https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BX2PfMxow34
Well, and speaking of that, you were just in Toronto not so long ago at the increasingly famous monk debates. They apparently seem to be doing something right. And you and Douglas Murray faced off against Michelle Goldberg and Malcolm Gladwell. And I believe that you and Douglas won the debate by the biggest margin that had ever occurred at the monk debates and actually speaking to an audience that in principle shouldn’t have been particularly favourable to your claims, right? Because the monk debate audiences Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Glitterati, such as we produce in Canada, are equivalent of people who think they’re celebrities, let’s say. That might be a good way of thinking about it. And the probability that they would be both beholden to and fundamental supporters of the legacy media was extremely high. And yet, by all accounts, you mopped the floor with both Michelle and Malcolm. So do you want to walk through that a little bit? Tell everybody what the debate was about first. And tell me your impressions of the whole enterprise. First of all, I had an amazing time. It’s a great event. I think anybody who has the opportunity to attend the monk debates should definitely do it. The resolution was be it resolved, do not trust the mainstream media. And so Michelle and Malcolm were arguing the nay portion and Douglas and I were arguing the yay portion. And you said that we mopped the floor with them. Really, Douglas mopped the floor with them and I was kind of there. But he’s very impressive as an orator and as a stage performer. And he was very quick. He’s a fighter. He actually enjoys it. And so, yeah, you mess with Douglas at your peril. Exactly. Exactly. But another thing I think that really turned the tide with that debate was kind of the superior attitude, I would say, of a couple of the participants, Malcolm in particular. I don’t have anything in particular against him. But I made the observation at one point that Walter Cronkite had twice been voted the most trusted person in America in the 70s and 80s. And Malcolm wouldn’t let that go. He kept implying that by saying that I was longing for the days of Jim Crow in America and that I had forgotten that when those votes were taken, by the way, he was wrong about this, when those votes were taken, that, you know, lots of people didn’t have it so bright in America, you know, implying that this was the 50s or the 40s when, you know, women, gays and African-Americans had a tough time in the States. I don’t know, poor people were doing a hell of a lot better on the marital front back then than they are now by a large margin. And there were a lot fewer children who were fatherless. So, you know, some things have improved, but there’s lots of things that haven’t improved. So we might not want to be too smug and superior about how well we’re doing on the moral front compared to 40 years ago. I mean, lots of things have changed for the better, but it’s by no means a universal panacea, let’s say. And that’s especially true for poor people who are nonetheless on average richer. But I would put that at the feet of capitalism, you know, rather than of any, you know, well-meaning government programs or ideology. So anyways, you said he adopted a mien of superiority on what basis? Well, essentially, he was calling me a racist for making that observation. So and he went back to it five times. And by the fifth time, there were actually sort of audible gasps in the audience. So I think that had something to do with what happened with the debate. Well, that sort of thing actually doesn’t play very well in Canada. You know, yeah, the people who I debated at the Monk Debates, they played that same mistake, too. They played the racial card and racist card. Yeah, and Canadian audiences, they don’t like that much because that hasn’t really been part of our parlance, part of the tenor of our public discussions, not nearly as much as in the US. I mean, we’re trying hard to get there and we might be successful in this country, but generally it’s not a good strategy. So, yeah, yeah. So did you learn? Did you think that Goldberg and Gladwell made any points in relationship to why the legacy media might still be worthy of support and trust? Well, their basic argument was that the procedures of the legacy media are still good procedures, you know, fact checking, that sort of thing. And we countered with, yes, those are good things. Unfortunately, they’re mostly gone from legacy media organizations. And that’s one of the reasons that you have problems like the Russiagate case, where, you know, one story after the other goes sideways and you guys don’t catch it. And that’s, I think, there’s still a failure of vision. I still know a lot of people who work in legacy media and there’s a slowness to recognize that audiences no longer, I think, really believe what they’re reading in a lot of these organizations in the New York Times, Washington Post. They see it as politicized, not terribly reliable factually. And I think that’s a shame. Even as an independent, I think the mainstream media needs to be good, right? I think everybody benefits when it is. But they haven’t figured out that in order to have that respect that they think they deserve, that they just can’t get this many things wrong. And that’s been the fact. They don’t get to be the legacy media without maintaining a genuine respectability. Right, exactly.