A Love Letter to Canada

Gaslit Nation

Trump, Politics, Left, Democracy, Resistance, News, Society & Culture, Progressive, Liberal, Kendzior, Chalupa, Resist

4.8 • 4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What’s the easiest way for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to invade Canada?

Simple: Have voters sit out the upcoming election and let Pierre Poilievre become Prime Minister. If you’re Canadian—especially if you live abroad—now’s the time to get organized. Make sure you and at least five of your family and friends have a plan to vote. Not sure if you’re registered? Check here! Voting from abroad? Double-check your registration and make sure you’ve got everything you need by visiting this link.

In this week’s Gaslit Nation Canada Super Special, we’re joined by the amazing Leigh McGowan from Politics Girl, plus Marcus Kolga, a Canadian writer, filmmaker, and human rights advocate. Marcus is an expert on Russian and Central/Eastern European issues and Kremlin disinformation. He regularly shares his insights in top publications like The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Maclean's, and The Atlantic Council. Marcus also played a crucial role in the Canadian campaign for the Magnitsky human rights sanctions and has helped drive similar efforts in Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, and Australia. His expertise has taken him to testify before parliaments in the UK, Australia, and Canada, covering everything from Russian disinformation to Interpol reform. Currently, he’s a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad.

This week’s bonus show will be our live discussion with Dr. Lisa Corrigan, author of Prison Power: How Prison Politics Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation and Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties. Dr. Corrigan is the Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Arkansas and also teaches in both African & African American Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies.

Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION:

March 17 4pm ET – Dr. Lisa Corrigan joins our Gaslit Nation Salon to discuss America’s private prison crisis in an age of fascist scapegoating
March 31 4pm ET – Gaslit Nation Book Club: From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, which informed revolts in Ukraine, the Arab Spring, Hong Kong, and beyond: https://archive.org/details/from_dictatorship_to_democracy_1306_librivox
NEW! April 7 4pm ET – Security Committee Presents at the Gaslit Nation Salon. Don’t miss it!
Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon.
Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon.
Have you taken Gaslit Nation’s HyperNormalization Survey Yet?: https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/survey-reject-hypernormalization
Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community

Show Notes:

Ways to Vote in Canada:

https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=vote&document=index⟨=e

How Canadians Can Vote Abroad https://travel.gc.ca/travelling/living-abroad/elections-faq

Meet Politics Girl https://www.politicsgirl.com/

Meet Marcus Kolga https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/cm-expert/marcus-kolga/

Nadia Guerrera for Parkdale–High Park https://nadiaguerrera.ca/

Clip: Dropkick Murphys call out a Nazi at their Boston show https://bsky.app/profile/meidastouch.com/post/3lkhxscnvws2x

Clip: Stephen Marche on why the US can’t occupy Canada https://bsky.app/profile/jimmyalto.bsky.social/post/3lkgixldo6s2t

Want to topple a dictator? Gaslit Nation Book Club: From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/480x270/p08qz3w0.jpg.webp

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	America can't invade Canada. Trump can't conquer Canada. America is not in a position to conquer anyone.
0:09.7	When I was working on the next civil war, I spoke with a lot of counterinsurgency experts from the United
0:14.7	States, and they made it pretty clear that the American military has learned painfully over the course of 70 years that
0:22.3	you cannot really hold a population against its will, even if only a tiny fragment of that
0:27.9	population considers you holding them against their will. So, you know, if they can't hold Baghdad,
0:33.3	I'm not sure why they think they can hold Montreal. But the truth is that what this is really is the
0:38.4	ramblings of lunacy and imminent breakdown. And that's what it's really a symptom of. I mean, I think
0:45.7	you can see Los Angeles is burning and they can't stop it. They can't even stop blaming each other for it.
0:51.6	You know, ordinary citizens, some with Ivy League degrees,
0:54.4	are starting to kill their business elites and to widespread approval. They don't have even a
0:59.2	shred of solidarity. And to make war, you need solidarity. And that is the one thing they absolutely
1:05.4	don't have. You know, America's also not used to fighting wars that aren't divided from them by an
1:10.8	ocean.
1:11.2	They would suddenly have an enemy that was along this huge border.
1:14.8	And also, you know, they're extremely vulnerable to attacks on their homeland.
1:17.9	They're not a people used to suffering for war, which inevitably they would in this fantasy situation.
1:24.3	That doesn't mean that Canada's out of the woods or that suddenly we're not under
1:28.3	threat. We're actually under very deep threat and we need to prepare for economic, political,
1:33.1	social, and cultural chaos. It's just actual conquest is not really in the cards.
1:38.2	Our opening clip featured Canadian journalist and novelist Stephen March, author of The Next Civil War, Dispatches
1:47.1	from the American Future, warning that the U.S. could become a far-right dictatorship within the
1:54.7	next decade. Looks like we're ahead of schedule. I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide, famine, and Ukraine, a film that would not exist if it weren't for Canada.
	...

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