A profound examination of the current political landscape reveals the intricate vulnerabilities that characterize the Trump administration and its policies. Jesse Hirsh and Allan Gregg engage in a thorough analysis, positing that the recent State of the Union address symbolizes a pivotal moment: the apparent end of the initial honeymoon phase of Trump's second term. They scrutinize the ramifications of Trump's tariff policies, particularly within the automotive sector, and highlight the complexities involved in their implementation. The duo articulates concerns regarding the competency and foresight of these policies, questioning whether Trump and his administration fully comprehend the intricacies of the North American supply chain. Through this lens, Hirsh and Gregg emphasize the potential opportunities for opposition forces to leverage the growing discontent among the American populace, igniting a renewed discourse on democracy and governance.

Moreover, the conversation transcends the immediate political implications, delving into broader themes of national identity and defense. The prospect of demilitarizing Canada emerges as a thought-provoking alternative to conventional defense strategies. Hirsh and Gregg advocate for a reallocation of resources towards civic engagement and community preparedness, suggesting that a focus on public service initiatives could yield far greater societal benefits than traditional military expenditures. This radical notion challenges the prevailing perceptions of security and defense, urging a reevaluation of what constitutes national strength in an era marked by climate volatility and social unrest.

As the dialogue unfolds, Hirsh and Gregg do not shy away from addressing the growing sentiment of nationalism within Canada, reflecting on how it intersects with the political dynamics in the United States. They articulate the risks associated with an unchecked nationalist narrative, particularly in the context of Canadian identity, urging a careful consideration of how such sentiments might influence future electoral outcomes. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to engage in the political process and to foster a more inclusive, informed, and resilient society, positioning these discussions as crucial for the health of democracy in both nations.

Takeaways:

• The Trump administration exhibits significant vulnerabilities, particularly in its handling of tariffs, which may lead to backlash from affected industries.
• A shift towards demilitarization in Canada could promote investment in civic engagement and community resilience rather than military spending.
• The current political climate suggests an opportunity for the opposition to challenge Trump’s narrative control and address the concerns of the electorate effectively.
• Increased nationalism may present both risks and opportunities for Canadian politics, influencing voter sentiment and party strategies in upcoming elections.
• The complexities of urban-rural divides in Canada and the United States highlight the need for greater dialogue and understanding among diverse communities.
• Investing in civilian capacities for emergency preparedness could serve as an effective alternative to military spending, addressing pressing societal needs.

Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsh, and I'm here with my friend Alan Gregg for another episode of Red Tory. And once again, we are starting right on the hot heels of news.

It seems the State of the Union yesterday begs the question, what's the state of democracy?

But it does feel, Alan, as if democracy is kind of responding, waking up, that the State of the Union might have been the end of the honeymoon phase of the second Trump administration. But as you know, I love starting by saying, what are you paying attention to?

Well, obviously, we watched the State of the Union last night, and then today, the pause on automobiles, tariffs on automobiles, I think is telling, points to the inherent flaws in, in the policy that Trump is launching around tariffs and a lot of the misunderstanding about what tariffs actually do and what they, what they don't do. So, I mean, I think that's worthy of consideration as well.

And also the extent to which, on the one hand, it begs to question the competency of the policy. Like, didn't they understand this was going to be the case?

Everyone sort of seemed to understand it would be the case, but also who his constituency is, that he does want to make it clear to other CEOs, not only is he willing to do a deal, but that he'll listen to them. He won't listen to anybody else, but he'll certainly listen to them.

And I felt symbolically that that was an important part of what seems to, in essence, be theater, because to your point, the policy seems to be inherently flawed.

Well, first, on the policy, two things.

I mean, one is that the supply chain in the auto industry is both so intrinsically North American and so intrinsically complicated that it makes the application of tariffs almost as impossible. I mean, most cars have parts that travel across borders between seven and nine times.

You want to, you know, implement a tariff each and every time this, this happens, it's just not going to happen. And you wrote something interesting today, too, about, you know, the multinationals that operate in Canada need that supply chain, too.

I know the other week you wanted to nationalize Amazon, but the fact of the matter is that Amazon's goods come from all over the world into, into Canada.

And, you know, we could put some real pain short of nationalizing on, on Amazon by making that supply chain, if not as disruptive as the automotive sector, certainly very, very, very problematic.

The second thing, though, I think again, and I, you know, you don't want to kind of suggest that Trump is stupid because he certainly has people around him who understand this. Maybe he just doesn't listen to them.

But he seems to have it in his head that the, the imposition of tariffs somehow will generate a whole bunch of revenue for the government of the United States. And that isn't the purpose of a tariff.

I mean, a tariff may be the only tax that is imposed in the hopes that it is never collected, because what the tariff is there for is to protect domestic industry. So I put a tax on my apples that go.

The hope is that you don't buy that apple, that you buy a domestic apple instead because it's 25% less and therefore there's never any tax actually be paid because the apple is not purchased and therefore there's no income to go to. So if they actually work, they generate virtually no income at all. And this I don't, you know, whether he understands this.

He's certainly pretending he doesn't.

On the prospect that for those who've talked about this before, who might see this as a means of offsetting what clearly is going to be a massive deficit inducer in the extension of the.

Tax break, and I do think that he fundamentally doesn't, or rather does understand the impact, but is lying, is, is creating this kind of myth about revenue generation. And, you know, your point, the auto industry and how impossible it would be to impose this tariff.

Another area where that becomes kind of similar is agriculture. And where agriculture doesn't have the back and forth that the auto industry does, I think it's going to be the next chip to fall.

And while the farming lobbies are not necessarily united, there are some major companies in the agricultural supply chain who are going to be able to go to Trump directly and who are going to say, look, you're sabotaging the food chain. You think the price of eggs are high now, wait until the price of everything goes up because we don't get potash.

And we need that potash and we need it now as the growing season starts to kick in. And I think just like Otto, it's going to be another exemption. It's going to be another place where he's forced to step.

And that's what makes me wonder to what extent is this just about negotiating a better deal, or is this just part of some larger farce where he knows this stuff isn't going to stand up, he knows he's going to have to make exemptions left, right and center. But it doesn't matter insofar as he gets to look like the strongman, he gets to look like the deal maker.

Because what was interesting I found about the state of the Union was just how much fiction, like not just political spin, outright fiction. That was really part of his framing of his positions.

Well, the agriculture is interesting because there's no question that one of the things, a legitimate grievance, in my view, that America has about Canada is our supply management system that protects eggs, poultry, milk, and it hurts Canadian consumers as, as well, you can almost guarantee that we're going to have to give that up in the renegotiation of the Canada, Mexico, sort of the US Mexico, Canada Trade Agreement.

But you're also right that I think, you know, and it's interesting Ford talked about it the other day, trying to, you know, say that Saskatchewan should really be withholding potash because 80% of agricultural potash comes from Saskatchewan. It's a huge amount. And without that, the yield of crops will just go into the dumper in, in the United States.

Back on Trump's performance, I mean, it's interesting he said something too, is that, you know, he wanted the United States to be culturally dominant. And it speaks to not just the substance of policy, but the psychology of what he's, what he's trying to do here.

He's got all of these countries so far on their heels right now, all of Europe, the Ukraine, Panama, Greenland, that they just don't know what to do. They're flummoxed. They are, you know, developing all of these plans. They're quasi, hysterical.

And he likes that because that gives him strength, not just with the electorate, but with those, those other things we're jumping around here.

The thing that I think is also interesting, some people are drawing attention to today, post address to the Congress, is that all of this stuff has got nothing to do with what most Americans care about, which is inflation and the economy.

And the polls are showing tremendous evidence right now that fewer than a third of Americans claim that Trump is paying enough attention to these two issues.

And so while he's trying to flood the zone with all of this chaos, he may be increasingly vulnerable to be, you know, look like a guy who cares about all the wrong things when the essence of his brand is I'm the only guy who speaks for you. I'm the only guy who really understands you. So he, you know, we will see.

And again, we've accused, you know, of being wishful thinkers here sometimes, but there's, there's a lot at play. And I just don't know if any, you know, one administration is capable of managing this much crap at exactly the same time.

And I think in particular, the extent to which not so much wishful thinking, but a window of opportunity.

I think, as researchers, what we're seeing here is a vulnerability, not just in how he's framing his policy, but how he's framing his message, in particular, how it could be perceived by his core audience. And that's where I think it is a window of opportunity for the Democrats, for the opposition to start trying to change the narrative.

Because I think the reason he's winning, to your point about allies and opponents alike being on the back of their feet, he's winning because he is controlling the narrative.

He's keeping the narrative at such a pace that everyone's reacting to him, and they have no time for their views, they have no time for their dissent or their perspective. So I think we are seeing vulnerabilities in his narrative.

We're seeing inconsistencies that make his base susceptible to seeing that this guy is just a fraudster, a con man. But it depends on how they respond. And I did watch Bernie's response.

Bernie gave one of the official kind of Democratic responses after, as they often allocate. And while his argument was solid, it was still kind of weak. He is kind of yesterday's guy. And even though I think he's got the moral high ground.

You asked me a couple episodes I mentioned, I keep mentioning Jasmine Crockett, and you asked me where she's from. She's in the Democratic Congress, lower House, from Texas, from Dallas, and she's got a real kind of Dallas fire to her.

And she was one of the Congress people who walked out yesterday. It was just like, I've heard enough. I don't need to hear more.

But if the Democrats don't take advantage of these vulnerabilities, if they don't find a way to really get cracks into this narrative control, then Trump continues to succeed in what he's doing, which is to consolidate power and attention. And even if he gives exemptions to the auto industry or backs off for the agricultural industry.

It was interesting to note that as soon as he got off the call with Trudeau today, he posted a really inflammatory message on Truth Social, in which, in sheer ignorance, said, I'm really concerned that Trudeau doesn't know when the Canadian election is going to be. I think he's trying to hold on to power. The fact that he can't tell me the exact date of the upcoming Canadian election is very suspect. Right.

And of course, Canadians are mocking him because he clearly. But it's irrelevant. He's creating a narrative of illegitimacy. Which I'm sure he will tag on to Carney right after Trudeau.

So it's not wishful thinking, it's a vulnerability. And the question is how to take this vulnerability and change the narrative as a whole.

Well, you wrote today, and you quoted some of the original philosophers and thinkers on propaganda that what is said doesn't have to be true if it's repeated long enough, because it becomes part of the narrative. And part of this narrative is that Canada is weak. Canada is a non contributor to defense.

Canada is so reliant on America that left to its own devices, it wouldn't exist.

And that kind of repetition starts to form part of the narrative of not not just with your base, but with the total story that is under, under investigation at that time.

How you counter that, you know, when we don't have the microphone of the President of the United States, when as, again, as you noted, that we are culturally inundated with American media with virtually no reciprocity whatsoever. I mean, what Americans know about Canada is horrifying, absolutely horrifying.

And you know, to the point that Trump doesn't know when Canadian elections are. You can guarantee he's never read Armagregor Dawson or knows anything about parliamentary democracy whatsoever. But he's not alone in that regard.

So by saying maybe Trudeau is a dictator the same way that Zelensky is a dictator just adds to this whole kind of dialogue that everyone else is in the wrong, which ipso facto puts Trump in the right. You should talk about some of those counter strategies that, that you talked about today in the face of that kind of attempt.

Because again, for most people, it just seems so overwhelming that they either give up or they revert to the only things they know, which is, you know, going on across Canada checkup, you know, and they might as well be barking.

At the moon or writing a letter to their mp, which what's that going to do right now? I mean, part of it.

Everyone loves to say that culture is the powerful part of politics, that culture is what shapes people's values, that then determines how they vote or the political choices. And this is to your point of American ignorance of America.

They do consume Canadian content on TikTok, they do consume Canadian content on Instagram, but they have no idea that it's Canadian content because it's Canadians who are just talking about the same subjects that they're talking about. And if those Canadians all of a sudden started to shift their focus ever so slightly. Hey, welding friends, I know you love to hear about Mig Welding.

But let me just take a moment to talk to you about Canada or whatever the context may be. It's that kind of creative thinking, but it's also thinking outside the box.

You mentioned the supply chain interference of withholding potash, which I think would be a very powerful gesture. And then the other would be things like, hey, maybe we should ban Facebook, at least temporarily.

And I was thinking about actually a talk that I gave to the Canadian Supreme Court 10 years ago, along with a whole bunch of other kind of social media people. And I gave my back then radical idea that Facebook was a threat to democracy, that it was an alternate form of news and governance.

At some point it's going to threaten our sovereignty. Well, look, here we are. And I think even just blocking Facebook on the disinformation grounds, while crazy, is a worthy debate.

But the last thought I have on this, which I was thinking about to your point, was think about all the Canadian comics, comedians, actors and musicians currently residing in the United States, currently making their living in the United States.

Now would be a good time to do what Mike Myers did rather than what Wayne Gretzky has done and be that kind of cultural guerrilla warrior on the inside, promoting to other Americans why Canada is a distinct culture and a distinct society. I think that would be very powerful.

Well, there's no question on the cultural side that more can be done. We've talked about in the past how things like the music industry and in the counterculture culture, you know, changed politics dramatically.

But the other thing I was thinking, you know, reading what you were writing and oh, by the way, you might not remember this, but 20 years ago on a golf course, you also told me that the Internet was nothing other than a surveillance device. And I thought, this guy is nuts. What the fuck is he talking about? A surveillance device? You know, it lets me go and find out who.

What the price of carrots are and loblaws. I mean, it's a good thing anyway, that's neither here nor there.

Is having worked inside political process for a long time, is that people who are involved in politics are often, while they're supposed to be attuned to political culture and popular culture, are very, very slow to adapt to the new ways of communicating.

I mean, you remember when, you know, Obama won, part of the acclaim was that here was a guy who actually understood social media and had a social media team. That was not that long ago.

I remember also, you know, when, when Stephen Harper started creating these kind of incendiary video clips and he had no intention of doing anything with them. But back then, we, we didn't know much about going viral. We thought about, you know, being a paid thing. He had no intention whatsoever.

But what he used them was to grab the traditional media's attention. And the traditional media started talking about these videos that he made for nothing, for five bucks and got all of this earned media and attention.

You talk in your article about the power of memes, and I saw one the other day where again, someone had got, you know, Trump kissing Elon Musk's feet, and clearly it didn't happen. But for a lot of people, the image, you know, resonates a little bit. And it went everywhere, employing this.

And again, why the Democrats wouldn't be way more effective in doing this, because again, we also know there's nothing that makes Donald Trump crazier than being the brunt of really bad jokes.

I mean, there's an argument that he entered public life because Obama at the Press Club press dinner went after him in the dying days of his presidency. So again, I think that that kind of outside the box, that more modern thinking about how to counter who is.

And again, you acknowledge it in the piece and everyone else who sent you acknowledged it. He is an absolute genius at controlling the news cycle. I mean, I've never seen anyone who could do it in such a dominant fashion for so long.

I mean, we're a decade into this guy now.

And I think the other concern here fundamentally is not just the mastery of his media, but I keep thinking about the medium as the message. And for me, there's kind of two Medium is the message here. One is intimidation, right?

Like this is like gangster style intimidation and extortion of just trying to intimidate people to comply and where they won't be intimidated, kind of coerce them to comply.

And on a cultural level, I think the consequence of that is Americans are less willing to be the Jon Stewart, as it were, to be the comedian, the meme maker, because they're worried, they're scared. They don't want to be the ones to kind of say the emperor is naked just in case the emperor comes after them.

And that's where Canada can do that in spades.

That's something that Canadians could do is their part in this continental battle for democracy is we could flood the Internet with ridicule and all sorts of hilarious memes and anti authoritarian, anti American, anti Trump stuff.

That's where maybe the Canadian culture of respect could navigate that line of political satire in which we do it in a manner that targets their political Leadership without pissing off the population. I don't know. Right. We'll see if that balance can be made. But similarly to the other side of the medium is the message.

What concerns me here is the nationalism. And on the one hand, I do mean the American nationalism, because that is the kind of nationalism that can turn that republic into an empire. Right.

That is part of the subtext of a lot of his talk. And my dog clearly is also concerned about this kind of nationalism. But here's where Canadian nationalism also has me a little worried.

On the one hand, I'm loving it. I'm feeling like we have a kind of not so much social cohesion, but participation, civic activism, that I think's great.

If more people vote in the upcoming federal election, regardless of who they vote for, I think that's a net win because that means people are going to be paying attention and engaging. But I also worry, and I'm curious what you've seen around this, if this will fundamentally benefit Poliev, that the nationalism will.

On the one hand, it's an initial surge for the Liberals, but it's a nationalism that's not so much ideological and it's a nationalism that is not mutually exclusive with we need a change. And that's where I feel Steve Bannon's kind of laughing going, ha. Everyone's embracing nationalism.

Everyone's getting into the kind of worldview that I have. So I'm curious, I'm rambling, but I'm curious what you think of those dynamics.

Well, there's no question nationalism, Canadian nationalism is on the rise. I mean, you saw some numbers out of Quebec that was quite stunning. In fact, Quebecers are always the last to say, I'm proud to be Canadian.

Major jump in the last two months in terms of.

And I understand, I mean, nationalism is also the root of Nazism and all kinds of authoritarian movements and a desire to have a dominant culture such as Trump was referring to the other day. What it steals from Poliev, though, is the notion that Canada is broken.

Whereas in America, I mean, you could tell in that the address to Congress, I mean, a lot of his supporters. And these are not the crazy people.

These are people who are, you know, in the House who are, you know, in senior departments, were almost hugging themselves on the notion that America could be great again, that, you know, that we really are on the way back.

And you go back to what we talked about some time ago is this notion that the best days are behind us has become versus in front of us have become a major cleavage in politics and that Trump has really been able to tap into that, to basically say, we used to be better and that things used to be better and I'll make them in the future like they were in the past, which is very retrograde. It opens up for things like there were no transgender toilets. Women weren't uppity back in the day. So, you know, all the immigrants were white.

No Muslims in North America.

And that's part of that nostalgia and why people embrace all of those kind of terrible, reactive kind of choices in the face of that desire to make things like they were again in Canada.

I mean, we just don't have that same kind of cultural route in that kind of sentiment, largely because our greatness has always been revolved around things like being good human beings. Canadians have always said we're never going to be military leaders, we're probably never going to be economic leaders, but we're. We're good people.

We can lead by virtue of our example. And, you know, and so, for example, you know, when we're.

We're true leaders in things like peacekeeping, this is a tremendous source of pride for Canadians. I don't know whether Polly have. Can tap into.

Into that at all if he can get out of his rut of being the guy who's against everything, because right now, what do you got to be against? You have to be for something.

And he's been struggling with that over the last couple months, and it's been reflected obviously in the polls tremendously.

Whereas the center and center left have always been better at tapping in to that kind of nation sense of, we are a great country, we can do great things together. All we have to do is, you know, be good human beings.

And that's where I think the Democratic Party is struggling with the same problem that Trump in his kind of repetition is, is not only quote, unquote, making America great again, it feels like he's building America.

It feels like all these tariffs are part of some new project, which it is in a sinister, dystopian sense, but not in an actually alleviating people's concerns.

And the Democrats have to have some counter, has to have a different vision to your point of being for something rather than just being against this guy or against the kind of lies that he's spouting.

And as a tangent, but a relevant tangent, what I've seen as kind of a positive is I've seen a lot of Canadians rethinking the concept of public service and people. There was an article in the Tyee I'M trying to remember his name. He's actually someone I know well because we met him at the.

Peter McLeod wrote an article in the Tyee about the need, not so much militia, but kind of emergency preparation and to have as a kind of public service that we all form parts of groups that are prepared for fires, that are prepared for floods, or prepared for an American invasion. And I'm seeing people right across the political spectrum really embrace this idea.

So I think that's kind of cool to your point about being good human beings and good citizens, that if we start actually getting organized, not just out of a threat of the U.S. but the threat of climate change, the threat of all sorts of things that require community efforts.

My fear, my concern is, is that Poliev would escalate that to military spending.

And I think Carney obviously is gonna campaign on increased military spending the way that that is a natural response to saying we can't count on America anymore. But I think that's where Poliev might be able to distinguish himself again in the time for a change.

And I am anticipating that the Trump regime will back anybody but Carnegie. And that doesn't mean they're gonna back Poliev necessarily. They could back Maxime Bernier for all we know.

Nothing is out of line for Musk and the social media crowd. But again, could you anticipate the military spending being a differentiator in the campaign?

Well, it's really interesting because this is a perfect example of exactly what you were talking about is if you say something enough, it becomes part of the narrative, part of the discourse, and people, as a consequence of that legitimizing, are more prepared to buy into it. I mean, I've asked on studies forever, you know, do you believe we should be spending more, the same or less on massive big policy list?

Defense is always right at the bottom with the fewer mores and the most less. Canadians have no particular inclination to arm ourselves right now. Again, it's inconsistent with our self image.

But this idea that Canada has not been carrying its fair share of the burden, that we are laggards within NATO has become such that now there's an orthodoxy around we have to spend 2%. And again, if you look at a poll today, do you believe we should be spending 2%? The answer is overwhelmingly yes.

But it's not yes because they want more arms and more military and more stuff. It's because they believe that yes, we have an obligation to the larger community that we should live up to.

And it would be unrelated to the kind of the hardware of military. In fact, I think exactly the opposite. If someone stood up and said, you know what Canada should be like, who doesn't have a military?

Denmark, Greenland, who?

It's a good question. I don't know.

I don't have the answer there, there is, I can't, I can't remember what.

But if they sort of said we don't need a military, you know, we're going to take the $28 billion we spend right now and we're going to put it into the absolute best program of volunteerism for Canada's young people so that they can clean up the rivers, that they can travel around the world, that they can get tuition free educations, Canadians would go, wow, that's a Canadian policy. Not, not, not something else.

And I wrote a piece in the, in, in the, the Toronto Star the other week saying, you know, the, the irony for all of this talk about merging Conservative Liberals and, and New Democrats is that there's tons of room on the Canadian political spectrum for not only those parties to differentiate themselves, but for them to win electoral victory.

Because Canadians by and large embrace a lot of the things that a much more strident left of Stenor alternative would put forward and isn't right now. So it's hard to, I mean, short term, the trends we're seeing right now help Carney.

They help Carney because first and foremostly, the moderate middle in Canada is the most likely to feel unrepresented by the political options that are available today. That sounds counterintuitive to a lot of people.

There's people who are on the right and left of the ideological spectrum saying we got lots of choice. If I'm the right, I like Polyev, I'm on the left, I like Jagmeet Singh, in fact, I like Trudeau. If I'm in the middle, who do I like?

None of them is their answer. Carney is by definition a middle of the road kind of politician. Secondly, the threat of an external threat. And we saw Ford take advantage of this.

If your brand is strength, if your brand is experienced, if your brand is decisive enough, the other guys don't even have a chance. They're not even in the, the, the contest. And he can hold out. You know, his experience in the financial meltdown, his experience in Brexit.

And it was very interesting to note on the weekend, Stephen Harper writing a long letter trying to discredit Carney's accomplishments on those very things, saying that he had nothing to do with it when he used the bank of, of Canada. He was just sitting there with his, you know, his thumb up his arse.

So, short term, it helps Carney, which is, I think, is the other reason that Carney's looking at a very quick election. I mean, there's some just literally logistical considerations he's got to take into account.

But I think if he added, if those weren't in play, he'd call the.

Election on March 10, and I think he will. I think there is a general consensus, a kind of open consensus, even amongst the political class, that it's going to happen at that point.

A quick, a dissenting perspective. I don't think the left is very happy with Jagmeet Singh at all, but they got nowhere else to go.

So I think they would even potentially vote for Carney while plugging their nose if they thought that the threat from Poliev or the threat from Trump was substantive enough.

I do want to spend a few moments unpacking your brilliant idea of, to use my language, demilitarizing the military, because I think if you took that capacity and made it civilian, if you focused it on facilitating civic engagement and civic participation, it could not only be a very popular policy, I think it could be a very powerful demonstration of government capability and government agency, because I've always felt that part of what the military does well is training, but part of what it doesn't do well is allocation of resources, because it's constantly allocating resources for future use in the hope that that future use never happens when it makes way more sense to be allocating those such resources for present need while investing in future capacity so that you always have more resources.

And again, I don't think we have time today to get into the depths of this, but I may write a few meta views, issues to try to unpack this so we can talk about this further.

Because to go back to Peter McLeod's idea, what I loved about it was precisely that it was civilian, precisely that it was focused on training and literacy, but also that it was centered around emergency preparedness.

Because that is, if we go back to what really impacts people, what really impacts Canadians, that's floods, that's extreme weather, that's, you know, the climate volatility that we have already been facing, that we're going to increasingly be facing, and to build that capacity, not just in a civilian sense, but in a volunteer sense, in a cultural sense, would be so incredibly like the ROI on that would be so phenomenal.

So I think this is a radical policy that we should tease out and get back into over Time, because the training piece is something that I think we as a society neglect.

And you talk about this all the time, that the Canadian productivity issues, because we don't invest in R and D and Canadian companies don't invest in R and D, but the military does.

So imagine if you took these resources and invested in R and D for commercial interest, for public interest, for personal interest, for provincial interest, for indigenous interest. That would be a game changer and we will have to look up to find who that country is. Because I do recall. You're absolutely right.

But for Canada to do it would be phenomenal.

But also you should read a guy called Matt Price who's written a book called Organizational Engagement. We should try to get him on the show.

I think he's now very, very much involved in kind of holding companies to account on their, their carbon emissions. But he also was very central to the whole Dogwood initiative that took place on, out on the west coast.

That among many other things, stopped all tankers going through the Straits of Juan de Fuca. And these are just people who lived in Oak Bay in Victoria.

His thesis is that if you can empower people, truly empower them at the grassroots level, give them real authority and what they will do, not only will they use that authority, but their enthusiasm for the causes that they support will go up very, very significantly because they will be engaged. And that the purpose of organizations is not to make top down decisions to tell people what to do at the grassroots.

It's quite the opposite to say, okay, Betty, you know, your job is to look after these 50 homes on these two blocks around your community. You got to find out what those 50 people are really concerned about, what motivates them, what kind of things are going on in their head.

And that you are our representative for those 50 homes. And then someone above them has 5,000 homes. And Betty, you know, is part of a committee to that 5,000 home. And so on and so forth it goes.

And there's evidence that it can actually work, that you can get people off their ass. You can not only get them to do things, but to care more about doing things as a consequence of doing things.

It's kind of traditional persuasion theory turned on its head. Traditional persuasion theory says you change people's attitudes, you'll change their behavior. Crest reduces cavities. Holy, I've got cavities.

I better start brushing my teeth. With, with, with Crest. This is, it turns this in its head. It says, no, you change their behavior and their attitudes will change.

And so I'm A football fan. I watch the NFL, but not that much. Someone introduces fantasy football. Holy shit. Now I got 17 players on, on my team.

Now I'm watching football five times more. You've changed my behavior by and now you've changed my attitude to. Towards. And so there's, there's something there.

And again, among the, the various and sundry unorthodox reforms that, that we want to explore, that should definitely be one.

Of them and allow me to really try to stitch together a few concepts here without the risk of getting too complex. But a thought I had earlier when we were talking about the power of repetition and the power of propaganda is the assault on diversity, right?

The way in which there has been a weaponized rhetoric against the concept of diversity, inclusivity, equity, and there really hasn't been any opposition mounted. There is on an individual level. There's lots of people who are kind of scared, mocking, reacting, rebelling.

But I haven't seen, to get back to the point of narrative control, I haven't really seen anyone talking about it.

But I just got this insight when you were describing it, especially when you were describing the methodology around this kind of empowerment and the methodology around this kind of community engagement. And I had a weird kind of cross section of ideas that I'm going to try to articulate without being too ludicrous.

So one of the criticisms I anticipate of turning the military into a civilian concept that moves away from weaponization and war to civil service and civic engagement is there's going to be a lot of people who say, well, how do we defend ourselves? Where's the self defense capacity? And here's where I see a unique opportunity to solve a few problems.

Since I became a farmer and moved out to the country, I've gotten much closer to the gun culture that exists in Canada. And I myself have obtained my firearms possession and acquisition license.

I took a firearm safety course, which I recommend everyone to take as it's important to know how to disable a firearm, right? How to make a firearm incapable of functioning. I think that is a literacy everyone should possess.

But I am kind of now privy to these nuts and these people and the one thing they all have in common is they hate the military. It is remarkable how much they hate the military. Veterans hate the military.

The Canadian military has alienated their own personnel so bad that we could create a new type of, not militia because militias are dangerous, but a new type of kind of martial organization that achieved diversity because you get these gun nuts in the same room with the Lesbians from Parkdale teaching firearm safety and talking about the need to form these community organizations. These guys would be open minded because they're talking about what they love, right?

And the other group would be interested because, oh yeah, they're learning something. So it disarms the cliches of identity. It disarms the kind of cultural divides of urban versus rural.

And I bet you you would start subverting some of these right wing gun nuts because they'd start realizing the things they have in common with the people that they currently demonize. Because when it's them, there's no connection.

So what I'm to re articulate, if you did have the equivalent of reserves, if you did have the equivalent of like firearms training and you know, target marksmanship, you would mandate that it had to be cross cultural. You would mandate that you had to have, you know, the hicks teaching the city people. The city people connecting with the hicks.

Because that way you foster that diversity without making it over the top, right? And still allowing, you know, the rural types to feel like their knowledge is being valued, to feel like their perspective is being being valued.

Again, a crazy idea, but it feels like it touches a few different pinpoints.

Yeah, I could see those gun nuts in the same room with the Parkdale lesbians. Everything working out really well until one of the gun nuts called one of the lesbians butch. And that might be the end of that.

Although you'd be surprised because in these types of environments, because the stuff we're talking about like this Jim Hogan is joining us next week. And you know, we, we met a lot of people through his extended network who work on this type of material.

And one of them is this guy, Anthony Larozovich. And I could be mangling his last name.

I apologize, Tony, but he's been doing work right back since the days on the Tea Party of how important it is to get these people in a room, right?

When they're on the Internet, they call each other names, but when they're in the same space and they say that derogatory term because it comes up, right? Because the hick doesn't know that, butch, he can't say that. And he will worse, no doubt.

But because the humans are sharing the same space and if there is a task that they are all there to focus on, the empathy happens, right? The forgiveness happens, the forbearance happens. Go ahead.

Let me just. In that regard, you are absolutely right. I mean, all the research that has been done shows that the foundation of tolerance is contact.

And so you think about it, for over a century, there was a abolition movement that said slavery is wrong, racial discrimination is wrong. Nothing happened. In fact, a lot of things got worse. Jim crow happened almost 100 years after that movement started.

And Plessy versus Ferguson that said separate, it could be equal, exacerbated that because it kept blacks and whites across from another Brown versus the Board of Education, you know, some 57 years later said, no, separate is inherently unequal and that you have to have integration.

And it was the integration that started the civil liberties movement that blossomed up with within a decade, because the racist who said, you know, all of those ends are lazy, conniving, no goods. But he became a neighbor to Corey and he met Corey and he said, holy mackerel. Corey isn't lazy or corrupt or a no good bum. He's a really good guy.

And all of a sudden attitudes started change. And it's another example of change, behavior and attitudes will change.

So I think that's still pretty nutty idea, Jesse, but it has a foundation, a kernel of something there at the bottom.

And I think one of the tensions, if I could use that word, what are the underlying conflicts that we have to keep our eyes on.

And I worry that it's going to get glossed over in this larger nationalism, in this larger kind of reaction to whatever Trump is saying is the urban rural divide. Because certainly in Canadian politics, the urban rural divide, I feel, dominates how governments are formed.

But I think in the United States, too, the red, blue state stuff really is an urban, rural divide, because within those states, the difference between blue and red is almost always urban, rural. And I don't see a lot of talk on that as much.

You look at an election night and just look at a map of a state and see what is blue and is red.

And for a start, it's almost all red because geographically the rural areas dominate the state until they started moving in on the cities, and then all of a sudden they're blue. And where, and this happens in Canada too, you know, where increasingly the elections are won or lost is in the suburbs. And is.

Are those suburbs more like urban folk or are they more like rural folk? But it's a huge, huge divide. And Canada is massive and has been for decades. And arguably the chasm itself is even wider today.

The only difference being is that the rural population is shrinking while the urban population is growing, both by virtue of inner city migration, but also immigration.

Although where I would say immigration are not, where I would say that's bleeding is in the Edge of cities. Right. Because a lot of these, like for example, my writing includes the Kingston suburbs, so it includes a huge swath of rural Ontario.

I would say most of the riding is rural Ontario, but the Kingston suburbs is growing because of the way in which the cities are sprawling.

So conceptually, I do agree with you, but politically, the exurbs, the part of the suburbs that is still being developed, is an even more of a kind of melange or mix between them. And I bring this up because of the point of proximity, because so much of politics is about contact. It is about interaction.

Where I think cities have a lot of benefit, depending on where you are in the city is you can have people across the political spectrum engaging each other and communicating with each other and having opportunities for shared humanity. The urban rural divide rarely offers that opportunity.

People who live in rural communities, when they go into town, they're hanging out with other people who are rural. And when they go to the city, they're not necessarily connecting with people from the city.

So even though the political ideologies may be different, the actual cultural, urban versus rural divide, to your point, is getting larger. And if we had proportional representation, if we had ranked ballots, that would be different.

That would sort of, on the one hand, still allow rural concerns to be part of the decision making, but not have, as we do now, which is rural votes do kind of count for more, even though I agree suburban votes count the most. But it is also there are. Just because there's less people, there's a per capita more value to the vote. So it's complicated.

And again, this is where I think Poliev, because he is going to get a lot of rural support. I think we shouldn't rule out this dynamic or this kind of conflict or tension that underpins a lot of this.

Let me just throw one more wrinkle on that. And that is the other thing that we've seen over the last 25 years in the suburbs is the increasing ethnic concentration of one identifiable group.

And what happens when you have that kind of ethnic concentration and the same thing happens in Rosedale. It's not an immigrant issue.

I Mean, we've seen this time and time and time again is that people relocate to areas where they have relatives, where they have people who are the same.

But if you lived in, you know, in Richmond, bc, or if you lived in Markham, Ontario, you know, and you only spoke Mandarin in Markham, Ontario, you would never have to leave that community. You would be completely served. Signs are in Mandarin. The services, including for TD bank and everywhere else.

And that is scary also for the very reason that you touch on in terms of lack of contact.

If we don't have that integration, you know, if new Canadians don't have a relationship with older Canadians, with settlers, and then we create the other. And when we create the other, then we have the stigmas that create all the kind of ugly stuff that we're fearful of. And we discuss very often.

And that's, I think, most importantly, why the narrative control practiced by Trump needs to be sabotaged, needs to be countered, because it is, at its core, a xenophobia, a white supremacy that could really take advantage of, to your point, for lack of a better phrase, the increased segregation of society, the voluntary.

On some level.

Yeah. But here's a crazy conspiracy I'll throw out there more on the comedy side, but also on the piece of diversity.

I still don't like the whole Russia obsession. And the Russia obsession is certainly getting a lot of play and a lot of attention.

I mean, there's a lot of people, I think, quite rightly, calling out that America is doing everything it can to support Russia in its fight against Ukraine. But here's why I think Russia is not the only player at the table. Why? Global politics, international diplomacy is always complicated.

If I was President Modi of India, who already does not like Canada, does not feel that Canada's diasporas are helpful to the Indian Republic. It's why the Indian intelligence and security services have been active in Canada for some time. I could totally see him saying, hey, Mr.

Trump, we would love for you to take over Canada. We will diplomatically support you taking over Canada if you promise to crack down on those sick expansion extremists.

If you make sure that anyone supporting Khalistan in Canada is deemed a terrorist and becomes a convenient enemy for you, we will bring the huge might of the Indian diplomatic corps to support your annexation to Canada. Again, conspiracy. I'm just saying that for comedy.

But politically, you could see that conversation taking place because of the extent that India is threatened by the powerful diasporas that exist here in Canada.

Yeah, but the threat is small against their larger constellation of problems. But Let me just throw something else out there in terms of Russia, because, you know, there are lots of conspiracy theories. Why is he doing this?

You know, first, it's kind of completely contrary to the American tradition since the start of the, the Cold War. Maybe they have something on him. I mean, it's been going on and on and on forever.

Very interesting thesis the other day, which you don't see that much in the popular press, is that Trump's real fear and obsession is not with Russia, is with China, and that what he's trying to do is to break the Russian Chinese friendship, that in the price of doing that is Ukraine. Again, I'm not an expert in world geopolitics, but it was just a very interesting thesis.

And again, maybe it's too smart and clever to attribute to these guys, but it was worth, again, mulling over.

And I think more importantly, that is the kind of logic that motivates the US Hawks, the military generals, because they are absolutely obsessed with China. I think that they are less interested in Ukraine. I think they're less interested in their European allies.

So while you're right, what Trump thinks tends to change by the moment, but that is the kind of argument I could see Trump's people making to senior military officials as to why this isn't insanity, as to why this isn't part of some greater conspiracy, but why there is a geopolitical military strategy behind this. Because Russia is not a military. Like nukes aside, Russia is not a military threat to, to the United States.

China is undoubtedly not globally, certainly just within the Asia Pacific, but that is the adversary.

I remember just after Russia invaded Ukraine that again, there was a general who was on CNN news or what have you, and that the host asked, but what happened if, you know, if, if, if Russia threatened nuclear war in this, and he says they would be a smoldering hole in the ground within 48 hours.

It's the notion that there's something to, you know, to really fear either economically or militarily about Russia by given that the posture of the Western world until Trump is crazy. Whereas you're absolutely right, China is in a completely different caliber.

And this is where there is a general scuttlebutt saying that Trump is about to take off the sanctions, that he's about to remove the sanctions from Russia.

And I think one of the biggest arguments behind that, which is semi valid, is that the sanctions haven't worked because China has circumvented them all. And not only is, you know, not only is this ineffective against Russia, but it's to China's profit.

And that to center this on a US China conflict really makes that logic clear.

Worth talking about.

One last thing to say, Tobias Gibson, who is our guest on Friday to kind of talk about the political and legal environment around the United States.

He's also a listener and he pointed out that I made a mistake in our last episode when I talked about the CPO study around violent January 6th offenders and who they were. It was not Northwestern University, it was the University of Chicago. So geographically close.

But I apologize to those alumni who I've so greatly offended. But I think Tobias is going to be a really fun guest. He's really looking forward to joining us. He wanted me to ask you if you had any questions.

He should be preparing in advance, but he's also eager to answer the question of what he's paying attention to because apparently he's at a legal conference in which there's been a lot of talk that he wants to share with us.

Well, there's what he's been listening to, but also something that, again, you don't see in the popular press and it's just so confounding, is that what happens if we do enter a constitutional crisis where the courts rule X and Donald Trump says, fuck you, it's Y, we're doing Y. And just because it just is not even contemplated as part of the Constitution and the Founding Father?

Well, it wasn't much of a Supreme Court and Founding Fathers were around, but, you know, in terms of postmodern times.

Yeah, absolutely. So, Tobias, there you go. Thanks everyone else who's listening, you can find us on YouTube on all the podcast platforms.

Alan Gregg at alengreg.substack.com is starting to post regularly with some fantastic stories and metaviews.substack.com with the usual radical crazy ideas pushing the Overton window. Thanks again, Alan. Thanks everyone, and we'll see y'all soon.

Take care.