This episode dives into the complexities of contemporary politics and media, focusing on the roles of the fourth and fifth estates in shaping narratives around fascism and far-right movements. Host Jesse Hirsh engages with guest Rick Salutin to explore the shifting landscape of Canadian politics, particularly in the wake of Justin Trudeau's leadership and the rise of Pierre Polievre. The conversation also touches on the challenges of engaging with mainstream media narratives, the importance of grassroots movements, and the potential for new coalitions to emerge. Salutin shares insights on the evolving discourse around issues like Zionism and anti-Semitism, highlighting how these topics are increasingly being addressed in a more open and critical manner. With humor and depth, the duo examines the implications of these narratives for the future of democracy and social movements in Canada.

Takeaways:

• The podcast delves into the chaos of contemporary media, politics, and society's response to fascism.
• Rick Salutin expresses optimism about the current state of Canadian politics and media narratives.
• The role of social media in shaping political discourse and public perception is critiqued.
• Both hosts discuss the impact of the AI bubble and its marketing illusion in society.
• Trudeau's leadership is analyzed in comparison to Poliev's approach and their respective political personas.
• Salutin highlights the importance of grassroots movements in shifting political narratives and power dynamics.

Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsch.

Welcome to Metaviews, recorded live in front of an automated audience.

And today we're gonna get into the.

The chaos of our moment with the fascist fourth and fifth estate.

A fun alliteration on my part, but I'm joined by my good friend Rick Salutin to kind of break down this moment in media, in politics, in society.

And you know, Rick, we like to start every show with the news, partly because Metaviews publishes a daily newsletter.

And today's issue is what I call the illusion economy.

And it kind of gets into the distance between the marketing of AI and the substance of AI you know, had Trump not been elected, I was predicting that the AI bubble would burst right about now.

But of course, with Trump in the White House, bullshit reigns.

And that means that AI is very much going to continue in its meteoric pace, especially with the state support that was announced this week.

But really, Rick, the purpose of our news segment is to give an opportunity to our guest to share news.

It's meant to be spontaneous, intuitive.

This could be personal news.

This could be world news.

The challenge, of course, is many of the guests we have are not news consumers.

They're not people who necessarily.

I'll step into that.

Yeah.

No, I'm a news consumer.

Yes.

This is where you are very much both intellectually and professionally engaged in the news milieu.

So the question fundamentally is what do you have your eyes on that you think our audience should be paying closer attention to?

I'm sort of pleased with the way Canadian politics, federal politics is going at the moment.

I thought we're just going to have to suffer through another kind of latter day coming of Brian Mulroney, but it's at least got shaken up now and we don't know what's going on.

And it's just nice not to know how it's going to come out.

I, I did not think that Justin Trudeau was the.

The devil.

You didn't want to fornicate with him.

You didn't fly.

No, no, no, I did not.

But I think he was cr.

He was wackier than we thought.

We knew he was wacky and it was endearing.

And he did nutty stuff.

Like he got into that boxing match with the, the Conservative member.

I want to say.

Brazo.

Yeah.

Something.

Yeah.

And he, he had a sort of a, A tendency to have outbursts in the House of Commons, like yelled at Peter Kent that he was a piece of.

And those were his good moments.

Like those are his endearing moments, because anybody could Identify.

But the, but he, he was, he always reverted to that high school drama teacher Persona and it was so irritating.

You know, you just, when he was in there, you never wanted to hear a word from him again.

But he was, he was not, he was wacky, he was not psychotic.

He was not.

But like that India trip that he took with his family was really beyond, beyond words, really.

It was all pictures in fact.

So I think he did have to go and he wasn't going to go and probably ever built his, the, his, his whole campaign on two things.

One, Justin Trudeau is responsible for everything bad that is happening in the world.

And the second one was ax the carbon tax.

So now Justin is gone and the, the contenders to replace him are going to ax the tax themselves before Pierre gets a chance to do it.

So we don't know what's going to happen.

I think it's at least it's, it's re.

Engaged me in that.

What I can tell by which, which news shows I, I switch to while I'm cooking or whatever it is and if I go to the BBC or the American nets, it's because things are just not interesting here.

But I'm actually spending, you know, grim as it is.

I'm spending more time on CBC and CTV than I was.

So, you know, is that to say.

And I think we are going to, as part of our conversation today, I think dig into why Canadian politics is particularly interesting right now for a range of reasons.

And it struck me that while Justin Trudeau probably saw himself as a kind of social media politician, at least on superficial or kind of image side, where Poliev has kind of built his own Potemkin village is around authentic.

Like on the one hand, he's the most fake professional politician, cardboard, you know, two dimensional personality, but he has somehow, you know, created the grift that he is, you know, like the convoy supporters, you know, salt of the earth.

And I'm not sure how long that's going to last.

I'm not sure that that is going to survive the test of a campaign that's not all about Trudeau.

No.

And the campaign is, it's, it's, it's in contrast to Trudeau or whoever else the opposition is that he gets support.

He's not an endearing fellow except for that weird breed of basically young conservatives.

A bizarre term in itself, I think.

Although I think the core appeal there because he is, I think, quite repulsive.

He's a troll.

And there are a lot of young conservatives who love trolls.

Absolutely no no, and they better because they haven't got anything else to say as far as I can see.

Right.

I do play.

I pay close attention to them.

They seem bright, mostly white and male.

Yeah.

And they love him because he's like them.

Yes, yes.

Well.

And, you know, we.

We are going to get into the F word today in terms of fascism that while he is not, I think, at this moment, openly fascist, he is a gateway drug.

Right.

He.

He certainly helps normalize, you know.

Yeah, far right.

No, no.

Yeah.

The nastiness, the meanness, the.

The ability to just smirk while somebody shudders.

Yes, yes.

So our.

Our second kind of opening segment that we have on every episode is called wtf or what's the future?

Obviously a riff on what the fuck?

So you could think of it as what the fuck is the future.

Thanks for pointing that out.

We.

We have some American listeners.

Right.

So it's important to me that I spell everything out.

One of my great.

It is a stupid and ignorant population, but it is not their fault.

Oh, absolutely.

And not only that, I would say further that there is a real desire to learn.

And what we have as an opportunity as part of the podcast revolution is provide some of our counter view, our counter environment, our counter perspectives to our American friends and comrades.

But there is a phrase that keeps ringing through in my head, which is, you know, no one ever went bankrupt underestimating the intelligence of the United States.

It rings in my head too, quite often.

Yes.

So I ask you, Rick, what do you see on the event horizon?

Right.

What in the future?

And it doesn't have to be positive or negative.

Could be personal, could be societal.

But what do you see when you look out your window?

Well, I see good stuff.

And to my surprise, because my son, who's now 26, has been in the process of persuading me that I'm the most hopeful and optimistic person.

I always thought it was the opposite, but I think he has the evidence on his side.

I mean, when 911 happened, the first column I wrote for the Globe and mail after 911 was great.

This is an opportunity to solve the hardest problem in the world, which is the Mideast.

And I mean, that didn't work out.

Too well, but it was the right idea.

Not yet.

And similarly, with October 7th in Gaza, again, I thought, okay, it's back on the agenda and it's a chance to do something I do.

I amaze myself because I was convinced I'd go to my grave snarling and doer what I think has happened.

That's really encouraging in the last year, which has in a way been the year of Gaza for me, year and a half.

Is that a narrative that I grew up with, which was a very, very false one, basically.

Which was that the Zionist narrative that basically, I mean, I, I'm, I, I consider myself in a certain way a Zionist in the sense that Israel has the right to.

Jewish people have the right to have a country the way everybody else does.

It does lead to racism, it does lead to problems.

It's inconsistent.

And yet, you know, you, you, you make do.

But the narrative has been that the heroic Jewish state which was under siege by anti Semites, et cetera, et cetera, this is what Pankaj Mishra, the Indian writer, describes as the dominant Western narrative, which is a story of anti Semites and racists gradually being beaten back during the Second World War and then the Cold War and all that.

And he says the alternate narrative is that these people who were the good guys were actually the, the dominators.

And from a Third World perspective, which is the majority of the world, the real narrative has been the attempt by countries led by the United States to control, dominate, and kick the shit out of the rest of the world.

I wrote a piece in McLean's, which was then a big deal, called Hitler's Last Laugh, that the Jewish state had become a kind of parody of what it thought it was.

And it changed my life.

I've had trouble not.

I mean, you mean the response and the reaction.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It just came down on me like a hammer.

Being critical of Israel has been much harder than being a leftist, a socialist.

Yeah, revolutionary, none of that matters.

They don't give a damn.

You can, you know, you can attack the Pope, you can do anything, but don't attack the state of Israel.

But what's happened is somehow in the last year and a half, that narrative has been, hasn't been supplanted, but it's been.

There's now a counter narrative beside it.

Yes, it's driving people in power nuts.

Has a lot to do with social, Huge amount to do with social media.

Well, TikTok, fundamentally, I think that's why TikTok fell into the crosshairs.

Was it absolutely subverted the American discourse on Israel, 100%.

I should watch more TikTok.

I mean, it's changed, unfortunately, what happened last Sunday with this Trump, you know, false flag operation.

Where they took TikTok off for 15 hours and then brought it back up saying, thank you, President Trump.

Users in the United States have noticed a marked difference in how TikTok operates, in the content they're seeing, in the stuff that trends out.

But previous to that, it was arguably a leftist platform where a lot of radical voices were finding a global audience in a way that those American voices, quite frankly, had always been suppressed.

And I don't even think of them.

I mean, this is partly dreamy on my part, but I don't see them particularly radical.

I see that the, an empirical, common sense response.

You just look at those pictures.

Come on.

But that's what a radical would say.

But I agree entirely.

Right.

This, this is the, the irony of fascism is it's based on lies, it's based on bullshit.

And it, the paradox is this is right when liberalism, even neoliberalism, was embracing evidence based policy and was kind of.

An alternate idea about.

Go ahead.

Which, which I have been brought to by my, my, and I don't want.

To, I don't want to drop the Zionist piece.

I'm going to come back to that because I think that's.

Go ahead.

When we've talked.

He works at a think tank in the UK and he says, look, the truth is the fascists said a lot of things that were true, that people were miserable, that they had been, that the peace after World War I was terrible for the, for the defeated, that unemployment and housing and all of this stuff.

He says, they say all these things that actually make sense and that people perk up and then they go crazy and they say, so the answer is kill all the Jews.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or the answer is violence, right?

Because yes, the answer is violence.

That is their medium.

The answer is, you know, the race, the evil race, so we got to kill them all.

And that's.

And to your point, and again, I want to come back briefly to the Zionism piece.

We can explore this later in the conversation.

Fascism's ascent to power is based on a critique of capitalism.

Right.

It's the right wing's critique of the way in which liberalism and neoliberalism with unrestricted wealth accumulation becomes an unjust society in which you have a lot of people with legitimate grievances.

To your point, that the solutions they offer don't actually address the problem.

No, no, they're not in the same universe.

Yeah, yeah, they're on Mars as, as we're starting to find out.

You were going to say.

And they're smarter than us.

What's going on now with this round of.

I don't think of it as populism, although.

Or it is.

No, no, no, no.

But right.

Populism, not left.

But hold on.

This is a good opportunity.

The center calls it populism because the center is jealous of their popular support.

Right.

But it's not populism because it does not reflect policies that serve the populace, that serve the people.

Well, it's.

I think it's right.

Yeah, that's right.

But the.

As long as people think its policies will answer it and you know, they're smart with immigration and stuff like that.

But I got to push back also on the idea that they're smart.

I've always considered myself a left wing populist, and unfortunately, I am on the hinterlands, the margins of contemporary political discourse.

I'm further out than Bernie Sanders, and I don't mean that I have different politics than him.

I mean he has a platform.

You and I today are speaking with my mom, my dad, and a few other friends.

And that's fundamentally it.

I'm leaving this up there for the kids of the future who will discover this after the fact.

Yes.

But if I could make my point quickly, I'll throw back to you.

And as good Jews, we will talk over each other and bounce back and forth.

I think the left is smart, but not the left in power.

Right.

The left that is marginalized.

The left that with myself for my entire life has always been, no, shut up.

Stay in your lane.

That's technology.

Don't talk politics.

And that's where to bring it back to Zionism.

I too felt, and it's paradoxic to say this because October 7th was a tragedy, but I did feel a room in the narrative, a space in the narrative open up that allowed us to talk about Zionism critically as Jews and be like, not in our own name.

And even the way colonialism as a word has kind of come back in a more like not colonialism of the past, but colonialism of the present, especially in American discourse.

I find encouragement.

I find optimism in that.

Yeah, no, no, I agree.

I had not expected to see that opening in my lifetime.

I just didn't think it would happen.

It had such a grip that.

And you know the use of the term anti Semitism to beat off any criticism.

Yeah.

And yet.

And it just seems to have.

It hasn't vanished, but it's really on the defensive.

And there is an equally strong and more convincing narrative of the sort that Pankaj Mishra talks about the third World perspective.

Yeah.

So this is why I kind of felt, in a provocative manner, I wanted to title this episode the Role of the Fourth and Fifth Estate in Fascism.

Because where you and I share in common is paradoxical, a joy, a passion in analyzing the narratives in the media and analyzing the way these narratives kind of move and you just hit a big one, which is the way in which antisemitism has been used to prevent any debate around Zionism, to prevent any criticism of Zionism.

And Jesse Brown, who is a big Canadian podcaster, he's been doing that.

He's lost a lot of credibility because he continues to use anti Semitism as a blunt instrument to attack anyone who's critical of Zionism.

And that again, he is someone who under normal circumstances has a lot of critical thinking and it really tries to facilitate dialogue.

I'm curious, from your perspective, both in the context of Zionism, but also in the larger context of Trumpism and maga, to what extent are we seeing a transformation of the role in media in society and the way that that media in society?

Certainly not overnight.

You and I have been talking about this for a couple of decades now, but it does feel, especially with the way in which the tech titans and the social media people were front and center at the inauguration, that we're almost entering kind of a new world of state media, even though it doesn't resemble the old world.

This isn't Pravda, but again, there's interesting parallels here.

So I'd love to hear your perspective on that.

Well, I don't have anything much to add there.

I think that the question, I think when you.

We are in a potentially very fertile situation, the question is, how do you grasp it?

I mean, you and I have nothing to do.

We can claim no credit for this new consciousness that arose.

I think just human beings looked at the feeds on their devices and they said, well, this is nuts.

This is, you know, okay, October 7th was an atrocity, but it was a more or less garden variety atrocity of the sort that happens in the world from quite frequently.

Whereas the.

The Israeli response was on its own level.

I mean, it wasn't the worst thing that ever happened, but it was on a much more massive, nauseating, even more nauseating level.

Yeah.

And that this, you can't make it drives me nuts.

The attempts to make an equivalence between October 7 and what's happened since then.

You can deplore both and recognize that they are of a different character.

Well, one should deplore both.

That's an interesting kind of metric.

Of our moment, but please continue.

Yeah, no, no, I just.

So all I'm saying is people came to that by themselves, so it's not hopeless.

And the domination of the media has never been hopeless.

But the question is, is there any way to seize that and move it into the realm of formal politics and social decision making?

And I'm really not sure what that is.

But then I don't think we.

It's not honest to come up with that.

Then you just hope that it works out.

So on the one hand, I share that desire for humility, that absorption of guilt and anxiety, that you're right, it's not up to us.

But then, Rick, you know, there are few intellectuals like us who have read Herald in US.

There's more who have read Marshall McLuhan.

Not that they understood the guy, but there aren't a lot of people who approach media with a political economy.

And those who do, especially in academia, are not incentivized to think about what comes next.

And I think to your point about impacting policy, part of the social media debate has always been these are just clicks.

These are just likes, this is just slacktivism.

And I had a really interesting conversation yesterday around here on the podcast.

Check it out for everyone listening around the power of community.

Right.

And the power of solidarity and the power of organizing.

And that brings me.

And I'm all over the place, but this is how we tend to talk.

What really upsets me about Jagmeet Singh and the NDP is like Trudeau, they are playing a very symbolic social media game, and they're not actually building community, they're not actually building networks.

They're not actually mobilizing in the way that politics needs to be.

They're thinking that it's just about ideas which just draws them to the center rather than being an effective alternative.

Yeah.

And, you know, fortunately, also, they are not building any kind of success.

I mean, in the short term, it would be nice to stymie Polyevre and keep them stuck at the level of a minority government, something like that.

And as the NDP goes down, there's the chance of.

And the Greens have been dreadful.

So, you know, so you're left with the Liberals, which is sort of what has been the.

The case in Canada all along.

But I would say, Yeah, I don't mean to say that there's no role.

I, I do sort of believe in the ring of truth, that in spite of all the cacophony of.

I think if somebody.

I think that's what happened with the get with the social media and Gaza, that it just.

There was a ring of truth to a critical point of view.

All of the mass media and most of the sort of influential stuff on the Internet was the old story, the old narrative.

But somehow these pictures got through.

Yeah.

And some testimonies.

So I think if you just keep saying.

You just keep trying to tell the truth as you see it and hope.

That it resonates, and if I'm going to try to create a through line of our conversation today, we've sort of acknowledged the power of narrative.

We acknowledge that part of what October 7th created was room for new narratives, room for different narratives.

So let me bring you to something you wrote about recently, but I'm kind of curious about your thoughts on it as a power, as a narrative, the Manifest Destiny idea of America.

And I say this because it does seem to be a story that's infecting the people in power, but it's also a story that seems to be rattling Canada to its core and maybe creating new opportunities for new Canadian narratives.

Yeah, no, I think that's right.

I mean, the last time this happened was the free trade debate in the late 80s.

And it was quite remarkable.

I mean, I got on board.

I'm not sure why, but it changed my life for a number.

It changed my life in a lot of ways.

And I remember when we put.

We set up a coalition and we used to have big concerts and rallies in Massey hall, which nobody on the left had ever tried to fill before.

And I remember during the first one, we did a couple of them there.

More than.

No more than a couple.

But I remember standing at the front of the hall as it filled up with people and the reporters looking up at them and saying, jesus, people really care about this.

We just don't know.

I think we made, you know.

You know, we made it.

I mean, we made a big mistake, I think.

Or maybe it was just of the time we treated.

We taught.

We.

The Americans were invading us.

And we chose not to emphasize the fact that this was basically a corporate assault on.

On society.

Really.

Do you think.

Do you think that kind of rests on John Turner, though?

No, no, on the contrary, Turner was a response to it.

Turner was heroic and noble for the one time in his life.

If you're right once, it's good to be right on a good thing.

But my point is his narrative wasn't really attacking the corporate side.

And this is why, on the one hand, I don't disagree with you, that we may be left with the liberals as the alternative to Poliev, but I keep feeling that the liberals are ideologically morally bankrupt.

They are the last free traders.

They are the last neoliberals.

But more than that, I kind of feel that their narrative, especially outside of their own, again, my own bias here is I have met people from across the political spectrum in my life, and never have I met more ambitious people than members of the Federal Liberal Party.

Right.

Like they are not, in my experience, they are driven more by their personal ambition than they are ideology.

Absolutely.

And this is why I just don't feel, in an era as conflicted and as desiring authenticity, that the liberals have a chance in hell other than how they continue to get elected, which is, we're not the other guys.

Well.

And that they have no principles, so that they can just shift to any position.

But that's not bad.

You know, if you have a strong social movement and somehow the popular will is going in an enlightened way, they'll go over there.

So that's not a bad thing to have.

I mean, I even think Doug Ford, you know, who the hell thought he was going to come out the way he has.

He's been awful in some ways, but not in all the ways we expect it.

Well, Doug Ford is, you know, your classic retail politician, where if we had equal access, right, like he bends, he wants to make friends with whoever's in the room.

So if we had more access to him, absolutely, we'd be getting more out of him.

And props to Olivia Chow, who she has figured out a way to work with him in a way that I don't think John Tory ever would have.

But that's, in a way, good.

It means you don't have to join the Liberal Party or the Conservative Party.

You just have to do what you can to shape the environment in which they're operating.

And then their antenna will pick up.

Oh, we should go in this direction.

So then, you know, for the sake of case example in history, give me a brief unpacking of that Massey hall event and.

And what it took to put that together.

And I say this because I don't.

I'm broke as fuck, but there have been times where I've so been tempted just to rent a hall because I felt that it would be easy to strike a chord.

And there is so much hunger right now for at the least, like fucking podcasts.

Successful podcasts are selling out tours because people want to show up and do this thing.

So give me a little bit of the case example of how that.

No.

Well, what happened there?

And we almost won.

I mean, we won the vote, but because of our stupid system.

Yeah, Mulroney got a minority of votes, but he got a majority of seats.

And that was a mistake we made, too.

We discussed whether we should push for a referendum on free trade, and we didn't have the confidence in the population to do it.

We thought we have a better chance with electing the Liberals and the NDP to stop the deal, and we were wrong.

But the way.

But we did gather a consensus, a majority consensus in the country.

And the way.

It doesn't work to just rent a hall.

At least it won't get you where you want to go.

What you need is a coalition approach.

And that was a massive coalition that I don't think there's been.

But here's.

I think the paradox.

Give me a sense of who was in that coalition and whether they still exist now or if they do exist, whether they are politically engaged in that manner, as they were then.

Pretty much, yeah, it's a different constellation, but it's.

So they weren't that engaged.

I mean, we had a fight with the mainstream labor movement and the ndp.

The NDP were hell to deal with because they didn't want the free trade issue, which is the equivalent of the corporate issue today, to eclipse.

At the end, if he didn't want the free trade issue to eclipse the.

The social welfare issue.

Sure, yeah.

Because they thought it would cut for the Liberals and they would lose seats.

To the Liberals, which they are probably quite right about that.

Yeah, yeah.

And they didn't care enough about the country, as no party does.

Yeah, yeah.

To override their own interests, but.

And the labor movement was conflicted and we had to work with people, and you have to find people who work.

The farmers.

The National Farmers Union, and I forget there's an agricultural association or there was anyway, Artists, writers were very important.

And they had.

They had all.

They all have their organizations, so you can work with their organizations and try to get them to deal with their members.

We didn't say.

We didn't succeed very fully in that either, in the sense that we had the largest coalition that anybody had ever put together.

However, it was mostly the leaderships that were involved, not the membership.

Right.

And that's hard to do because.

And it's even harder to do now.

I was gonna say it.

It.

And.

And it's even There's a certain question of legitimacy that, you know, ends up being put on the table if you just have the leaders and you don't.

Have coalition of elites.

But the other dynamic to this, of course, is we live in a different media environment.

And while I fundamentally believe in the power of narrative, and this is why trolls can be so effective, because you don't actually need a lot of people to seed and launch and distribute a powerful narrative, but we are in a media environment that skews heavily right wing.

And part of what Zuckerberg just announced in the wake of the inauguration was again, allowing meta platforms to skew further right wing.

X Twitter skews further right wing.

And it looks like they just neutered TikTok to also skew right wing.

Does that by necessity shape the political discourse in the culture, or do you think that the ring of truth, as it were, will still burn through, especially when it comes to these heightened political moments?

I think it's the only real hope.

I don't think that basically it can't be generated from above.

When you say narrative, do you mean what people call storytelling?

Sure, but when I say narrative, I'm being more inclusive because I mean memes, I mean spin, I mean insults.

Right.

Because, you know, narrative doesn't have to be a full story.

It can invoke.

No, that's the point.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was thinking of Innis when you said that in the oral tradition, there was no storytelling in the sense that there is in the age of print, where you've got in.

Within the covers of a book, you've got a real structure, opening, closing, ending, sense of an ending, all of that.

And in the oral tradition, it's something like the Iliad starts in the middle and ends in the middle.

Yeah.

And I think that's the kind of environment that.

That people that.

That kids are growing up in.

Well.

And because it speaks to how AI starts in the future and ends in the future.

Right.

It's always a story that never actually exists in the present.

It's always something that's going to happen.

And one of the most frustrating things I've had in doing this podcast is on the one hand, I want to have guests who are going to speak to AI because part of what I'm doing is building a critique.

Right.

And trying to kind of break it down.

But they've all accepted a future that does not exist, and I don't think it's going to happen.

But they refer to it with such authority, such conviction, and the Biggest one is jobs.

Right.

That AI is going to take all our jobs.

And I just don't see it on so many different levels, but it's just assumed that there will be no jobs.

And I'm just like, well, where do you get that from?

Well, Elon Musk says that I'm like, oh, yeah, you trust that fucker.

Right.

And it's frustrating to me because this is why I keep coming back down to narrative.

So much of what fascism seeks to do is control our narratives and not allow for any alternatives.

And as much as I hate the narrative of Wokeness, because it is a narrative constructed by the right, it is a narrative of control.

Right.

The way that this issue of gender, like you were talking about Poliev and his smirk.

Right.

He did an interview yesterday on ctv, which he was like, what?

There's only two genders?

And did this smirk.

Right.

As if he's negating the existence of thousands of Canadians.

And.

Sorry, I'm rambling.

No, no, go ahead.

Well, but I think.

I think the situation.

I find the situation now more hopeful than.

I mean, I went through the 60s.

That was my sort of, you know, debutante's ball, and I think the situation is much more hopeful now because of the spread.

They can't.

The Gaza thing has been very encouraging to me that if.

If you could break through that narrative, you can break through.

Everything is fragile.

But I mean, with that in mind, where do you see the state of Israel in this kind of emerging global order?

On the one hand, they seem to have quite an ally in the White House, but on the other hand, they seem to have lost any legitimacy.

I don't think they have an ally.

You mean with Trump?

Yeah, I mean, not at all.

No, no, please, go ahead.

I think he's essentially anti Semitic, like many of his cohort.

Yeah.

And what his goal.

I don't think he has any.

Biden was much more of a problem.

Biden was of that generation that had sold out almost everything that they'd grown up with from the 30s.

And they wanted to feel there was one area of idealism and commitment that still existed, and it was Israel.

Yeah, well, because of the Holocaust.

Yeah.

So.

But you think Trump may not be as effective?

Not in that.

What Trump is into is controlling the region the way they used to control it, via a collaboration between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

And for that, the Saudis would love to do it, but they can't do it as long as Israel is slaughtering Palestinians.

Yeah.

So Trump has to stop that.

So in that sense, it's more this.

The right.

In the real politic of it, it's a more hopeful situation.

The other reason it's not going to work is because satellites and colonies are not what they once were, and they have much more of a sense of autonomy and self interest than they used to have.

Well, especially the Netanyahu government.

They're not listening to anybody.

Well, and I think you're gonna find that, you know, elsewhere you can find it with.

Well, you certainly find it on the level of India is just, you know, willing to go deal with anybody.

Yeah.

And I don't think.

And Saudi Arabia is.

Is making its own rapprochement with Iran and China.

So it's just not a pretty controllable world the way.

All right, so what about Canada then?

Because your answer when I asked this the first time was accurate and fair, but it was still kind of vague in the sense that it was anticipating a continuance of the status quo.

So if we assume that the status quo is not going to continue, I, for example, don't think that Poliev.

There's a guarantee on Poliev continuing as leader of the Conservatives.

Like we are at a situation in which all bets are off.

And your point about Poliev needs Trudeau.

And now that Trudeau's gone, Poliev's strengths are certainly no longer in private.

He's in mourning.

Exactly.

And so given this bully that has now decided to kick us around a little, and we still don't know how or when, but there is a lot of rhetoric on the Canadian side of, hey, we can't kick.

Be kicked around.

And I think for some politicians, it seems, especially for Doug Ford, it's an excellent opportunity.

Give me some speculation on how you seen this play out.

On the assumption that the status quo doesn't hold.

I just, I don't like doing predictions.

I've been wrong about everything.

I didn't.

But that's the fun.

We know we're going to be wrong.

It's true.

It's true.

And I know.

I don't know.

I just.

I think it's very good to actually, you know, to get old and die.

I agree.

It's something to look forward to, you know.

You know, you offer what you can.

Okay.

I'm not going to let you off that easy, so I'll focus it back again.

Doug Ford.

Where do you see Doug Ford?

Because he certainly sees this as an opportunity.

How do you see him playing this moment in Canadian.

I, I welcome this, you know, Captain Canada thing.

He's doing.

It's way better than his other thing.

He's not going to cease to be.

A, a good old boy.

Well, yeah, and you know, just a facilitator of his.

You know, he doesn't, he's not into big capital.

He doesn't want Elon Musk up there with him.

He wants some realtor in, you know, Brampton or something.

He's happy to be the king of on.

Yeah, but you know, but we all have our flaws.

Nobody's perfect.

We have our flaws.

But do you think he'd follow through on some of the threats that he's been making?

Do you think the feds will follow through on some of the threats that they're making or will they just cave to American power?

Perhaps because there isn't the narrative support to facilitate.

Well, I think that's where some coalition building and could, could help, you know, but putting on public pressure.

The, the convoy I don't think was a very majority movement, but it was fringe.

But it, yeah, but it managed to make itself a force that had to be dealt with.

And in some ways Polyevre's leadership is a result.

Although, and again I, for the record, I'm not endorsing this in the manner that they did.

They use the threat of violence.

Right.

I mean that's what allows the right.

When they engage in grassroots actions that are comparable to the left, they tend to get a little more traction.

A because the police support them and B because they use the threat of violence which the left used to.

Absolutely.

But hasn't in a while.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, and that was, that was what was, that's what led to the successes that did happen.

I mean Canada is not a negligible force in the world, you know and we did have the first socialist government in North America and somehow or other it's, I mean I, I, I hate the CBC but.

As do I.

It's a, but, but it's, it's an achievement.

Yeah.

To have got it going.

It was a mass movement on behalf of the cdc.

You think Polly have will kill it?

Because one thing for him to say.

So except for radio radio, you know, if they, you would have a violent uprising among those 70 and 80 year olds who listen to CBC radio and I think they know that they're willing to leave it.

Plus Radio Canada.

I also think some backbench Tory mps.

Oh yeah.

In favor of CBC Radio because of its reach in, in small town Canada in a Lot of rural locations.

Yeah, but they, yeah, CBC radio will survive and French cbc.

It'll be that sort of Canadian compromise that, you know, that does happen.

How you feeling about your Toronto Star column?

You still digging it?

You're still going to keep doing it?

No, I am.

I'm really.

I mean, it's a test for me to see if I turn into an old.

It'll be the sign when I turn into an old fart, I'll be able to see it reflected.

Kind of holds you accountable in the paper.

Yeah, yeah.

No, no, it's nice to think.

Can you still say something?

If I surprise myself with what I say, then the readers will probably be surprised.

Are you still trying to, you know, like the old days in McLean's in terms of the Zionist critique, you're still trying provoke that kind of reaction?

Are you ever successful?

I'm not trying to.

I'm not.

And, and I try to be very careful.

I mean, this has been very tricky to deal with because, you know, a lot of my friends are Jewish and that includes comrades, you know, sort of politically sympathetic people.

But there's a carve out for Zionism with many of them.

And for a long time I felt this is inauthentic.

They can't mean that they really think that the Holocaust is going to happen again.

But for a lot of them they do.

And I think I've had a, you know, I was wrong about mistrusting them.

So then I have to understand why do they feel that way?

And, and how can I address this?

And it's been extremely interesting.

I found it actually, and even with my family, I have, I've cultivated non relations with my family for a long time, but I got into some of it and it was really quite fascinating.

And the ones who I thought were the really hardcore pro Israel and won't hear anything else, a lot of them came through with a lot more flexibility, adaptability than I thought.

So it's been a good experience.

And in terms of, you know, trying to expand my sense of other people.

Right on.

And the teaching, how you feeling about, you know, the kids of today and your experiences in the classroom?

Really, you know, I, I've been doing that course that you come to for, I think it's 46 years, it's a half course, you know, so it's not what I really do, but I have never felt the students differed much from year to year.

Young people are still to.

I mean, they're not as open as they were in high school.

And in high school they're not as open as they were in public school, but there's still a sort of openness there.

When I started in the late 70s, students used to say to me they really regretted having missed the 60s, which seemed like an exciting era.

And I took it on myself to absolve them of feeling badly about that because I said it was 90% rhetoric and 10% maybe something worthwhile.

And where are we today in that rhetoric, something worthwhile ratio?

I think ahead of that in some ways.

Yeah.

I mean, the.

What, 80, 20, 80?

No, no, what.

What I regret for the students I have now and have had most of that time is that they do not have.

They haven't lived through the illusion of thinking you could change the world significantly within your own lifetime.

It was.

Yes, but, you know, but people this.

Who were like, I worked with people in the labor movement who were active in the 30s, and they had that same illusion back then.

Yes.

And they still said, but, you know, it really could have happened.

And people from the 60s will not say that.

Yeah, yeah, interesting.

Yeah.

We just were wrong.

We didn't grasp it.

I mean, the AI people definitely believe that.

Right.

They believe that they're in a moment where radical change.

They are on the cusp of radical change, and there is this manifest destiny that they have to reshape the human race in.

In the face of AI.

It's.

It's very Christian, it's very American.

And I agree with you that they're wrong.

We'll see.

I don't think you and I are going to be around a few decades from now, but we'll see if they come to the same conclusion.

Yeah, but, you know, the same with.

Yeah, I think they should get out more often.

I think the opposite is happening.

I think that they're getting out less and less.

In fact, they're falling in love with their own chat bots because only their chatbots understand them.

The rest of the humans, they just don't see what they see in the future.

What is it that they don't understand about how being a human being is different from being a machine?

The body, Fundamentally, their conception of intelligence is disembodied versus I think all of science's understanding of the human body is that intelligence is central to our bodies.

Right.

Yeah, the mental.

Yeah, the mental process of being human has nothing to do with the mental process of being a machine.

There is no mental process with being.

Yeah, but what passes for it.

But that's just it.

It's.

It's projection.

They are taking their own deep subconscious putting it on the screen and saying, look, the screen is alive when it's just a magic mirror.

No, I've tried to say that.

I mean, I don't understand what, you know, large language learning has nothing to do with how human beings learn.

No, it's a word processor that allows you to put words in the right order if you know how to use the word processor.

When I first learned how to type, it was initially counterintuitive because I was used to writing.

Right.

But again, it's these stories, it's these narratives that elevate AI to this godlike status.

And look who's hanging out with the President of the United States.

So clearly that story has worked for them on a political, economic level.

Well, people like to talk.

What can you say?

You know?

And they have a right to this.

It's one of the compensations for all of the disappointment you come upon in life.

I hear you.

I would prefer a different religion, though.

I mean, as far as religions go, this one seems to be trying to disconnect us from our body, I don't think.

I don't begrudge people this religion.

I just begrudge them having.

Seizing power through it and wrecking everybody else's life.

That strikes me as a pretty big grievance for us to have.

Now, our last segment on every episode is what I call the shout outs segment.

And you could think of it as a kind of bibliography that on some level it is designed to acknowledge that we stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to our ideas, our concepts.

So, Rick, do you have anyone you want to give a shout out to, whether living or dead, real or fictional, that you think our audience should know more about?

Oh, well, I was just.

I didn't quite understand.

That's what it was.

I was just thinking of, if you.

Want to shout out Gideon, you can shout out Gideon.

That's cool, too.

The three little girls up the street who are the daughters of my friends who are just great, they're between about 4 and 12, and they have a grasp of issues like gender that nobody my age or even between them has.

And I don't know, I'm just so privileged to be in touch with them.

I just love it.

That's a perfect shout out, right?

Shout out to the youth.

In fact, part of how I'm doing this podcast is I'm using this service called podmatch.com, which has been feeding me all the guests, many of the guests present company excluded.

And I sent a kind of Complaint to the company saying, I love what you're doing, but it's all geezers.

Where are the kids?

Let's get the kids up there.

They're the ones who've got some really interesting perspectives and are thinking about the world in novel ways that we should be platforming.

No, no.

Old fartism lurks there waiting for all of us.

If you make it through without reaching it, it'd be great.

Well, to your point, when I was young, people would say, what do you want to be when you grow up?

And my answer was always old.

But at the same time, I've internalized Bobby Dylan's line of those not busy being born or busy dying.

So it is a matter of keeping the farts at bay.

Well, Jesse, what I'd say is, in this 46 year long course that I've been teaching, I've had many guests, some of them quite illustrious, including Conrad Black, who came to class at one point.

And when you came the first time and you went into your kind of wild man routine, I was thinking, oh, God, what a mistake inviting this guy.

And the next week I asked them how they felt and they loved it.

And you are the only person I've asked back year after year, you know.

And the benefit is you get to see the shtick evolve year after year, which is, you know, a bit of a.

No, no.

You've always.

You just.

Yes, but.

But to your point, it is.

The shtick is the same, the content changes, but it is fundamentally me indulging my Harold Innis kind of worldview, which I don't get to use anywhere else.

I could play the McLuhan stuff elsewhere and get away with it, but the Innis stuff, people can't handle it.

Innes was more radical.

Innes actually thought that the oral tradition was a medium.

It is, on some levels.

Absolutely.

Right on.

All right, Rick, thank you very much.

My pleasure.

This has been another fantastic episode.

We've done two in a row, which kind of suggests our next episode is gonna suck.

If you're listening to this, maybe you want to skip it.

I can't guarantee if it works out to be great again, I'm gonna get struck by lightning.

Rick Saluten writes for the Toronto Star, where you can read it regularly.

I perhaps will encourage Rick to maybe start a sub stack so he could get his ideas out towards the Internet as a whole.

Although Rick's shaking his head saying, fuck no, not a chance.

So thanks again, everyone listening.

You can find us on the interwebs.

Yeah, that's about it, Jesse.

Hirsch signing off.

We'll see you soon.