Trudeau's "flat earth" speech to firefighters in Mississauga #shorts #Mississauga #flatearth (7:40)

In case you missed it, this is the infamous "flat earth" speech Trudeau gave March 16, 2023, to a captive audience of firefighters and their families. It is officially called a "townhall". Trudeau criticizes people who disagree with him calling them "flat earthers" referring to the preferred state of being for a "shared grounding in facts," and needing to keep people "safe" from the internet.

PORTION OF TRANSCRIPT MARCH 16, 2023:
Right now, with the internet people can find themselves in little corners where all they hear is what they want to hear and they're surrounded by people who think exactly the same as them. And they get spun up into a world that is increasingly disconnected from the world. I remember a few years ago, before the pandemic, before much of this um I got fascinated by the idea of flat earthers.

Now this is not an entirely new phenomenon. There wasn't really any moment back in recorded history the ancient Greeks or the ancient Babylonians or the Incas, or whoever else, who actually wondered whether the earth was actually flat or not. And Christopher Columbus, they knew the earth was round; he knew there was no danger he was going to fall off the edge of the world. That wasn't what people worried about when he was setting off to discover the Americas or discover a shortcut to India, um but recently over the past few years a whole bunch of people have decided that the world is flat.

Now everything we know about science, from the people we've sent to the moon, to the photos we've taken from space to how we explain day versus night and seasons, we know that the earth is round, but there there are a whole bunch of people out there who have decided that the earth is flat.

And they hang out with each other and they find different ways of proving to themselves that the worthless earth is flat. Now that may not seem like a very serious thing because someone who believes the earth is flat is not going to necessarily cause tremendous harm to everyone else. But the ability to start to believe something that simply isn't true, because enough people are telling you and reinforcing that around you actually starts creating real problems and can bring bring us as a society to very scary places.

And that's why we're still very much trying to figure it out how to make sure we're protecting people's freedom of speech and freedom of expression and we're making sure that marginalized communities and people who are traditionally oppressed by majorities continue to be protected in all the ways they need to be in societies.

Because there are lots of tools for majorities to oppress minorities, everywhere in the world, but our capacity to make sure we're keeping people safe, and not having people actually believe that vaccines include a microchip, that's going to track you or poison you when it's actually about saving your life, um these are things we have to figure out together.

... Well we have to start making sure that as parents and as a society we're helping kids and all of us be smart and safe, in what we choose to learn, what we choose to confirm, can consume, uh who we choose to hang out with on the internet as well…