Thread by @ezralevant

Weird. He just did a whole email interview with me. I thought it was pretty good. He doesn’t really explain what changed other than the obvious: he folds under pressure. Liberals have his number now. I guess all that “cancel culture” stuff was just to win the leadership. #Scheer2

https://twitter.com/globeandmail/status/1348813456565174273

If you are a Conservative leader, but you do whatever the Liberals and the CBC tell you to do, you probably don’t have the stuff to withstand an election. Too bad — we need a guy with guts. I would have expected more from a military man.

In politics, appeasing your opponents doesn’t win them over. You just give them unearned moral authority; you give them a veto over you. Ask Rosemary Barton how Andrew Scheer’s appeasement worked on her. But more important: it demoralizes the party base, who love Rebel News.

I just finished doing this fun quiz with @sunlorrie: Without Googling can you name the Conservative:

1. Health critic?
2. Enviro critic?
3. Foreign critic?

Those are the key issues of the year: the pandemic; carbon tax; China. How many could you name?

I haven’t met single person who could name all three key critics. Add in a fourth — defence critic. Maybe their super-secret strategy is to stay very quiet and just hope that Trudeau falls apart and the election falls into their laps. But didn’t Scheer just try that?

The interview was a big win for O’Toole: finally a break from CBC questions about inherent racism & MAGA hats. He had good answers on questions that motivate his base. Imagine forsaking our 1.43 million conservative subscribers because Andrew Coyne, Justin Ling & the CBC say so!

Watch my show on this tonight. TheChinaFiles.com was the biggest story of the season. International news — I even went on Tucker! O’Toole had a press conference on it, but the Media Party didn’t ask a single question about the documents — not one! His Plan A isn’t working.

I hope O’Toole wins the elxn, but that’s unlikely unless he starts to fight (the Liberals, that is, not us). Honestly, I couldn’t care less about interviewing MPs — when was the last time any of them (other than Pierre) said anything interesting? But this looks awful to the base.

Cancel culture and free speech are a huge issue to the party base. Running for leader, O’Toole made repeated, specific promises to resist it. He caved in in a matter of hours today — to a bunch of Ottawa insider losers. How demoralizing. Did he mean any of it, or is he Scheer 2?

Anyways, I’ll still be here when the next Tory leader is chosen. Hopefully it will be one who knows you can’t make friends out of your enemies by making enemies out of your friends.

Politicians usually don’t write their own tweets. But did you even read yours?

https://twitter.com/erinotoole/status/1280190966889091072

Please don’t bully your MPs like Scheer did. Don’t cut them off from 1.43 million viewers. I think that probably cost the party ten seats last time.

https://twitter.com/TheRealKeean/status/1308977191657578503

I should move on but I’m just sitting here, so I’ll keep going. Why did @Melanie_Paradis feel the need to respond to a non-story in the first place? The Liberals would never be that indisciplined. Why give oxygen to some weird, gossipy insider quarrel by vain, grudgy journos?

And then, to give quotes to the Globe — to make it a 2-day story? That will now turn into a 3-day story as 1.43 million Rebel viewers rejected by O’Toole have their say. And @RobertFife might even ask: “so what changed between you granting the interview and now?” Big Liberal win.