Midterm election candidates 'can't be neutral' on Kavanaugh decision, says prof

Guests: Matt Mackowiak, LA Kaufmann, Dan Cassino

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VOICE: I stand before you today on the heels of a tremendous victory for our nation, our people and our beloved constitution. Just a few hours ago, the US Senate confirmed Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court.

DC: In the end, US President, Donald Trump, got his man. On Saturday, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, removing the final hurdle to the controversial pick's ascension to the U.S. Supreme Court. Now his confirmation of course was almost thwarted by three sexual misconduct allegations dating back to the 1980s. And while Republicans celebrated the vote, many others were not happy.

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Protest outside the Supreme Court.

DC: Protesters were right outside the front doors of the Supreme Court, while Mr. Kavanaugh was being sworn in over the weekend. With the Senate vote out of the way, all eyes are now turning to the midterm elections, that's in under a month, and how Kavanaugh's confirmation could shift or solidify power in the Republican controlled Congress. All 435 seats in the US House of Representatives will be contested, along with 35 of the 100 seats in the US Senate. Now for his analysis, we've reached Matt Mackowiak. He's a Republican consultant and president of the Potomac Strategy Group, which is a PR strategic communications firm. We've reached him this morning in Austin, Texas. Hello, Matt.

MATT MACKOWIAK: Good morning.

DC: We heard over the weekend, the top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, say thank you to what you called the mob for energizing the Republican base. Do you believe that is the case that Republicans are going to come out in midterms because of what they say are over the Kavanaugh confirmation?

MM: You know based on the evidence we've seen just in the last you know five to seven days, it does appear that that's what's happening. This is just initial polling, it's initial reaction. We still have what 30 or so days to the midterms and so we have to see if the intensity is sustainable, but so far if you look in some key US Senate races in places like North Dakota and Montana, if you look at the congressional generic ballot, which had the Democrats up seven or eight points and now appears to have them up only two points, it does appear that the tactics that opponents of Kavanaugh used, really did fire up Republicans. I think among Republican voters there was a sense that it was over the top, that it was unfair, that it was unproven, that it was an attempt to basically destroy his reputation and life for a political outcome.

DC: So what you're saying is interesting because the midterms had up to this point, really seemed like just a straight referendum on the president, on Donald Trump and you're saying that's no longer the factor, that it is about the Kavanaugh confirmation.

MM: Yeah. What I would say is I think Trump is still a major factor. I just don't think he's the only factor and he dominates American politics really unlike any president in the modern era. Dominates the news every hour of every day. In this case you know for the last three or four weeks, the news has really just been about Kavanaugh. It's not much been about what Trump says or what he does. You know the president may interject himself from time to time, but it's really been about that and obviously he's going to be sworn in I guess sort of ceremonially this evening in Washington. But the big question I think that's out there is you know are Democrats more fired up now than they were? They were already pretty far out if you look at you know all the polling that we've seen in the last few months. Their enthusiasm level has been very high. The thing that's changed is that Republican enthusiasm was really pretty modest until just a couple weeks ago. That I think is what's changed. So if Republican enthusiasm can match Democratic enthusiasm then the midterms are probably more likely to be a modest pick up for the Democrats rather than the kind of blue wave that Democrats were hoping for and even predicting.

DC: White women are key to any GOP get out the vote strategy.

MM: Yup.

DC: And I'm wondering when you look at the way that there was anger around how Christine Blasey Ford was treated during those confirmation hearings. Do you believe that will impact white women in terms of their as you say enthusiasm to come out to the polls?

MM: I think it's a really complicated question. First of all, I think you know so-called white women are not monolithic and so you know the idea that they all view this story the same way is really probably not accurate. You know I think that just in my world in Texas and the political races I'm following, this is mostly anecdotal, but there has been a new concern among women who have sons. That you know it's not that far-fetched that one of their sons could do something when they're 16 or 17 years old, do they want that to live with them for the rest of their lives? Look I think women clearly are more concerned and have more certainly more personal experience with these kinds of situations. The MeToo movement has been powerful, it has brought accountability to some you know high level, high profile individuals who were getting away with bad behaviour for decades and now are facing at minimum, public backlash and at maximum, criminal charges. I think to compare Kavanaugh to some of those most egregious examples like Bill Cosby and you know Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein and others, is really not fair. You know in the Kavanaugh situation, you really had only one credible allegation. The second and third one, those really weren't even credible enough for the Senate Judiciary Committee to look at them. The first one, there's no question that there is going to be tens of millions of people that believe her and don't believe him and that's something he's going to have to live with for the rest of his life.

DC: And there'll be others who will believe the other two as well.

MM: Hundred per cent. There will be some, sure. I think it's less because those two stories got far less attention. So I think most people probably don't understand all the arguments in the second two cases, but there will also be millions of people that believe him and not her. I think most of the country is somewhere in the middle, right? And so if you have a so-called he said, she said, where both people saying different things under oath. You look at the evidence and in this case there just wasn't the kind of evidence that make clear that he did this beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond preponderance of the evidence, by any standard you could use.

DC: Just very briefly, when you look ahead, less than a month from now to the mid terms, it had been looking very bad, certainly in the house, but possibly in the Senate for the Republicans. Do you believe that's changed?

MM: I believe it's improved for Republicans, yes.

DC: Could they hold the Senate?

MM: Well the Senate I don’t think is in play. I mean I think there's really been very little smart discussion of that anywhere that I've found. There's a 51-49 Republican advantage Democrats basically have to win 12 out of 12 Senate seats in order to take the Senate back. They have to hold the 10 seats that they're defending and then pick up two Republican seats. And if Republicans pick up even one new seat, say North Dakota, say Florida, say Missouri, then they have to go you know 13, they have to win 13 of those. So it's just the math is not there. Now the house, I do think the Democrats are more likely than not to take the House back, but I think that's changing. This is a volatile political environment and I do think the last week has been very good for Republicans. As I said before though, key question is going to be, if Republican voters are fired up right now because of the tactics used by those who opposed Kavanaugh, will they still be fired up 25, 27, 29 days from now when they vote or if they vote on November 6th on election day. I don't know whether it's sustainable. I don't think this story is going to stay in the news. We're going to move on to other topics and so that intensity question is a big one.

DC: Matt Mackowiak, thanks very much.

MM: Pleasure.

DC: Matt Mackowiak is a Republican consultant and president of the Potomac Strategy Group, a PR and strategic communications firm. And we spoke to him this morning in Austin, Texas. Now my next guest says voters are indeed angry. They're angry over how the Kavanaugh nomination was handled and she expects to see that anger at the ballot box next month. LA Kauffman is a grass roots organizer, activist and author of "How To Read A Protest: The Art of Organizing and Resistance." Ms. Kauffman believes that female voters in particular, furious over how Mr. Kavanaugh's accusers were treated, may end up deciding the mid terms. She joins us this morning from upstate New York. Good morning.

LA KAUFFMAN: Good morning.

DC: You've heard what Matt Mackowiak said. Do you believe that women are, contrary to what he said, ready to protest right at the ballot box? Will turn out and change this race fundamentally?

LK: Absolutely, I do. I mean I agree with him that women in general are not monolithic, and particular white women are not monolithic. But what has been happening ever since Donald Trump took office is that women have not only been angry, but they've been organized and there has been underneath the radar, there has been an extraordinary level of organizing taking place at the grassroots. So the anger that people are feeling right now in the wake of the handling of the Kavanaugh confirmation is not just going to vinted and expressed. People are really channeling it into sustained organizing around the midterms, in a way that I have never seen before.

DC: How does that play itself out? How do you keep this in the news cycle over the next month leading up to the midterm election?

LK: Well I think the question is not so much about the news cycle as the ground game and you know what has been happening over the last two years. We've had, since Donald Trump took office, there's been unprecedented levels of protest in the US. There's been some 25,000 different protests involving something between 14 and 21 million people, much higher than at any point in American history. But people have also not just been protesting, they've been forming groups. There are thousands and thousands of resistance groups, at least 5000 connected with the indivisible network, which is more than 10 times what the Tea Party had at its height. And what you're seeing now is that women and their supporters are channeling that anger that they're feeling in to canvassing, door knocking, phone banking, sending postcards to voters, all that kind of unglamorous ground level work that it takes to decide elections. And I think we're going to be seeing people redoubling their efforts over this next month and see a real difference at the polls.

DC: I'm going to go to a limb and say that you did not support Mr. Kavanaugh getting in to Supreme Court.

LK: I did not.

DC: But I wonder on some level, if the fact that he did and the fact that we went through the process that we've witnessed, may in fact be the motivator that you need or will benefit from to help get people out to the polls.

LK: I mean you know the outcome of his confirmation is it's a tragedy for American democracy. It was such a sham process at every step of the way. So there's nothing in it that I celebrate. This is a very dark moment in American history, where we have you know a president who lost the popular vote and the legitimacy of whose election is very seriously in question, joined by Senators representing a minority of the population. Pushing through an extremist who lied under oath repeatedly and showed he does not have the temperament to be a Supreme Court judge. You know, it's a tragedy, but I think the kind of sense of triumphalism and smug self-satisfaction that some Republican voters are feeling now in the short term aftermath of the confirmation, I don't see that driving people to the polls in the way that this long simmering discontent at the grassroots is driving people to the polls on the Democrat side. It's not so much happening in the Democratic Party. You know like last night I was at a candidate forum in a part of upstate New York where Trump won two to one and you saw you know all kinds of women coming out. The town librarian, the local Girl Scout leader, the local grade school teacher, getting ready to canvas and get out to vote in a way that they hadn't done before and not especially through the mobilizing efforts of the Democratic Party themselves itself. It's really a groundswell of people who are disgusted by what has happened to American democracy.

DC: Do you think the Senate's in play?

LK: I'm not an expert. I'm not an elections expert and I think that's it's very, it's too close to call. I think it could be in play. I think that the House is obviously where the momentum is and I think we're going to see some very powerful upsets on the House side.

DC: LA Kauffman, thank you very much for joining us this morning.

LK: Thank you.

DC: LA Kauffman is a grassroots organizer, activist and author of several books including, "How to Read A Protest: The Art of Organizing Resistance," joined us this morning from upstate New York. So where does the truth lie in all of this? As they say, often that's somewhere in the middle. For a take on that I'm joined by Dan Cassino, an associate professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University, spends a lot of time studying public opinion polls and how well they translate into voter turnout. Dan Cassino joins us from Bloomfield, New Jersey; hello.

DAN CASSINO: Good morning.

DC: There has been an awful lot of attention on the Kavanaugh confirmation. Do you see it being, if not the defining issue, then one of the key questions at the ballot?

DCA: Well if you lose sight of the fact that most Americans weren't paying much attention to the Kavanaugh hearings. So if you're on social media following the news, it looks like that was the only thing happening in the country. When you actually ask people, only about 40% of Americans says they were following hearings closely or very closely. So most Americans just weren't paying very much attention. And the people who were paying attention were people who were already politically active. People with already strong partisans. Now those people are certainly motivated. They were certainly outraged or elated by the end result of it, but they were already likely to vote anyway. The problem is enthusiasm doesn't directly translate into votes. If you're enthusiastic, you're going to go out and vote, but being more enthusiastic doesn't mean you can vote twice. I mean maybe in Chicago, but in general you can't. And as a result, it's just that it doesn't make that much of a difference. Also we are more than a month out from the election and a lot of these emotions are going to be fading by the time people actually get to the ballot box.

DC: There is a whole question about the midterm elections because traditionally and notoriously turnout is low for midterm elections, but there has been much made before the confirmation hearings that this is all about Donald Trump. That everything else is irrelevant. It's all about Donald Trump and that he either causes people to be angry and support him or angry and oppose him and that's going to be the factor. Do you see that as still the case?

DCA: Well we talked about Trump. The reason we care about Trump because he's got nationalized elections. The question is if I'm a candidate running for local office, can I separate myself out from the national agenda or do I really have to, can I really focus on what's happening in my own district and run to my district. Candidates always want to run to their district. Republicans cares the cycle who are a little worried about the national agenda. Donald Trump is not very popular after all. They really would like to run to the district and not have a nationalized election. Now we're seeing in the Senate, it's actually the Republicans prefer a nationalized election because we're mostly running in Republican states. In House Representatives, most of these candidates are running in swing districts kind of suburban districts in the Northeast. In those districts they really don't want to be nationalized. What the Kavanaugh hearing has done is nationalize elections in a way that we hadn't seen before, especially on the Senate side. Now that's probably good for Republicans in the Senate, but likely going to be very, very bad for them in the election with House Representatives.

DC: Is that how you see this playing out?

DCA: That's what it looks like right now. The votes for or against Kavanaugh were very hard votes for a number of Democratic incumbents who were up, I'm thinking in particular of Heidi Heitkamp from North Dakota. This is a really tough vote for her and that might cost her the election because she upset so many of her constituents because she can't just run saying this is about issues in my state because they care about national elections. However, the sort of swing districts that are going decide to control the House. Those districts are really decided by moderate women, especially moderate younger white women and that's going to be a real, the Kavanaugh hearings set a real problem for candidates running in those districts on the Republican ticket. There's simply no way to be neutral on this, which is what those candidates would really, really like to do.

DC: You know, I understand when we talk about anger being a motivating factor. I can see how that helps a Democratic candidate or democratic organization motivate their people to get out to the polls. But if you're a Republican, how do you translate that anger after a win. After you were victorious. How do you make it something to get people angry about?

DCA: I think you've hit the nail on the head. In poll psychology we often look at this difference between enthusiasm versus anger as motivators. We find that anger or fear are much more powerful motivators than enthusiasm are. Essentially if you're winning, you're likely to be complacent. Everything is going great. Why should you be putting a lot of effort into mobilizing and getting other people to go out to the polls. So for Republicans the problem is they have to make simultaneous the argument that we're winning,. everything is great and everything is about to be terrible and you have to go to the polls and vote. And that's a much harder message to get out than the Democratic message, which is essentially, everything is terrible and you have to get out to the polls and vote. Now there is going to be some anger at what happened in the Kavanaugh hearings. There are people as we heard that are saying, look this is terrible. This is a travesty. This man's life was destroyed by this, however it's really hard to play that at the same time that you're saying we won, everything is going great. I think the real importance of the Kavanaugh hearings was that it kept Donald Trump out of the news for three weeks. We see with Donald Trump, especially his approval ratings, is that when Donald Trump is quiet, when we don't hear him, his approval rating rises. It's essentially whenever Donald Trump opens his mouth or starts tweeting, he gets people upset and his approval rating drops and that is a real ramification before the midterm elections.

DC: I think Donald Trump might see it different. He may see it differently.

DCA: Well, he certainly believes that he is best when he is out front and that he's the best voice for his party. And that's probably true in a lot of states and a lot districts, but those states and those districts are not the ones that are going to decide the fate of the House and the Senate. He really runs well in very deep Republican parts of the country. He doesn't do well in moderate parts and especially in the northeast and that's where this election's going to be decided.

DC: Dan, we're going have to leave it there, but thanks so much.

DCA: Always a pleasure.

DC: Dan Cassino is an associate professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He was in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Well, the CBC News is coming up next. And then critics loved the movie, The Last Jedi. Fans online though, they had often some very harsh words for the Star Wars film. So why that disconnect? Well we're going to be speaking to a researcher, who has some interesting ideas about why that is, what it says about culture and culture wars in particular. I'm David Common, in today for Anna Maria Tremonti on this Thanksgiving Monday and you are listening to The Current.

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Russian trolls 'pushed their agenda' with Star Wars critiques, study suggests

Guests: Morten Bay, Rebecca Harrison, Rad Simonpillai

DC: Hello. I'm David Common, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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DC: Still to come. Guess who's been peacocking around a Surrey, BC neighbourhood and causing quite a flap. The CBC's Rafferty Baker brings us his documentary, "A Foul Feud," in about half an hour. It tells the story of how a flock of feral peacocks is tearing a community apart. But first, stewing up the rotten tomatoes.

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VOICE 1: The Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if you strip away the myth and look a their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi are failures. Hypocrisy, hubris.

VOICE 2: That's not true.

VOICE 1: At the height of their powers, they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire, and wipe them out. It was a Jedi master who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader.

VOICE 2: And a Jedi who saved him.

That is the legendary Jedi knight, Luke Skywalker, speaking to his protege Rey, in the latest installment in the core Star Wars movie franchise. When the Last Jedi was released in 2017, it received rave reviews and near universal kudos from professional critics, but diehard Star Wars fans were another matter. The movie directed by Rian Johnson made big money at the box office, online though there was a vocal and persistent group of fans who had serious problems with the movie. Here's how some of their tweets sounded.

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VOICE 1: Rian Johnson your movie is the worst. I hate you for ruining Star Wars. #thelastjedioff.

VOICE 2: It was incoherent, poorly constructed garbage. Had no understanding of intercutting stories. Pathetic one liners. The list goes on.

Now others took aim at some of the characters in the film, notably Rose Tico, a maintenance worker portrayed by Asian-American actor, Kelly Marie Tran.

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VOICE 1: Rose is a character that adds nothing to the Star Wars universe. She's plain and dull, even her name is lame and absurd.

VOICE 2: She's stupid, not very attractive either.

DC: That was actually just some of the most mild mannered attacks on Rose Tico and the actor who portrayed her, Kelly Marie Tran. The criticism grew so harsh that Ms. Tran eventually deleted all posts from her Instagram account. So why did The Last Jedi generate such vitriol online. Morten Bay is a researcher with the Center for the Digital Future, which is affiliated with the University of Southern California. His study found that amidst all the fan criticism of The Last Jedi, there was a deliberate organized attempt by political activists, bots and Russian trolls to politicize the discussion around the film and inflame racial and gender divisions. Morten Bay joins us from Pasadena, California. Hello.

MORTEN BAY: Hi.

DC: I want to get to the how you figured all of this out, but I got to start with what has become one of the headlines of your research and that is that Russian trolls played at least some role in a lot of the online anger and hate that we saw out there. How did you come up with that conclusion?

MB: Well first of all, that's not a very hard conclusion to come to since that is the case in pretty much all of the western internet right now and has been for about 24 since about 2014, when we first started, sort of in my field, started looking at these Russian troll activities.

DC: So they're in everything else, why not this?

MB: Exactly. That's kind of what the little nugget of a finding about the Russian trolls were in my paper, but it's kind of been blown a little bit out of proportion.

DC: So it's not as if all of the anger that was seen on online and all of the response to The Last Jedi was in and of itself coming from Russian trolls, it was much wider than that.

MB: That's the point. The main point I'm trying to make in the paper is that when I started looking at the fandom discussions about around The Last Jedi on Twitter and I should add in a very very specific and small forum, which is sort of the collective that are tweeting directly at Rian Johnson. When I started looking at that what I was starting to see were a number of people who were using the conflict in the fandom to try and insert themselves and state some very sort of I would say politically oriented statements that weren't necessarily tied to the movie at all.

DC: So you know when we hear about Russian trolls and the activity in the political sphere, where there is an attempt to influence an attempt to increasingly polarize Western society. Are those the same kind of goals that would be used, but instead of it being a political debate that it's one about a movie?

MB: I would actually say that it's the other way around. It's using the movie to do the same thing and what's interesting I think, which is kind of one of the main things that I would like people to take away from this study is that these tactics that we saw in the 2016 presidential election here in the U.S. for instance, this idea of sowing further division and divisions that are already there, that's a tactic that the Russians use, but that tactic is now being taken up by people on the alt-right and people who are anti-feminists in order to try to push their agenda.

DC: So I want to continue that discussion in just a moment, but we should just understand how you came to these conclusions. What was it you did? You mentioned that you looked at tweets that were directed towards the director of this film Rian Johnson.

MB: Yes. So what I did was you know in social science we kind of have to, especially when this is a small summer project that I was doing by myself without funding, we kind of have to limit the scope of what we do when we do these large studies. So what I did was I chose a very specific narrow set of tweets, which were the tweets that were directed at Rian Johnson because on his Twitter profile there was a lot of discussion and he was engaging with it, which I also think was interesting. And what I then did was I simply collected every single tweet that had been tweeted at Rian Johnson between December 13 and July 20 that came up to around 18,000 roughly. But that was a lot of retweets, there were a lot of gifs in there that you can't really use because they're not searchable. And there were some other data cleaning that I needed to do and once I'd done all of that, I kind of whittled it down to roughly a couple of thousand and then what I did was I took one tweet per person or per account, in order to see how many accounts were tweeting negatively or positively or neutrally. And so that's kind of how I ended up with the number 900 and I believe it's 967, which is the sort of total number of tweets that I'm actually studying.

DC: That's what you used to look at and come to these conclusions and one of those conclusions of course you're telling us is that Russian trolls and potentially even bots were involved in some of the response that we saw to this film, particularly the negative response. But there is also of course long been talk about misogyny and racism in what is often referred to as geek culture. How receptive do you think Star Wars fans to the kinds of messages they were hearing from bots and trolls and activists?

MB: So it's sort of a cumulative effect, right? Well you had the rift already. That started happening right when the movie opened. Once that rift had opened, others started going into the discussion in order to widen the rift. There were already misogynist and racist comments being made, but then some of these political activists and the 16 suspected Russian trolls, I have to say because I have no way of attributing that to them directly. I don't have the.

DC: You can't prove it, yeah.

MB: Techonlogy that the CIA has for instance. So they started doing that and the 11 bots that I found, so these are very small numbers, they did the same thing, but then you saw a substantially larger number of people I think it came at like 67 or something who were doing this in a more pronounced fashion, but who were regular human beings living in the US.

DC: Some of the Star Wars fans, those who are particularly diehard, are quite possessive about these films. Is there something about how they're reacting now that is different from what we have seen with sci-fi movies in the past?

MB: The way they're reacting now is more vocal. And I think the Trump era has kind of legitimized a way of communicating and stating your positions. That is let's say a little more vitriolic than usual. The decorum has kind of gone out of online discussion, not that we had much of it already, but it kind of seems like it's kind of really disappeared now. And add to that the fact that Twitter, as a public platform, allows you to be completely anonymous and therefore maybe say stuff that you wouldn't say to a person's face. It's become more legitimate to be racist, misogynist on social media than it was just say three years ago.

DC: Morten, as you say, this was a summer project, no funding, but it certainly got a lot of attention. Thanks so much for talking to us.

MB: You're very welcome.

DC: Morten Bay is a researcher with the Center for the Digital Future, which is affiliated with University of Southern California. He was in Pasadena, California. As the debate over The Last Jedi played out, director Rian Johnson showed he did not have much patience for some of his critics, calling them "man babies" on Twitter. Our next guest says there's a lesson to be learned from the reaction to movies and it goes beyond talk of outside political agitators and Russian trolls. Rebecca Harrison says we need to understand that the reaction is itself a window into the sexism and racism in our broader society. Rebecca Harrison is a lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Glasgow and joins us from Glasgow, Scotland, this morning. Hello.

REBECCA HARRISON: Hi.

DC: You just heard Morten Bay explain what he saw as driving some of this online criticism of The Last Jedi. What do you make of it?

RH: I mean I think the research is really interesting and it's certainly in line with other research going on elsewhere. There was a piece published in The Washington Post a few weeks ago by Professor Bethany Lacina, which also pointed to the fact that there are a small number of accounts operated kind of operated by bots. I think she mentioned something like 4.4 per cent of Star Wars-related tweets, they think are bots, so this is mostly people, but I think one of the things that I would pick up on with the research is that you know it has a small focus, that's the way that we do research, but that research is focused on, particularly on Rian Johnson. So I think it's slightly obscuring the broader picture. I mean only looking at the tweet sent to a white man.

DC: Yeah and that's a very good point. I certainly remember at the time that people were not as focused or at least I was not as focused on the tweets that, as you say, the white male director of this was facing and I look at Kelly Marie Tran, who's an actor in the movie, the reaction she faced. Some of the other actors as well, particularly those who come from diverse backgrounds, they were facing enormous amounts of negative reaction online. What do you think is the bigger factor in that reaction, that criticism?

RH: We live in a society that is incredibly biased. It's incredibly hierarchical and gender and race still play a major part in determining who gets treated well and who doesn't. I think we do tend to pick up on the worst things that get said. They make the better headlines. But as someone who has been on the receiving end of abuse, when I talked about my work on Star Wars on Twitter, it's very difficult not to pay attention to these things.

DC: What have you received?

RH: I have seen certainly offensive language. I've received kind of hate speech and it's often started on Twitter when I kind of posted something about my own research, but then it would spin into different areas. So this is how I know it's often not bots. People will leave offensive comments on articles that I write. They will contact me on my personal e-mail address. I will get comments about my appearance sent to my work email address. They write in very good English. They're not bots sending these things to my personal or work accounts and these people who are really, really upset as soon as you start to talk about issues of gender and race and their representation even, in the franchise.

DC: But this is a movie.

RH: Right. You'd think that people would be kind of considerate of that, but I think it's you know, films are so important in reflecting to us our own culture, our own society, but also in challenging our beliefs. I think it's very interesting that Star Wars has always been a slightly left of center franchise in terms of its storytelling and its politics, but it's only really now that this kind of response is happening and I think it's because this kind of latent racism and sexism has always been there, but now it's legitimized.

DC: Yeah because we went through gamergate's, I can't remember a couple of years ago, where a lot of these issues came up and shines a light on nerd culture. There's other terms for it, but the idea of often young or middle aged men who feel somehow threatened by what they're seeing in these touchstone products like Star Wars. I wonder you know the term fundamentalism has been pushed out there, where people are turning pop culture almost into a religion. What do you make of that characterization?

RH: Well it's certainly something that seems to have really taken off in the age of social media because if you look back at kind of fan, kind of discourses publications back in the 80s, when you know there weren't these online spaces and people were using kind of fanzines to circulate stories and ideas about that kind of fan cultures. The stuff around Star Wars is way more positive. You don't have fanzines dedicated to hating on Princess Leia or hating on Lando Calrissian. So this does seem to be a more recent phenomenon and I think it's part of a backlash against women, people of colour being able to have a kind of more mainstream voice. Taking up more space and being more visible.

DC: How then do you, I mean in a position like yours, how do you actually have a dialogue? How do you have a conversation about whether a film is good or not. What its flaws might be when it is in such a polarized environment.

RH: It's very difficult and there are actually really, really vague discussions going on, even among film critics at the moment, about how much of a role identity plays in how you critique a film and the kind of biases that you bring to it. There have been arguments made very similar to the ones that come up in gamergate that women critics will inevitably review films made by women in a more positive way. But the fact remains that most film critics are men. The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released a study earlier this year, showing about 78 percent of reviews of the top 100 films from last year were written by white men. So there's lots of these conversations and it's very very difficult to kind of pick apart like why are you thinking about film a certain way? Why are you talking about it a certain way? And how are you responding to the people on screen?

DC: Very interesting. Rebecca, thanks so much.

RH: No, thank you very much.

DC: Rebecca Harrison is a lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Glasgow. She's working on a book about race and gender in Star Wars and she joined us from Glasgow, Scotland. Now when films become battlegrounds in the culture wars, how does that affect the critics tasked with objectively reviewing them? The Last Jedi was widely praised by film critics, but there was some who found fault with aspects of the plot and some of the character development. That includes our next guest, Rad Simonpillai is a film critic with The Toronto alt-weekly Now magazine and he joins us in our Toronto studio. Hello.

RAD SIMONPILLAI: Hey.

DC: OK, so you're an actual critic. What did you think of this movie?

RS: You know what, there's aspects of the movie that worked for me and there's aspects that really didn't and for the most part, I found the movie kind of tedious. The aspects that worked is actually part of the ethos of the whole movie, which is let the past died. That's a line that the villain in the movie always says, Kylo Ren. And I did like that with that line what the movie was trying to do is break away from the old Star Wars movies and try something different. What didn't work for me is that the movie actually ended up not being that different from the old Star Wars movies and still ended up retreading the same ground and a main subplot in the movie that really didn't work in that respect, was unfortunately the plot that involved the diverse characters John Boyega played by John Boyega and Kelly Murray Tran. They're off on a kind of a space mission, similar to what Han Solo and Princess Leia had to do in Empire Strikes Back and it is a very tedious plot, not the fault of the actors playing them, but just the scripting that was given to those characters. And unfortunately that gave the trolls of this movie something to really attack.

DC: Okay so let's pick up on that. You think that's what they were attacking? That their concerns were legitimate in terms of the actual script flaws of the movie?

RS: Well you know it depends on which fans you talk to actually because I mean a lot of the fans, actually no maybe I'm a little wrong there because a lot of the diehard fans took issue with the stuff that I loved. Like they took issue with the fact that the movie was trying to be different and they took issue with the let the past die decorum. I mean they took issue with the idea that Luke Skywalker was all of a sudden a weak wary Jedi who doesn't believe in all the things he used to believe with in the past. And then there are the people who agree that with me, yeah that subplot with John Boyega and Kelly Murray Tran was the weaker subplot, but then they use that to invoke their own politics and attack it for all the wrong reasons.

DC: Yeah I guess that's, I mean this is the thing, on the spectrum of complaints, how do you figure out obviously if someone is making racist comments or saying something that you would never say to a man, but you're saying it to a woman, it becomes much more abundantly clear that it's sexism or racism. But how do you separate what might be a legitimate criticism around a script from what isn't? What is just malicious and backwards thinking?

RS: First of all, when you're attacking, I mean it's the language you use, right? Like you don't need to criticize the movie by then bringing up the person's race. But I think it's very telling that that is what these people are doing because for me when I watch that movie, I took its diversity and representation for granted. I mean I was like yeah, this is the way things are. I didn't see it as something to attribute to the movie as a progressive because I just assumed that that was the way it should be. When you get these racist and sexist attacks, that makes me look back on this and say like oh, well this is actually a big deal. Like I've seen lots of diverse movies before, but all of a sudden it becomes something different when it's Star Wars. It brings everybody out, first of all just in terms of box office and such, but in terms of the cultural wars it attracts those people that these people who we label as sort of geek culture. I mean if we were to draw a straw man example of them, we would think of them as these middle aged men who really cherish this moment from their childhood, where the white male stories were privileged and always at the center of things.

DC: But not just stories, society.

RS: Society in general, yeah. And so I mean this is, I mean this wasn't just Star Wars that it happened with. This happened actually a couple of years before with Ghostbusters, when there was an all female Ghostbusters movie. People attacked that movie the same way and they specifically, just like they attacked, focused and honed in on Kelly Marie Tran, they honed in on Leslie Jones and made hacked her account. Said some really really awful things to them. So for me as a critic, that just opened my eyes to how much bigger this conversation is.

DC: You know, we heard from our last guest and you were listening to, Rebecca Harrison was talking to us about how this sits in on the culture wars and so many things come back to the Trump White House and what is now seemingly permissible to say in society, permissible to not just think, but to think out loud. Where do you see that sitting in the context of the conversation we just had with Rebecca?

RS: Well you know I mean I definitely, I agree with that assessment. It's hard to say what came first right, in terms of the chicken or the egg thing because the gamergate and I think even this Ghostbusters situation, that that predated Trump, right? And but certainly with Trump in the White House and the stuff he says, it seems like you know he all of a sudden made it OK for these racists to come out and say everything they feel or complain about everything. That is again attack, what they feel is an attack on white male culture. And for me, I mean first of all, I do see it as part of my job to engage with that. These are cultural products, right. They are made, they're influenced by culture and they in turn influence culture. Like if you go back to the very beginning of film, one of the what's considered the first epic movie was D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," a racist movie was the origins of cinema is a racist movie that then in turn inspired the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan. So you know the way movies and culture and society in general are intertwined like that, that is part of the job of a film critic to talk to engage with those things and to talk about those things. Like our opinions don't just end with a rotten tomatoes score. This is where the real work begins, it's to engage with what is this doing to society, how is society responding to it and how can we move forward from that?

DC: OK so take that critic hat for a moment because we're talking about the past. We're talking about some of the recent past around The Last Jedi and the other movies in the Star Wars franchise, how does this, everything that has transpired, alter what will come in the future in terms of that franchise or other movies? What do directors, what do people who make these movies, actors who are involved in them, think going forward?

RS: Well you know I mean I think when Donald Trump labels Hollywood as his enemy and left leaning, I certainly think that's true. And I think this would only motivate them to keep going, like this is just an example of oh we're kind of doing the right thing because you have to remember that just because these online trolls are being really loud and really attack, trying to pick these things apart with their racist and sexist attitudes, the movies aren't hurting at the box office, right. Like there's still people who love this, who love this direction and I would say that's the majority of people because these movies are doing really, movies like Black Panther and The Last Jedi are killing it at the box office. So it just sounds like there's so much more hatred than there really is because the people who are trolls tend to be louder and tend to really want to wield their voice. So I would think this would only motivate the producers to keep going with it. Another example, I don't know if you want to look at this is the Guardians of the Galaxy situation, where trolls started attacking James Gunn, the director for some really offensive tweets he had in his history. Now Disney reacted to that by firing James Gunn, even though this is stuff that was long in his past, stuff that he admitted to being wrong about this stuff that where he turned an entirely new leaf. He was attacked though because of his other more recent attacks against the Donald Trump administration. So it was Disney, I mean they took attacks seriously by firing James Gunn, even though James Gunn might lean politically more towards what the public is looking for. You know what I'm trying to say is that there's like a two pronged situation here, where yes Hollywood will react against these trolls, but at the same time they could be duped into playing along with these trolls when the trolls know exactly the kind of politics to work against Hollywood, if that makes any sense.

DC: It certainly does. Rad, thanks so much.

RS: Thanks for having me.

DC: Rad Simonpillai is a film critic with Now magazine in Toronto. For some final thoughts, here's talk show host and comedian Stephen Colbert. As the criticism of The Last Jedi exploded online, he and his writing staff came up with a trailer for a new Star Wars movie designed to make fans even more outraged.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: In 2019, comes the first Star Wars movie, specifically designed to make racist, misogynist nerds mad. Starring Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico. Yeah, she's the main character now. All the cool male characters like Kylo Ren and Po Dameron fell into a big hole. Plus the lady Ghostbusters are here for some reason, the new female Doctor Who and this girl wearing a Rick and Morty tshirt, but it's like, does she even really watch the show? And we've got two words for you: Woke Pores. Also, Darth Maul is now an intersectional feminist and Chewbacca was a woman the whole time. Star Wars Episode 9 shut the hell up, you broken, hateful dweebs.

Alright, from Chewbacca to another colourful tale, we are just minutes away from a Surrey, BC story where a certain neighbourhood is having a plume boom. Rafferty Baker's documentary, A Foul Feud, that's in about 90 seconds time. You're going to hear a lot about peacocks. I'm David Common, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you are listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Behold the Peacock: a fowl with the power to divide a B.C. neighbourhood

Guests: Rafferty Baker

DC: Hello. I'm David Common in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. Well it is a bird with a beauty like no other and so it's no surprise then that at different times, across various cultures, the Peacock has been viewed as a mythical creature. It's been a symbol of royalty, of joy, of good luck, even of Christianity, but in Surrey, BC one neighborhood has found itself bitterly divided over the presence of peacocks and whether they lift the spirits or are just an unholy mess. The CBC's Rafferty Baker investigates his longstanding dispute in his documentary, A Foul Feud.

SOUNDCLIP

RYAN: Most of the houses around here were still empty. There was quite a few houses that we could have chosen.

RAFFERTY BAKER: When Ryan Craig and his wife Julie looking for a new home in Surrey Sullivan Heights neighborhood, about 10 years ago, it was an area that was quickly changing. Developers were taking a lot of the larger properties and subdividing them into smaller lots.

RYAN: When we were looking at the show House we did see peacocks. There was three of them roosted on on Micky's property. At the time the implication of that was not obvious.

RAFFERTY BAKER: I mean the birds themselves couldn't be any more obvious; that brilliant plumage, the ostentatious displays and noisy calls. But I could see three of them alone minding their own business wouldn't set off alarm bells. However the small muster should probably have been viewed as a bit of a harbinger. Nevertheless Ryan and his wife bought a place that seemed like a great place to start a family. Before long though Ryan was struck with a realization.

RYAN: I was cleaning stuff out down to the basement entrance and I looked up. About ten peacocks; two adults and eight little ones were perched along my back railing there. So at that point in time I realized that populations are going to be bigger next year.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Now the Spanish word for Peacock is Pavo Real or royal turkey. And soon Ryan would come to be surrounded by these royal turkeys. And for him the experience wouldn't be very regal at all.

RYAN: Tend to buy cheap power washers.

[Machine starts up]

RAFFERTY BAKER: He regularly scours droppings from his patios walkways and roof.

RYAN: It looks like you sprung a leak on that one.

RAFFERTY BAKER: By the city of Surreys count, the Peafowl population would soon number at least a 100. This spring officials are suggesting there could be 150. The birds are feral but they stick to a pretty small area just a couple of blocks really. So with time Ryan has become intimately familiar with the habits of these birds. He knows how their brilliant plumage shimmers blue, indigo, green. How they strut around with an entitled noble air. He has learned their calls, their distinct ceaseless calls.

[Squeaks]

RYAN: They have a couple of different calls and they are calling and answering so it's not like one just going off you know. So it's even difficult to tell how many there actually are because they're just going that sort of whoa, whoa sort of sound. And it goes on for quite a while. And they also do a gobble kind of like a turkey from time to time [goggle]. The only one I 'm not confident doing is the is the scalded cat one [peacock sound]

[Squeak]

TJ: We still love peacocks. I love personally like I never had a problem with peacock beauty wise.

RAFFERTY BAKER: T.J. Shergill and his family owned three houses side by side. They're across the street from the Craigs.

TJ: has a tidy beard and he seems like a calm man. I do have a problem when they make a mass of damaging properties like scratching on the cars, attacking kids. Look at the my roof you can see what we- when we eat there this is what do we see every day. Look at the [unintelligible] the glass like it's full of their poo. We got to be that way and we clean all that right. So we're not that are rich enough like. You know what I mean.

[Squeak]

RAFFERTY BAKER: But for everyone in Ryan and T.J.'s corner complaining about the peafowl there's someone nearby who stands up for them. I meet one neighbor out for a stroll. Her name's Jody Misak. For her the birds are what make the area stand out.

JODY: I mean they're beautiful birds. And specially I was walking the dog this morning I found some long peacock feathers and gave them to a little kid and it just kind of unique for the neighborhood. I really like it.

AIZEL: Well for me. I want the peacock here. That's it. Because there have been here for so long. That's what I heard. This is their place right.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Aizel Villar figures the peafowl were here first before.

AIZEL: There's a lot of trees there and now the building houses.

RAFFERTY BAKER: The peacocks habitat is being reduced upsetting some of the local supporters who blame people not birds for the conflict in their community.

LANCE: You've got no nature in you, man. You're a sad person.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Lance Smart shouts at a TV reporter who questioned him about the peacocks from a news van. Lance is probably the Peacock's biggest defender. He's lived here for more than 30 years.

LANCE: You know the noises out bad they think they don't make noise. That's their voice. That's the way they are right. These are beautiful birds and you know we love them.

RAFFERTY BAKER: There is some debate about when the feral peacocks first appeared in Sullivan Heights. A city of Surrey document traces the origins to about 2006 when a property owner moved out of the area and left a group of the birds behind. It says the numbers have continued to grow unchecked since then. Peafowl supporters claim the flock goes back decades and the numbers have remained consistent. Regardless it's clear that by 2010 the issue had become a real problem for many.

NEWSCASTER: But neighbours are divided on what to do.

RAFFERTY BAKER: And that's when it first made the local news.

NEWSCASTER: So Bob Nixon went to find out what's up with the colourful visitor is creating a stir out in Surrey.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Today the birds are just part of the fabric of the neighborhood people have been living. TJ Shergill wife Polly and their kids Megan and Shania. They deal with the peacocks every day.

PAULIE: Megan my older daughter, in the old she's found it pretty annoying because if you can see up on our window we had a peacock always, they can see the reflection in the window as well. So it was attacking like literally attacking with the beak and then the claws and so noisy that you feel like somebody is breaking into your house. You know the peacocks going to break the window. Then what happens mummy, I said the peacocks going to come inside the house what more right.

MEGHAN: They attack and poop everywhere and we have to clean it.

RAFFERTY BAKER: You have to clean it too?

MEGHAN: No just my dad but I just don't like it because. When I ride my bike here it's in the way that I have to turn.

RAFFERTY BAKER: I guess nearly everyone has their limits.

[Music].

RAFFERTY BAKER: Many people here blame Lance Smart for the peafowl overrunning Sullivan Heights.

RYAN: He is very protective very possessive of the peacock's.

RAFFERTY BAKER: They accuse him of feeding the birds and sheltering chicks so they survive and grow up. But other neighbors told me they drop off empty drink containers at his home. So Lance can exchange them and buy feed, a sort of peacock fund.

TJ: Lance, he's kind of Tarzan guy yeah.

LANCE: I can lift more than my body weight on every muscle, your bicep, triceps.

RAFFERTY BAKER: And what do you weigh?

LANCE: About 170.

TJ: He's got some bunch of dogs in the back. Always feeding them I always ask him 'hey the way you live here looks to me like a Tarzan like living in the jungle in Surrey'.

LANCE: Yeah I have many nicknames Tarzan, Conan, Rambo.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Lance has wavy black hair that floods out of a baseball cap. He wears a hoodie with 'the champ' written on the back, underneath, a black muscle shirt that also says 'the champ'. [Squeaks] Lance lives on a property owned by a man in his late 70s named Mickey Rollins. It's about an acre and a half. The peacocks are definitely feral but if they had a headquarters this would be it. When I first set eyes on it I noticed a shed out back with cages, a little pool for animals to drink out of and an oversized bird feeder. But we'll get back to the feeder later. Mickey's property still has trees on it and overnight, that's where the peafowl go.

RYAN: Once they've chosen the tree to roost in the very hard to dissuade from that. So then the next battle would come in the morning. So they would start calling when the sun comes up.

[Squeaks]

RAFFERTY BAKER: Each day dawn brings an enthusiastic curve.

TJ: It's morning 5:00 and look at the noise. How are we going to sleep?

RAFFERTY BAKER: This is a video that T.J. emailed me. His alarm clock reads 05:11.

TJ: My kids were crying, even when I shut my window like still it was coming through. It's like really sharp. You can't even sleep with that. And that's why you I send the proper evidence, like people should look at it like you know this is what are we dealing here.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Ryan Craig's house doesn't faze Mickey's place but he used to have a big tree overlooking his yard. And that's where the birds used to roost.

RYAN: You can't sleep through that. So I'd be back down here in my bathrobe.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Ryan is standing on his patio looking at the spot where the tree used to stand. He says he would use an airsoft gun to fire plastic pellets at the roosting birds from his yard.

RYAN: So at that point they would fly out of the tree and fly down the street to the east towards Parm's hopes and then I can go back to bed.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Parm Brar lives a few houses down the street. The peacocks took a liking to the big old Douglas fir tree at the corner of his lot. In the evening the tree would fill with the colorful birds drawing looky-loos who would gawk and snap photos of the peacock and then at dawn Parm would also be treated to the song of the peafowl. [Squeaks] But for him the symphony was particularly rousing.

PAULIE: He had 40 peacocks up the street every night so I imagine palms tuition.

RAFFERTY BAKER: It sounds like he was just pushed to the limit.

PAULIE: He was.

RYAN: It takes a toll on you mentally you know to put up with that every day. I mean that's why Parm ended up doing what he did.

[Music]

RAFFERTY BAKER: This year's Peacock breeding season was well underway when Parm went rogue. He had tried desperately for a couple of years at least to get a permit to cut down the big fir tree but his applications were rejected. The city said the tree was perfectly healthy. So Parm managed to find someone who was willing to cut it down without a permit. And then on a humid Monday at the end of April, down it came.

RYAN: If a tree had been on my property and with the numbers of peacocks that we now had I own doubtingly would have done the same. Know you're at the end of your tether.

RAFFERTY BAKER: The city of Surrey immediately issued Parm a thousand dollar fine by law enforcement manager Jas Rehal also threatened further legal action.

JAS REHAL: Get it. There there's some issues there and the tree is causing problems, it doesn't give you the right to cut something down that is protected.

PARM: People are coming forward to support us like you know when this started happening people were thought 'oh he's going after the birds. He doesn't like peacocks'. That is not the case right. We never killed any peacock for babies or anything.

RYAN: Parm found himself at the center of the controversy and by early summer things were pretty bad. Here's how Jas describes it.

JAS REHAL: It's pretty intense. You know your neighbors are not talking to neighbors. Tention. You know people swearing at people. That's not good for any neighborhood.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Parm is being charged with two counts of a municipal bylaw offense his wife father and the two arborists who cut down his tree have also been charged. But he no longer has dozens of noisy birds outside his window each morning. They mostly moved down the street. Of course at this point the neighborhood is still teeming with Peafowl and the city is still getting an earful from all of the haters. In about a month after the tree incident at Parm's a complain about the huge bird feeder at Micky's yard gets attention from Surreys by law enforcement officers.

RYAN: So I call city of Surrey up again.

JAS REHAL: We received a complaint from the neighborhood that an individual was feeding peacocks.

RYAN: So then bylaws showed up at Mickey's house to inspect his little feeding area.

JAS REHAL: So our by the officer attended that the address in question.

RAFFERTY BAKER: But things got heated and in the dust up the bylaw officer activated a panic button.

POLICE OFFICER: There was an officer in distress and so our response was based on a call of an officer in distress. So multiple units did respond. A helicopter was in the area.

RAFFERTY BAKER: It turns out the helicopter belonged to one of the news networks not the police.

RYAN: Next thing you know, I think there were seven police cars an ambulance a fire truck and a helicopter.

RYAN: It was quite a scene. According to court documents a few RCMP officers responding to the panic signal arrived and claim they found Mickey aggressive and yelling. Police allege that Mickey pushed an RCMP officer and they had to take him down to restrain him and make the arrest. They brought him to jail but soon returned him home without charge. Police seized several weapons during the incident including three semi-automatic 12 gauge shotguns, a double barrel shock and a rifle and a handgun. Officers came back a couple of days later with a search warrant to seize more weapons. Documents show they left with six starter pistols, four rifles and a bunch of ammunition. No charges have been laid. The next time I was in the neighbourhood the giant bird feeder was gone. Lance acted coy about it and wouldn't say exactly what had happened.

LANCE: It's a terrible thing because there's fifty thousand bird feeders and you're picking on one. It's a joke.

RAFFERTY BAKER: I tried to speak to Mickey about all of this several times. I knocked on his door whenever I was in the neighbourhood. I tried calling phone numbers associated with him. I left my business card with Lance and asked him to put me in touch. Nothing. I did have a brief encounter with a man pulling out of Mickey's driveway and a grey pickup. Someone pointed him out as Mickey and he was driving a Dodge 3500 truck the same vehicle listed as Micky's in the court documents by.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Hi, How are you?

Mickey: I'm fine how are you?

RAFFERTY BAKER: I'm well. I'm with CBC Radio. I'm Rafferty.

Mickey: No!

RAFFERTY BAKER: No?

Mickey: No.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Are you Mickey?

Mickey: No!

RAFFERTY BAKER: No.

Mickey: I don't know the guy.

RAFFERTY BAKER: You don't know the guy. I was speaking to your

Mickey: Listen, I've had enough fucking trouble around here. I don't need any more publicity.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Alright. The dust had barely settled from the police incident when I heard from TJ again.

TJ: Hello?

RAFFERTY BAKER: Uh, TJ. It's Rafferty. I got your email that said to call you about a new problem.

TJ: um, the babies, they just came out last evening, right? So it's a new problem means so you can multiply whatever we have already here, right?

RAFFERTY BAKER: He emailed me another video. A peahen in a window well surrounded by peachicks.

They're pretty cute, but they sort of look like tiny velociraptors...running around, chirping. There's something ominous about it. And TJ who's usually pretty mellow seemed kind of wound up about the prospect of even more peacocks in Sullivan Heights.

TJ: If city's not going to step in now. So when they're going to do it? It's not only property, it's our cars getting scratched, the kids getting attacked by the birds. People going after each other like showing fingers to each other going by, everyone standing with the family outside. It's embarrassing now standing outside, right? So I told him personally like you know you need to stop all this breeding. It's getting worse now. He didn't listen, then we have to open up completely against him.

RAFFERTY BAKER: You mean Lance?

TJ: Yeah yeah. Why he need so many peacocks here in this neighbourhood? I told him you want to keep four or five peacocks that's fine. Okay right. But like having hundreds of them doesn't make any sense here in this neighbourhood.

RAFFERTY BAKER: What social order existed in Sullivan Heights was breaking down. There were jokes about killing the birds. At one point I asked Ryan what he thought when he saw a peacock on his street. His answer?

RYAN: If I drove over them would anyone notice. I also think about how much damage it would do to the vehicle.

RAFFERTY BAKER: But despite that comment, the morning pellet gun routine, and the constant stress the birds cause him, Ryan is clear, he's never killed a peacock. But Surrey isn't the only place that's been overtaken by peafowl. And in other cases...people have completely lost it.

OFFICER: This area's heavily populated with Peafowl.

RAFFERTY BAKER: This CNN piece documents the search for a peacock killer in Rolling Hills, California.

OFFICER: So the 50 birds that we have found have been killed in various ways. Either from pellets or BBs. Some of the birds were shot with arrows.

RAFFERTY BAKER: And then there's this story from Hawaii.

NEWS ANCHOR: Good evening and thanks for joining us for our one hour edition of KITV 4 Island Television news at 10:00. Well she admitted beating a peacock to death with a bat.

EARLE: I just couldn't believe we were in court let alone in a jury trial for a whole week with all of the publicity for this case. My name is Earle Partington, I'm a lawyer in Honolulu. I represented Sandra Maloney in the prosecution against her for killing a peacock.

RAFFERTY BAKER: And what was your first impression of Sandra?

EARLE: Oh very nice. She and her husband very nice people. They were just trying to live a quiet life in retirement and the peacocks were just driving her crazy. She couldn't sleep. There was a tree outside her condominium and in breeding season the peacocks would get in the tree and they sound like a woman being murdered in mating season. The ancient Chinese used them as burglar alarms.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Is any of this starting to sound familiar? Well here's where Sandra Maloney's case diverges from the situation in Surrey.

EARLE: Well she had just had it and she had a baseball bat aluminum baseball bat in her house and she went out and hit it once. She didn't hit it hard enough to kill it unfortunately, and it took a little while to die and she was a farm girl and she was going to bring it in and roast it, but some animal lovers saw her and were outraged and called police and she wasn't able to carry out her purpose

RAFFERTY BAKER: Did she share with you what those plans were? How she was going to prepare this and eat it?

EARLE: Well she was going to take it up defeather it you know take the parts out you don't want to roast and then roast it just like you would a pheasant. If you go online you could find plenty of recipes for peafowl. In fact I have had Peafowl in Asia, where it is eaten and it's quite good.

RAFFERTY BAKER: After a showy trial with several witnesses...

EARLE: The jury acquitted her in about 20 minutes. That is a very fast acquittal.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Meanwhile, back in Surrey, the city was starting to realize that it would have to play a more active role in managing the swelling neighbourhood conflict. After a few months of declaring there was nothing that could be done that the peafowl fell outside of its jurisdiction, that it was "a grey area" suddenly at the end of June, there was a plan put before city council.

RYAN: The corporate report. I don't think any of us saw coming.

MAYOR: I am going to ask counsel's indulgence to bring forward corporate report number R148, which is dealing with the peafowl relocation plan

RYAN: The council meeting starts and I see Lance over with this other woman I don't recognize.

MAYOR: I do believe I'll ask Mr. Rehal

JAS: Correct Madame Mayor, our plan is to move quickly and effectively to remove all peacocks.

MAYOR: Thank you...

RAFFERTY BAKER: Lance was with a woman named Roslyn Cassells who's running for Surrey city council. She doesn't live in the neighbourhood, but Roslyn had befriended some of the pro-peacocks folks, and she was distributing a leaflet laying out a plan for co-existence.

MAYOR: Councillor Gill.

COUNCILLOR GILL: Certainly Madame Mayor, I think that when I'm looking at the realities, the realities of noise, the realities of excrement and the realities of damage to property, I really do believe that there are neighbours that have been impacted more so than other neighbours

RYAN: And so they do a corporate report and all the councillors, they found unanimously to implement the peacock removal plan

MAYOR: Calling the question. All those in favour of the relocation action plan? Opposed. That's carried. Thank you very much. And as quickly as possible.

RYAN: At that point, the lady that was with Lance stands up and wants to speak.

ROSLYN: Madame Mayor, there's a number of people that would like to address council on this issue…

MAYOR: No it's a corporate report. I'm sorry it's not on that on the agenda. It's a corporate report.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Roslyn continued to press her point.

MAYOR: Ma'am I would ask you to respect the chair and the council. You will not speak at this meeting.

LANCE: And all the people that were voting got up place started running out.

MAYOR: please remove the citizen from the chamber.

LANCE: And then they called security because we got up and said, you know, we love the birds.

MAYOR: We'll adjourn while the citizen is removed. Thanks, Jas. Thank you.

ROSLYN: The birds have been there almost 50 years, their population is stable, if you remove some it will cause a rebound effect.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Despite the commotion, council did approve the plan to trap all of the peacocks in Sullivan Heights. More than two months later, none of the traps have been set, and neighbours aren't exactly sure how they'll work.

TJ: So it's like a cage. Like four by three?

RAFFERTY BAKER: four feet by three feet?

TJ: Yeah.

RAFFERTY BAKER: And is it meant for a different kind of animal or where are they getting the traps? What kind of traps?

TJ: They're going to deliver it. City's going to deliver it to the people's house. So either they're going to customize it for peacocks. I don't know how it's going to work.

LANCE: When you try to take the birds. You're going to injure the birds. You're going to probably kill some of the birds. You're probably kill some of the babies, which is ridiculous

RAFFERTY BAKER: Lance, of course, strongly objects to the plan. Ryan is cautiously optimistic. But TJ, he's already planning for life after the birds.

TJ: Since I heard the news, I personally bought my new barbecue up there, and so I'm happy so I'm not whenever the barbecue, I see the shit sitting the poop everywhere on the glass.

RAFFERTY BAKER: So you're really optimistic. They haven't even started yet and you've already bought a new barbecue.

TJ: Oh yeah, we're going to love. So we're going to enjoy our backyards now.

RAFFERTY BAKER: I'm just wondering if there's even just the littlest part of you that might miss them when they're gone.

TJ: Oh yeah definitely. But still it's We're going to miss a little part but the other side, It's going to be a big relief for the whole neighbourhood, what we're dealing from the last ten years.

RAFFERTY BAKER: Lance has a different vision of the future. He says he won't look too kindly on any neighbours who allow city traps on their property.

LANCE: Oh, it'll be a big battle. It's going to be a huge battle, huge battle. It's going to be super battle. This isn't over. Yeah. We love this place and those birds aren't going anywhere.

[Music]

DC: That's our documentary, A Foul Feud. It was produced by the CBC's Rafferty Baker and The Current's documentary editor, Joan Webber. We first aired it in September and you can see photos and video. It's on our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent.

[Music]

DC: Well maybe you haven't had enough peacock just yet. You can check out the website. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Singer-songwriter Sarah McLaughlin is on the show. And finally, we started today's program by talking about the US Supreme Court and how this latest confirmation process is likely to affect the US midterm elections coming up in less than a month. If you're a podcast fan, you may be familiar with "More Perfect." It delves into seminal Supreme Court decisions and tells the stories behind them, but in an entertaining way. This season the show is asking musicians to write songs inspired by the various amendments to the US Constitution. So we're going to leave you with Dolly Parton's contribution, dedicated to the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote. I'm David Commonn. Anna Maria Tremonti will be back with you tomorrow. Thanks very much for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: August 18th, 1920, women's suffrage amendment ratified.

VOICE 2: Women have been fighting for the legal right to vote since the 1840s. In 1890, the National American Women's Suffrage Association, NAWSA, was established with Susan B. Anthony, its leading force, but women have been fighting for their rights since the very beginning of time.

[Song about Suffrage movement from "More Perfect" podcast]

The Current Transcript for October 8, 2018

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

Midterm election candidates 'can't be neutral' on Kavanaugh decision, says prof

Russian trolls 'pushed their agenda' with Star Wars critiques, study suggests

Behold the Peacock: a fowl with the power to divide a B.C. neighbourhood

Oct. 8, 2018 episode transcript

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