(LifeSiteNews) Our July 18 anniversary gala in Canada was a very special event. We dearly wish many more of you could have attended this wonderful, wonderful occasion of celebration, fellowship, and just being together.
From the very moment people started to arrive we could see that it was going to be a great success for the 300 people who were there. Old friends who have not met for months or years were there and even for those who were not known it was like they were instant, long-time friends. Everyone clicked and the happy chatter never stopped except when the speakers spoke at the podium.
Our U.S. journalist Claire Chretien well captured the spirit of that evening in her July 25 article, It was an honor to meet pro-life, pro-freedom Canadians at the LifeSiteNews gala.
This was truly a family evening – for the LifeSiteNews family.
The several speakers were quite varied and all much appreciated. Not to minimize the importance of any of them, I must especially note the speech by Jim Hughes that brought down the house with his many well-delivered jokes but also his serious, very thoughtful points. His comments about his relationship with leading Canadian abortionist Henry Morgentaler conveyed a poignant lesson for all of us. And the two medical freedom doctors and one scientist unexpectedly wowed the audience with their passionate, brief speeches and expressed gratitude for our support.
Anyway, we want to share that evening with you. We MUST share it with all of our readers, Canadian and non-Canadian, because of how deeply it was appreciated by those who attended and for how much they learned that evening.
One person just told my wife today that it was the highlight of her year. Another couple mentioned to us yesterday that they felt very honored to have been there. These comments just keep coming.
We are going to publish videos and articles in the days ahead on all that took place that evening for your benefit so that you can share in the positive magic that we all experienced.
I had invited Dr. McCullough to come as he did last year in Florida, but he had a heavy patient load booked for that day. So, we tried 5 relatively local medical freedom heroes who had all lost their lisences or otherwise endured persecution and I was amazed that every single one was a fan of LifeSiteNews and moved and grateful for the invitation. I did not expect that. I barely knew any of them other than what we reported on them. Two of the five dearly wanted to come, but just could not for certain reasons.
Yet two more came to the gala without us knowing they would be there. The one that I learned about during the gala I invited to stay overnight and join the panel with the other three that was scheduled with our entire team the next morning. He gladly accepted and was a hit. We will be providing you with the video recordings and other reporting of that amazing, very enlightening session.
We begin with the video and transcript, substantially edited with additional items I planned to mention but forgot, and also needed clarifications, of my 15-minute co-founder speech that evening. I did not have a written text, just notes, so such somewhat off-the-cuff speeches tend to need quite a bit of editing to read more logically in a transcript. The transcript provides even more useful important information. For the toast at the end, I neglected to specifically mention our Canadian and US board members which I sincerely regret. They have also played a large role in the LifeSiteNews success.
Quite a few people thanked me for telling the history of LifeSite that they were not aware of. I am therefore hopeful that many of you will also appreciate it as well.
Enjoy!
The following is the edited text of the speech given by LifeSiteNews Co-Founder and President Steve Jalsevac at our Canadian gala this July.
Welcome everyone.
The most important purpose of tonight is for all of you to be together.
Enjoy being with each other as you are obviously doing.
You are in a room full of the sanest people that you have probably encountered in the past couple of years, and you know we really need that because the last three years or more have been really difficult. I said the same thing last year at the Naples, Florida gala, but in many ways the insanity is even worse at this time.
The folks that are here are all extraordinary. When I was wandering around the room, meeting one person after another with all of them stopping me, I thought, whoa, this is incredible, and John-Henry was experiencing the same thing.
Toronto is where LifeSiteNews all began
Having this gala here is the most natural place to celebrate almost 26 years of LifeSiteNews. We also celebrated it in Florida last year, and it was also a wonderful event, but this is where it all first began in 1997 nearby in Toronto, in the humble offices of Campaign Life Coalition, Canada’s national pro-life organization, otherwise known as CLC.
That’s where LifeSiteNews was established to be an internet news service to advance the goals and work of CLC and all the pro-life, pro-family organizations in the world. That was because there was a serious need for our own media – and still is even more. We were getting terrible reporting by all the mainstream media and other media in Canada and elsewhere. Truth was mostly unavailable on our issues.
But then CLC president Jim Hughes started the Interim newspaper 40 years ago, the first CLC effort to get media fairness, and that’s still going. The current editor, Paul Tuns, is here tonight. Jim was the first editor of that newspaper. Then, 15 years after the Interim began publishing, we started LifeSiteNews which had a much greater potential and far greater reach. It was extraordinary.
I was not pro-life and supported depopulation
Before all that began, though, I was a pro-abortion person, believed in population control and was a dues-paying member of Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s Zero Population Growth organization. Now you obviously know that because of the 8 children and 27 grandchildren that my wife Bonnie and I have. Pretty ironic, isn’t it? I just trusted what the media, my professors and others told me. In reality, I knew nothing about these issues.
By the way, I am a behind-the-scenes person and not used to making speeches, just so you know. I have lots of notes on paper here for security in making this speech.
And then in 1977, I had a conversion back to my Catholic faith. A few months later I went into a Toronto Right to Life booth at the Canadian National Exhibition. They used to allow those things at that time.
I was instantly converted to pro-life by photos of the unborn and aborted children that I saw there. I just went, whoa! I had no idea. I was angry that I was lied to. That completely changed my life and my wife’s life as well, although she was never pro-abortion or pro-population control like me, but we both became strongly pro-life which naturally went along with our faith conversion.
2 years later, that’s 43 years ago, Fr. Ted Colleton encouraged me to get involved in Campaign Life Coalition. While owning and running a large paint and wallpaper franchise, I started to receive CLC newsletters and donating to them. After 6 months I was very upset with Jim Hughes for publishing comments by the great Canadian pro-life hero Joe Borowski because he said something about the bishops not doing their part to stop abortion. The newly converted Catholic in me thought that was inappropriate and disrespectful. My wife also thought it was awful. You don’t criticize bishops like that.
It took about 2 years for me to wake up to how right Jim was and that the situation was actually much worse than what he related. And I have been writing stories about what the bishops are not doing and sadly wrongly doing ever since. But also a lot of stories on the good actions and statements of faithful bishops to support them.
Jim was actually being very charitable and gentle with us and only told us 1 percent of what he knew about that and many other things. He knew he had to gradually bring us along to an understanding of what CLC was having to deal with. I have learned to trust him on many other things since then. Too many times I have ignored his advice on situations and had to repeatedly relearn that he has exceptional discernment and really knows what he is talking about.
The huge role of CLC and Jim Hughes
Jim is an incredibly well-informed person. He has an astonishing gift of memory. I don’t know anyone with a memory like he has. He can tell you about something that happened about 45 years ago and at what time and what location and probably what everyone was wearing at the time.
I can’t remember last week. He also has a personality that leads to many prominent, highly influential persons trusting him and willing to work with him and telling him all kinds of very confidential things.
Because of our memory differences, Jim would often use me to debrief on very important confidential information from conversations with bishops, cardinals, members of parliament, government ministers, undercover police officers and so on. These were often things they literally did not tell anyone else, and Jim would tell this to me so that he would remember it, and he knew it was safe to tell me because I would usually not remember any of it.
So, I heavily volunteered for CLC starting around 1982 (41 years ago), later sold my business, and eventually started working full-time for Campaign Life Coalition and have never looked back since. LifeSiteNews just became an extension of that CLC work.
In many ways, Jim and Campaign Life Coalition are the real founders of LifeSiteNews. For the first ten years, that’s’ where LifeSiteNews was from. John-Henry and I were just employees there and LifeSite was a natural outcome of what we were doing for CLC. Also, for 15 years prior to and some years after starting LifeSiteNews I was one of Jim’s main lieutenants, along with Mary-Ellen Douglas and a few others.
John-Henry explained how he started doing a small amount of news reporting that led to the LifeSiteNews concept and we all saw that this was another very promising way of creating a news media for the pro-life, pro-family movement in the world.
We tried to find a name for this website. Jim gave me the job of developing the Campaign Life Coalition website, then the Interim website, and then I developed what became the LifeSite website. But it wasn’t called that. We did not know what to call it. I tried to find a name and one after another that I thought was good was not available, and so I said, ok, for now we’ll call it LifeSite. That was available. Yea, for now, 26 years later, it’s still, “for now.” We became such a prominent news service that LifeSiteNews was also obtained and seemed more appropriate and was a more credible, attractive name to use. We were above all a news service and the new name more clearly reflected that.
So, Jim Hughes made sure that we had all of our needs met to keep developing and improving this news media tool. He saw how valuable it would be to CLC but also to the international pro-life world and he and we were right, as John-Henry told you. It has been incredible.
LifeSiteNews encouraged to go out on its own
Gradually the LifeSite CLC project consumed most of our time and eventually a lot of CLC’s financial resources. So, we couldn’t keep doing it through CLC.
Jim encouraged us to go out and incorporate as a separate organization and with his blessing and lots of help from CLC, including using their large, national mailing list, he trusted that we would continue with this mission and make it grow a lot bigger. He was right. Jim was very astute on those kinds of predictions. He also suggested and nurtured several other organizations and projects that are still continuing to this day.
Jim Hughes has been a board member of both the US and Canadian LifeSiteNews divisions from the time they were later incorporated to today.
A very enthusiastic US LifeSiteNews fan and later wonderful, past U.S. board member, Terry Kopp, encouraged and completely paid for our U.S. incorporation, thereby playing a large role in our massive U.S. readership. Much later, newer Canadian board member, Alex Banga, through his large donations and special encouragement, got our monthly sustainers program really going. U.S. board member member and tech entrepreneur, Dominic Ismert, generously donated a crowdfunding program that later, after further, substantial development by our programming team, became our now more sophisticated and successful LifeFunder program.
John-Henry and I both stopped being on the CLC payroll in 2009 since LifeSite no longer needed to be dependent on CLC for funding and we were being quite successful in raising more than enough funds to cover all LifeSiteNews expenses.
LifeSite followed CLC example
We followed many of the same ways that CLC was doing things and getting down to the real source of the issues we were reporting on which most people didn’t know about.
There was an invaluable cooperative spirit, letting those with talents do what they were inspired to do to advance the overall CLC mission. Jim and CLC gave us quite free reign.
It wasn’t just us doing LifeSite. There were other people in the CLC office all doing different things. There were amazing people in CLC. A lot of them from different countries or backgrounds that came to CLC in Toronto. They were incredible people. Very memorable people, and I miss them dearly.
Although we had a lot of freedom, we were never allowed to compromise on principles – ever. And that’s unusual. And from our beginning and even today, CLC still does all of our administrative and bookkeeping tasks for the CLC Canadian branch of LifeSiteNews, and we still closely consult with them on many Canadian pro-life, political and other issues.
And when we were with them, they had Catholic priests and non-Catholic clergy working together on CLC’s mission.
CLC developed a unique approach to revealing the international forces and organizations behind the anti-life, anti-family and anti-God agenda. They were behind all the symptoms that the pro-life movement has been fighting. This has been a big thing that we have been revealing to the whole pro-life movement and the world. Most people had not a clue about this, and we didn’t originally. But we learned much of it from lobbying at the United Nations.
CLC got involved in the United Nations with a tiny number of other pro-life groups in response to an appeal from Pope John-Paul II that was passed on to Jim Hughes by a secretary of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. Jim decided we had to do this and stop the NGOs from pushing their anti-life agenda onto the UN.
International “big picture” focus
So, our people went out there and did this lobbying and discovered all kinds of things that we were previously not aware of. And we also discovered a secret, recently declassified, Henry Kissinger document for President Nixon called NSSM 200, that committed the US government and all of its agencies, to population control in quite a few of the most heavily populated nations in order to protect the economic dominance of the United States. CLC’s Gilles Grondin, a former Canadian government diplomat, obtained it for us.
That was official, but secret United States policy for decades and the American people had no idea. And it included using the military.
So, we were trying to help everybody understand this “big picture” of who the real enemy was that we were all fighting, or rather fighting us.
And CLC also had a very solid non-compromising Catholic/Christian perspective while also presenting for people of all or no faiths so as to draw everyone into the battle to defend human life. It emphasized starting every meeting with a prayer, having a daily, all-staff prayer time and basing all of its decisions on a traditional Catholic/Christian perspective without being an overtly religious organization.
But for the many Catholics in the organization, we also made sure there was always a daily Mass available for them whenever we had special day-long or multi-day meetings. That spiritual sustainment was necessary to continue this difficult work. We carried on with all of that in LifeSiteNews.
We learned that depopulation was the big tool of evil to destroy the inherent worth of every human and destroy God’s greatest creation which was not Mother Earth. It was human beings made in God’s image and likeness.
My son Paul produced a document called The Inherent Racism of Population Control. That was a real eye opener. It became by far our most downloaded document of all time. People learned from that document that this has been going on for over a century. What we are fighting now has been going on for a long time.
Charter of Rights betrayal
There was also the Trudeau Charter of Rights and Freedoms and that was another major issue. There was a petition of one million signatures and later on there was a one million postcard campaign involving all the educational groups in Canada. We were involved in heavily promoting that with them, trying to ensure that the unborn would be protected in the new Charter which had not yet been finalized and passed.
Just prior to it being officially decided what would happen, and this is another reason why we needed our own news media, Jim got a call from, I think it was Claire Hoy of the Toronto Sun newspaper. He told Jim that Cardinal Carter had made a deal with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and also with Bill Davis, the Progressive Conservative Premiere of Ontario, to grant full funding for the Catholic schools of Ontario if he would drop his opposition to the Charter not including protection for the unborn.
Trudeau promised Carter that nothing in the Charter could be used to legalize abortion, which was a lie. We were extremely close to actually getting that protection in the Charter. It seemed almost certain because of the massive, many months long national lobbying campaign. It was going to happen that day, or the next day. Without consulting with anybody, Carter made that deal with Trudeau. He pulled the rug from right from under the heroic efforts of a million or more Canadians who had worked very hard for many months to get the unborn protected in the Charter.
It was a great betrayal.
I saw Jim Hughes in tears that one and only time I have worked with him for many years. He was in tears because he knew the implications of it. He understood. Many of us didn’t, but he did. So, the many Catholic Liberal Party MPs were then were hugely relieved and felt freed to vote for the charter and of course the unborn were not included. That was an historic Canadian disaster that eventually led to the killing of millions of tiny Canadians and the emotional and other harming of their mothers.
We carried on regardless and have had enormous successes.
So, we owe a lot to Campaign Life Coalition. We grew a lot.
John-Henry talked about the El Salvador story and the New York Times. That was in 2006. There were only 7 of us in total then and yet we made a huge, international impact at the time with that story that led to the Times having to withdraw and apologize for a major, flawed report. We now have 70 staff. The truth itself is very powerful.
Surge in growth began in 2015
2015 is when we really started to get high page views, and we owe my son John who was with us for quite a few years for much of that. He played a huge role in improving the editorial standards, management and other internal policies and website features that especially started us on our historic growth period. He is a top Christendom College grad and one of the best writers we have ever had.
The news cycle was also a big factor in our growth. Just incredible, unbelievable things started happening that most other media would not touch or would not report in the honest way we did. That resulted in huge spikes in readership.
By the way, John moved on a few years ago and is in the very last stage of completing a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto. He is now the Headmaster of the Chesterton Academy of Our Lady of the Wayside in Peterborough which is undergoing major new developments under his direction.
On Feb. 11, 2015 LifeSiteNews published an article by John, Even the co-stars think ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ is awful (and even a bit like Hitler) that received 3 million page views – by far and away the largest total page views of any article we had published up to then. We were astonished.
The real statistics I am mentioning here were probably actually about 20-30 percent greater because we later found out that Google was underreporting our page views by that amount and was no longer reliable. It took us a few years to figure that out.
On May 7, 2015, The birth control pill is killing women but no one is warning them of the risks received 2.1 million views. That was written by Ben Johnson, an Orthodox priest who was with us, and an amazing writer who pumped out more articles per day not needing editing than anyone I have ever seen.
On Feb. 4, 2016, He performed 1200 abortions. In viral new video he wants you to see what abortion is, an article about a video by now pro-life, former abortionist Dr. Levatino, received 2-million-page views
We were on a roll.
Then on May 11, 2018 The United Nations wants a one world government in less than 12 years, a reprint from American Thinker, received 848,500 page views, which was still very substantial for a reprint.
Now we were really getting into the giant global connections to our core issues that have dominated the news ever since.
Covid readership explosion
And directly related to that was the COVID issue. We really got into reporting the truth about COVID before most others did and from then on, because of that, our statistics skyrocketed. It was extraordinary how much those articles were read because of what we were exposing and because it was deeply affecting everyone. It took a lot of guts to do because we got a lot of flak for publishing those articles, even from many of our own people. You know, they would say, “that can’t be true.” But we had all the facts.
So, we published thousands of articles on COVID and all the heroes who were doing incredible work on it.
LifeSiteNews provided a lifeline and is still doing it on this issue that has not gone away. We probably saved a lot of lives, and we helped so many people understand what they could do to prevent infection, how to treat infection, not succumb to all the fear and emphasized the need to listen to the honest physicians and scientists and resist the fear propaganda.
We reported on the actions and statements of hundreds and thousands of the most amazing and courageous medical and scientific professionals. We also helped them to understand the big picture of the anti-life, anti-human globalist agenda. It was extraordinary.
April 24, 2020 I wrote an article, Two California doctors may start revolution with calm questioning of extreme measures. It was one of the first articles to be published on their video press conference on the internet. The video went wildly viral and I embedded it into my article.
Unfortunately, there was a dispute among staff and readers about their statistical analysis. The article was taken down after several hours because of the complaints but restored a few weeks later on LifeSite after many determined the criticism was minor compared to the incredible value of what they exposed about the COVID lies. We show it received 1.3 million page views, but had I left it on the site it would almost certainly have been our top story of all time. We all owe a lot of gratitude to those two doctors for courageously beginning what did turn out to be a revolution of questioning the COVID polices.
On April 17, 2020 I wrote, Are globalists using Coronavirus as battering ram to destroy, remake world order? That has probably had about 2 million total page views by now. And my thesis in the article has proven to be correct.
On April 7, 2021 we published “EXCLUSIVE – Former Pfizer VP: ‘Your government is lying to you in a way that could lead to your death’ by Patrick Delaney, quoting the heroic Pfizer VP scientist Michael Yeadon. That received an astonishing 7 million, all-time record views.
By the way, Michael Yeadon was one of the first, along with Dr. Zelenko, to publicly state that the data they saw indicated that this all had to involve a global depopulation program. Nothing else made sense to them. It has taken a long time, but many medical freedom doctors and scientists have also started to accept it. That is largely what it has been about all along. And that’s why we as a pro-life organization are so much into this.
Yeadon and Zelenko, when they started publicly saying this were crucified for such an allegedly extreme view, but they persisted and later many others, such as Dr. Robert Malone, came to the same conclusion, as I have said.
And on May 19, 2021 we published our still top story of all time by Celeste McGovern on LifeSitenews, Nobel Prize winner: Mass COVID vaccination an ‘unacceptable mistake’ – about comments by the now sadly deceased French scientist Luc Montagnier, that has received over 7 million views.
COVID has been a gigantic issue for us at LifeSiteNews but also for all of you in your lives and for our nation and the world. And it ties into everything else that we report on. It has been all-pervasive and revolutionary.
A few of us saw that from the very beginning. There were a lot of signs that something very big, historic and evil was happening and we had a serious obligation to report the minimally available truth on all things related to it, no matter the consequences. It truly has been about life, family, faith and freedom.
Anyway, our stats rose to over 100 million page views for a few years in a row until we started to get censored. It was just incredible.
Many have been responsible for success
I asked for a list of who worked for us over the years and found out that over 300 people have worked for LifeSiteNews over the past 26 years. I read down the list and see all those names and I go, wow. I mean we have 70 now but it’s kind of reeling to think of the memories I’ve had of all those very, very good people that have worked with us and given so much of themselves.
So, I want you to join me in making a toast. I will first list off the ones the toast is meant for and then there will be a toast for all the good work of all of these people and how they have contributed to the success of the enormous and wonderful LifeSite mission.
The first one is Campaign Life Coalition and Jim Hughes, next is the entire LifeSiteNews team, present and past, and our board members, then there are all of you supporters without which we could never have done any of this. Also, the people who organized the event this evening – Ann Lyke and her team – and lastly, the medical freedom doctors and many other heroes who have worked with them, and we have three of them here tonight, but there are also many more who we have reported on.
So, to all of these wonderful people, I make a toast and I ask you to join me. Cheers!
And finally, let us celebrate and be very thankful to God for all that LifeSite has amazingly been able to achieve and that it still exists today despite the enormous obstacles that have thrown in our way. We have much to be grateful for.
Thank you and God bless you all.