https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TGADR-yPjVE
When I was a kid, 14, I worked with a woman named Sandy Notley and her husband Grant Notley. And Grant was the member of the Legislative Assembly for my home constituency, my riding in Fairview. And he was the only opposition member in the entire Alberta Parliament, essentially. And he was a socialist. The entire province was conservative, except for him. He was a socialist. The reason he was elected in that riding wasn’t because he was a socialist. In fact, he was elected, I would say, in spite of the fact that he was a socialist. He was actually a good man, and everybody knew that and trusted him. And so I worked for the NDP, the New Democratic Party, for about three years. And I was a good friend of his wife. She was the librarian at our local junior high school, and she introduced me to serious literature. And I really liked her. She was a real good mentor, kind of an eccentric New England woman, quite well educated by the standards of the little town that I grew up in. And so she pointed me to Huxley and Orwell and Solstenss. And Rand as well, to her credit, because of course Rand is no socialist. And then, you know, because I had access to her and her husband, and her husband Grant was the leader of the socialists in Alberta, he had access to premiers of Alberta provinces and the national leader of the NDP. And over about a three-year period, I got to be a fly on the wall in many meetings between senior labour leaders and senior socialist leaders. It’s this kind of Fabian socialism that’s got a British twist. It isn’t really derived from the same, say, school of thought that the communists were derived from. And I stopped working for them when I was about 17, for reasons that I’ll go into. But I got to say a few things about the socialists of that time. First of all, most of them had been labour leaders. You know, so a lot of them were working class guys, mostly guys, not all, mostly, and this was the leaders, who had worked themselves up the working class hierarchy and then had adopted political responsibilities of one form or another. And most of those guys, when I listened to them, I actually had a fair bit of respect for them and admired them. I actually thought that they were genuinely doing their best to put forward the interests of the working class. And at that time, the Conservative Party in Canada was pretty much middle class, upper middle class guys in three piece suits, you know, banker types. It was clear the Conservative Party was a voice of the corporate world. And then the liberals, who were genuine centrist liberals, sort of played both ends against the middle, and they did that quite successfully. So everybody knew where the political parties stood, in some real sense. They were different, and the socialists did advocate for the working class. But even then, you know, I used to go to the party conventions, and there were a lot of activists there. And I didn’t like the activists at all. They really made me nervous. I thought, and then I read George Orwell, and George Orwell talked about socialist activists back in the 1930s in the UK. What did he call them? Tweed wearing leather patch jacket, champagne socialists. It’s like, what the hell do you guys have to do with the poor? And the answer was nothing. You don’t love the poor, you just hate the rich. Now the leaders I saw, they liked the working class, you know, they were advocating on their behalf. But these activist types, they were motivated by pretty much nothing but resentment. And that really grated on me, and I stopped, well, I stopped working in anything that was political, well, pretty much from that point onward. So I think it’s really easy for young people to be attracted to leftist ideas, because first of all, young people are looking for a cause. And second, without much reflection, it seems obvious that we should be advocating for the oppressed. And then of course, the leftists always say that that’s what they’re doing. And so given that your first moral impulse might be to advocate on the part of the disaffected, then it seems appropriate that if you were attempting to be moral, that you would gravitate towards those who claim to be speaking for the dispossessed. The question is, are they really speaking for them? So why do you think now you also have said, and you need to explain this to people, that your mother was and is a left-wing political activist. So you have that reason for having been hooked into the ideology, let’s say. Do you want to expand on that a little bit? Let’s walk through your biography a bit here and talk about the philosophical reasons you were attracted to it, and also the personal reasons that this particular ideology. Yeah, absolutely. So I was raised by a single mother for much of my life. My parents divorced when I was around six years old. So my mom took care of me and two siblings. And through her single motherhood, really, I was super involved with her work. If we got a day off school, we were going to go to work with mom, and I was going to see exactly what she was doing. And what she was doing was fundraising for a left-leaning organization out in Orlando, Florida. So that was her day in and day out. She’s politically quite obsessed with virtually everything that’s going on in today’s day and age. So I would go to work with my mom and she would give me markers to write on posters. Little did I know those posters were going to be used in protests that they were staging in the city. So very deeply entrenched in that from a really young age. And my mom happens to be white, which I don’t find to be particularly important, but it is important in that she taught me from a really young age that because I was biracial, life might be a little bit harder for me living in this country due to its history and how that history is reflected in the present. So I think more so than doing good for the world. I was attached to this sense of victimhood and I thought that it was really pivotal to my identity. So I was a really angry young person. I was getting in arguments all the time with kids who knew nothing about politics, about political issues. And I grew up in a very small rural conservative town. So arguments were ripe for the picking with anybody I chose. And anger was the first thing that I think got me attached to the movement. But then it was going to my mother’s work. And like you said, there was a lot of working class people involved during the hurricanes in Florida. They would do food banking and give out food to the needy. So it was a lot of very radical policy prescription mixed in with pretty pragmatic helping of people who happen to be lower income and living in lower income communities. So I think I just got my wires crossed in thinking that because we were doing good on a small scale, that meant that these radical prescriptions that we were calling for were also good.