This episode is a reckoning.

In a raw, unflinching conversation, the ladies of North American Angst sit down with Lisa Bildy, a Canadian constitutional lawyer and Executive Director of the Free Speech Union Canada, to confront the slow erosion of free expression across professional life in Canada. What begins as her personal story — a trial lawyer turned homeschooling mother turned reluctant dissident — unfolds into a chilling map of how ideological enforcement has crept into law societies, professional regulators, universities, healthcare, education, and beyond.

Lisa walks us through the landmark battles she’s fought: from helping dismantle compelled DEI oaths within the legal profession, to defending nurse and women’s rights advocate Amy Hamm against a 22-day tribunal for gender-critical speech expressed entirely outside her workplace. Again and again, we hear the same pattern: regulators asserting authority over private speech, conscience, and belief — backed by human rights frameworks that now punish dissent rather than protect liberty.

This episode is not despair — it’s a warning and a call to arms. A reminder that history moves in cycles, that silence is never neutral, and that freedom only survives when ordinary people are willing to stand visibly, imperfectly, and together.

Lisa is not a commentator. She is a front-line defender.

She has:

• Successfully helped dismantle compelled ideological pledges within Canada’s legal profession

• Defended professionals targeted by regulators for lawful, off-duty speech

• Fought precedent-setting cases involving gender-critical beliefs, free expression, and conscience rights

• Helped launch Free Speech Union Canada, part of an international network pushing back against global speech suppression

Her authority comes not from theory, but from consequence. She knows what it costs — professionally, socially, emotionally — to refuse ideological compliance. And she shows up anyway.

When Lisa says, “The debate didn’t end — it never began,” she isn’t speculating. She’s describing the machinery she’s seen from the inside.

This episode makes one thing unmistakably clear:

Freedom does not disappear overnight.
It disappears case by case, silence by silence, professional by professional.

• 
  
• Follow and connect with Lisa on X — support the work of Free Speech Union Canada and those defending civil liberties on the ground.
• Follow caWsbar's Charter Challenge⁠ — the biggest case on the books in Canada.
• Follow Carol and Peeja, North American Angst Hosts, on X

• The fire is lit. Your voice belongs here.

  Join The Red Tent Collective; let's light up the world.

On this Red Tent Storyteller episode, we sit down with willow-weaver, grief-walker, and audio alchemist Hazel Moon Audio to trace the winding path from London suburbs to wild Hebridean shores — and from women’s refuge work to bringing other women’s stories to life in her own voice. Hazel shares how a girl who “didn’t fit” in a sporty family grew into a woman who chose books, music, radical feminism, and eventually a law conversion course and Women’s Aid work… only to walk away from the city and start again on a remote island where she had to learn to cut peat, build stone walls, grow food, and talk to neighbours instead of avoiding eye contact on the street.

From there, we follow her into the craft: the moment a friend dragged her to a basketry course, the older woman with arthritis who handed her the torch and said, “Of course you’re good enough to teach,” and the years of planting willow, making baskets, and slowly becoming the village basketmaker. Hazel speaks honestly about the years of caregiving for her partner Carly, and the way grief stripped all the colour out of the world — even the beauty of the island — and how reading aloud to Carly at night became the quiet, unseen apprenticeship for what would come next.

That “next” was Hazel Moon Audio: an unexpected nudge in a Dyke Voices Twitter space, months of learning ACX, microphones, mastering, and the sheer stamina of narrating whole lives into a microphone. Hazel walks us through the practical and emotional labour of audiobook narration — from auditioning for projects like Ray, The Well of Loneliness, The Candlemaker’s Woman, and feminist titles like Girls Matter and The Grumpy Guide to Radical Feminism — to setting boundaries around what she will and won’t read, mentoring other women who want to try it, and refusing to let AI erase the human warmth and history in a woman’s voice. This is an episode about craft, courage, and starting a new life chapter when the world has already taken more than its share.Hazel Moon is not just “a nice voice.” She’s a woman who has lived several lives and stitches them all into the way she tells a story.

Hazel’s authority doesn’t come from industry hype — it comes from lived experience, craftsmanship, political clarity, and a voice that has literally read women to sleep and back into life.If you want more conversations like this — women telling the whole truth about their lives, work, grief, and craft — follow us on X and join Ember for free, The Red Tent Collective’s flame of ongoing broadcasts.Follow Hazel Moon Audio on X

Today, we’re stepping into a conversation every one of us has brushed up against—some of us bruised, some of us bitten, some of us still crawling back from the dark. We’re talking about fear… the real kind. The kind that lives under the ribs. The kind that swallows children whole and follows adults into every room.

Our guest today—writer, illustrator, and truth-teller Cynthia Breheny—has written a book that does what so many others fail to do. Please, Don’t Feed the Fears doesn’t teach children to run from fear, suppress it, medicate it, or pretend it doesn’t exist. Instead, Cynthia walks us straight into Fear’s belly and shows us the way out.

This episode is a lighthouse for anyone who has ever felt stuck, small, or alone.
It’s a hand reaching back through the dark saying:
“Come on. You can do this. I’ve been here too.”

Stay with us.Take a breath. Let’s open the door.

Fear has teeth. It can freeze you mid-step, swallow you whole, and convince you that you will never crawl back into the light again. But in this Scarlet Frequency episode, author and illustrator Cynthia Breheny turns toward that monster with an unexpected truth:
Fear isn’t the enemy. Misunderstanding it is.

Reading her Quill essay aloud, Cynthia brings listeners deep inside the emotional ecosystem behind her children’s book, Please, Don’t Feed the Fears—a gentle, whimsical guide for anyone (child or adult) who has ever felt swallowed by their own worry. Instead of preaching avoidance or “fighting your demons,” she offers something far more radical: integration. Listening. Understanding. Compassion for your own biology.

Cynthia pulls back the curtain on her own story—growing up in a house where Fear ruled everything, where bravery was discouraged, and where trust was treated like a liability. When no one came to help, she became her own guide. Over years of therapy, study, panic attacks, and spiritual searching, she discovered what no self-help book had ever told her:

Fear is not an illness. Fear is not a curse.
Fear is a part of you, and it can be befriended.

This episode is for every child who trembled alone in the dark.

For every adult still carrying the echoes of those rooms.

For every parent desperate to help a child who hides inside their own mind.

Follow Cynthia on X

Don't Feed the Fears, available on Lulu

When you’re ready for more women’s truth spoken in full color—more fire, more courage, more clarity—join Ember, Red Tent Collective’s broadcast flame.
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