I couldn’t bear to watch the news coverage of the 2024 US election results. My family flipped between CNN, a hockey game and a few episodes of the sweet and funny sitcom Abbott Elementary.
I peeked at my phone around 6:30 the next morning: TRUMP STORMS BACK shouted the New York Times.
When Trump won in 2016, I was hosting a daily call-in show on CBC Radio. The day after I asked the audience: “President Donald J. Trump. Can you believe it?”
Can you believe it? Again?
Over the span of 16 years, I talked to thousands of callers in an open pit arena commonly known as open line radio. It’s the ultimate game of improv. You start here, rocket along a booby-trapped roller coaster, spin through crazy curves and end up over there.
Exhilarating. Illuminating. And terrifying.
From behind a microphone, I listened as the voices in my headset became angrier and more militant. I heard the switches flip, in hearts and minds, in real time.
“Go Donald Go!”, howled Mike from Brantford, the day after Trump’s first win.
“Sure he gets carried away with his locker room talk. He’s a guy! Guys talk like that. Nuthin’ wrong with that. It’s just normal. I know some women get offended...”
I turned on my microphone and sighed. Loudly. “Some men too,” I insisted.
“Yeah. (pause) Well, not a lot of men. They might say that to you but as soon as you walk away they’ll look at ya and say, yeah, you got a nice a#*.”
Pow. Right 'to my face.' No one had ever said something that rude to me.
I was hosting a show on greige, goody two-shoes public radio…. in Canada. The rebellion had been building. When I started the radio show in 2006, listeners reprimanded me over a poorly chosen word or how I pronounced Halloween. By the time Covid hit, callers were spitting insults and blaming me for spreading ‘fake news.’
It didn’t happen overnight.
First, emails got nastier. People wrote what they wouldn’t dare say out loud. One pre-Twitter call-in was particularly stark. At the time, there were escalating debates over Islamic extremism and a preoccupation with the way some Conservative Muslim women dress, especially the niqab, a veil that covers the hair and face, leaving only the eyes visible. I’d heard my share of angst about niqabs, and thought one way to nudge the discussion forward is to involve the women themselves. I invited a niqab-wearing woman to join me on the air and she agreed to answer any and all questions. The people who dialled up that day were curious and careful. They were so polite that they were completely out-of-sync with the anxiety boiling up in places such as Parliament or university campuses. However, the emails that blazed in after the show were fiery and foul. Listeners dumped all their panic, anxiety, and bile at the keyboard. Never would they have said any of that directly to the niqab-wearing woman on the radio.
Until they did.
When I opened the lines on religion, the environment, immigration, equity, #MeToo, anything political – callers got mouthy and mouthier, ruder and more bigoted.
It was coming from everywhere. From Mattawa, a-dot-on-the map town in Northern Ontario, an old lady grumbled “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton. In Metro Toronto, they defended a crack-smoking, vulgar-speaking mayor.
The late Rob Ford’s time as mayor marks a critical shift. You could say he was a trailblazer. As blockbuster humiliations piled up, his loyalists dug in, defending him for 'talking like a real guy.' Ford himself, suited up in a hard-shell no-shame armour, foreshadowed where we were heading. One morning, in November 2013, the mayor gave a jaw dropping scrum at Toronto City Hall. He was pushing his way past reporters heading into his office, when he stopped to defend himself against lewd accusations. In a startling matter of fact way, he ran through a list, declaring that he didn’t party with a prostitute, he didn’t snort cocaine and he never propositioned a staffer. He got way too talky on this final point. Looking right into the cameras, Ford said he didn't need to go looking for sex because he was a happily married man and....nope, I can't type it out. This is the best I can do: using the crudest slang for oral sex, he dropped the p-word. Live, on morning television. It was so over-the-top that once again, the disaster-courting mayor of Toronto was making headlines. US news outlets couldn't get enough of Ford running his mouth. No politician talked like that. Rob Ford stood out for all the wrong reasons. Three years later, the p-word was in the news again. This time it was a recording of a Presidential candidate bragging about grabbing women by the genitals.
Talking With Angry Men
Mike from Muskoka still lives in my head. Before the made up Pizzagate stories about a pedophile ring, before Hunter Biden’s laptop there were bombings in Libya. Hillary Clinton and Benghazi.
”Mike, why do you care so much about this?", Mike tried to answer but it was a jumble of disjointed thoughts. "Mike please help me understand: why are you, a guy in Muskoka, obsessing over Benghazi?” He continued with a rambling argument that began somewhere in the middle of something, with no ‘there there’ to hang onto. In the end, the literal meaning never mattered. Mike, like so many others, revealed something far more profound. Anyone listening could hear their anger, distrust, their all-consuming fear.
I talked to so many Mikes. I would think about them long after a show ended. In my own middle-of-the-night WTF heart-to-hearts with myself, I wondered who they were beyond the burning thing they called in about. Did Mike have a family? Did he rant about Benghazi (or the flat earth or whatever) at the supper table? Would he accept chemo treatments if he had cancer? Who was Mike -- the human being.
One night, not long after Trump won in 2016, I found myself googling: “talking with angry men”. I read many articles, mostly by psychologists. One really hit home: how to interact with abusive men to avoid triggering violent outbursts. It knocked me over. It was exactly what I was doing instinctively on the air: validating their angry feelings without validating what they were saying. I was consciously trying to sound empathetic without actually agreeing with the substance. It's a hell of a tightrope walk.
The angriest man I ever sat across from in a studio is a big burly man from Alberta. Freedom Convoy Pat King is infamous for leading an occupation in downtown Ottawa during the pandemic. But a few years before, I invited United We Roll Convoy Pat King onto my show. He was a key figure in a yellow-vest styled truck rally on Parliament Hill. The United We Roll convoy in 2019 was a test run for the horn-blasting takeover during Covid.
Rolling and swinging around in the chair, waving and grinning to his ball cap wearing buddies on the other side of the studio glass -- King dominated the room and the airwaves. At the beginning of the interview, he sounded like a relatable guy. He grew up in Sault Ste Marie and when the steel industry ruptured, he described laid off men lining up for jobs at McDonalds and Tim Hortons. He said he wanted something better than that, so he headed west to look for a job.
He was a 'working man', a guy's guy: little rough and raspy-sounding, emotional and impassioned. And then? Something about him and the callers started sounding -- really off.
Me: Angelique – you’re on the line in Kitchener. Go ahead
Caller: Yes. (very upbeat) How are you today guys!!?? I’m SO proud of you two!
King-Guest: Who?
Caller: oh (softer, slower, …) It’s Angelique. I’m sorry. Uhm. I’m sorry. Wade and Pat.
Me: Okay. So Wade is not in the studio
Caller: (gives a small giggle) Oh, Wade isn’t in the studio?
Me: No, it’s only Pat. (Caller gives small laugh)
Caller: It’s only Pat?
Me: You know these guys?
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This who's-on-first chumminess with callers was strange. As the minutes passed, the weirdness got weirder
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Caller: I know these guys. From Facebook. Real news you know, gettin’ real stories unlike what the CBC does.
King-Guest: We love you too!
Caller(talking over King): I’m freakin-I’m soooo proud of you guys man
King-Guest: Why do you love us? Tell the people why you love us.
Caller: Yup. I want to hear this one
Pause
King-Guest: No, You. (addressing caller who seems confused) Tell us why you love this convoy
Caller: You’ve united Canada. When the Prime Minister has been trying to tear us apart.
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King and the caller, Angelique from Kitchener, zigzagged all over the place, until they zagged into an outlandish rant about the Prime Minister. Something about the PM accusing construction workers about being rapists and killers.
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King-Guest: You don’t remember that?!! (sounds incredulous)
Me: I don’t know …
King-Guest: (voice rising) When he went out of the country and said construction workers, we bring rape and drugs and we bring crime....Oh! Come.On.Cee.Bee.Cee!! You guys know this!!!
Caller: RIGHT!? RIGHT! And this is ....
King-Guest: Come on!!!
Caller: And this is why ....
King-Guest: It was all over the news ..(talks over caller) … this is why Alberta is a red neck cousin to Canada. That’s what he described us as.
Me: This ....(big frustrated sigh that lasts a few long seconds)
Caller: Yup. If you covered real news you wouldn’t have this....
King-Guest: That’s exactly right...
Me: "Ahhhh," (they went in for the kill.)
King-Guest: "Uh. Uh. Uh." (King snickered and grunted.) "Now you're sounding just like Justin (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau)".
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They were making fun of me, mocking me live on my own show. To.My.Face. Loudmouth Mike who talked about my a#* after Trump's first win was nothing compared to this.
The only mercy was that everything was spinning off the rails very close to the end of the show. "What was that?!," I demanded when it was over. I was furious. King jabbered on about fake news, saying it wasn't against me, that it was those other journalists blah blah blah. He even tried to give me a hug as we walked out of the studio.
King high-fived his two buddies who had been watching from inside the control room. It was the first time I got a good look at them and I couldn't believe my eyes. One was wearing a very large, bright red MAGA hat. The visor was so big it covered half of his face. Remember this is 2019. So much we know now, we didn't know then.
The United We Roll trucker trio was long gone from the station by the time I discovered the stunt they'd pulled off. MAGA-hat-man, pushed up against a wall in the control room, had been busy. He had furtively used his cellphone to live stream the entire radio show. MAGA-hat-man was Wade. The pieces were falling into place. That's why some callers were saying hello to a guy named Wade. MAGA-hat-man used his cell phone, creating a path for his Facebook followers to flood the CBC phone lines. The producer and technician didn't notice a thing.
It turns out that their prank started well before King sat down in the studio with me. Here's what happened. A CBC guard had escorted the three of them from the lobby to wait outside the studio. There isn't a green room, just a couple of chairs along a wall in a large open-concept newsroom. Every guest until that day did was expected: sit in the chair until they are summoned into the studio. Not this gang. Talk about seizing a moment. What I found digging around on Facebook left me speechless. I sat at my desk watching a collection of self-made videos: bursting with nervous energy, taking selfies in front of journalists' desks and zooming in for close ups of computer screens. "Hey," they hiss-whispered, grinning into the phone camera. "Can you believe it? We're inside the Cee.Bee.Ceee. Here's the number to call ok. 1-800-" They were so excited, acting as if they had penetrated enemy lines. King and his cabal had managed a kind of siege. For a few moments at least, they had commandeered public airwaves and gleefully broadcast their backchannel of lies and conspiracies.
A full play-by-play dissection of my on-air run-in with Pat King is for another day. But that hijacking is a consequential before and after moment. King and his friends might have been odd but they were not to be underestimated. They had a plan: audacious, organized and laughing all the way. They were having the time of their life, pulling a fast one on their enemy -- the CBC. The media, on the other hand, was and is still outmatched. The radical, do-and-say-anything movement doesn't play by any rules. It just breaks them.
Donald Trump has stormed back to the White House. Self-proclaimed Dark MAGA Musk, the richest man on the planet and chat buddies with Vladimir Putin, has poured hundreds of millions of dollars and god-knows-what to get him there. It is a hard-core restructuring, so profound and entrenched, that winners and losers both know there's no going back.
All those lunch hours, talking with, confronting thousands of strangers, I internalized so much anger and fear. I wish I'd kept more detailed notes over the years so I could do the forensics, map out the shifts and patterns. Because without a doubt, I heard people separate from reality, cracking in real time. I grew to understand that their white-hot feelings were far more vibrant than any words or arguments they tried to make.
They, I, didn't understand the scale of the social engineering underway, just how sinister and insidious it was.
I fixate on Steve Bannon, a founding father of fake news. He schemed and succeeded in getting inside people's heads.
Somewhere along the way, callers started quoting Bannon's Breitbart News, an original channel for disinformation. He also led the way on a chilling plot to target American voters. He was an executive at the British company Cambridge Analytica when it used illegally harvested personal data to prey on voter's worst fears, custom-building nightmare scenarios on Facebook, and bombarding them with fake news. He was Trump's Chief Strategist when he first entered the White House.
Full of fury and f-bombs, Bannon is consumed by his convictions. He speaks frankly about crushing anyone he labels an enemy. Wealthy, smart, and eccentric, he's part of a small, powerful and murky network around the world. They are operatives, believers in an obscure philosophy known as Traditionalism. It's a strange mix of mysticism, spiritualism, Aryan supremacy -- hard-to-pin-down, fervent and hell-bent on breaking everything as it exists today. Destruction, they believe, is the only way to usher in a new age of enlightenment, a so-called Golden Age.
When Trump won again in November, I was reading Steve Bannon: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers, a book by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, I had to move it off my bedside table -- seeing Bannon's face on the jacket cover gave me the creeps. The book is a page-turner, one in which the Traditionalists come off something like the Illuminati in the Da Vinci Code, except they are a real and menacing influence in the world today. Bannon and his associates are executing a calculated strategy, one they have been planning for more than a decade. They have successfully infiltrated the highest echelons of governments in Russia, Hungary, Brazil and the United States.
American traditionalists like Bannon are seeing their dreams come true. In Washington, Trump has named the most outrageous people to head government departments. A man who wants to take down the "deep state" is in charge of the FBI. A science skeptic is overseeing the health of tens of millions of people. They will destroy government from the inside out. For Bannon, the plan is being perfectly executed. Everything is happening the way it's supposed to, he reportedly said, just a couple of weeks into Trump's second presidency.
Bannon's been planning for a long time. Seven years ago, he told an interviewer: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Mission accomplished. Now what?
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