The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 525. The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant
Episode Date: February 27, 2025Support Tommy Robinson’s Give Send Go: https://www.givesendgo.com/Tommy-Robinsons-children Jordan Peterson sits down with human rights activist, political writer, and founder of Rebel News, Ezra Le...vant. They discuss Ezra’s first hand experience with the World Economic Forum, the antithetical turn toward authoritarianism in the United Kingdom, and Tommy Robinson’s ongoing and wrongful imprisonment. #FreeTommyRobinson Ezra Levant is a Canadian human rights activist, political writer, and father, Ezra Levant is the host of the Ezra Levant show and founder of Rebel News – the largest online independent news network in Canada. Ezra’s great grandfather emigrated to Canada in 1903 from Russia, establishing a homestead near Drumheller, Alberta. Ezra spent his early life growing up in a suburb of Calgary, where he attended a Jewish day school before making the switch to public school. This episode was filmed on February 8th, 2025. | Links | For Ezra Levant: On X https://x.com/ezralevant?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Website https://ezralevant.com/?_sm_vck=6Dk0T7k5R2NWQTwwtTqs55WtJ754DTN27JZwMqFF2tff7QM4tJDs Rebel News on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@RebelNewsOnline Rebel News website https://www.rebelnews.com/
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There's a battle between Tommy Robinson and the government of the United Kingdom over what is true.
They've got Tommy in isolation. That's their strategy. Do you know how he's doing?
He's deteriorating. That's another thing about being in jail, I've learned from Tommy Robinson,
is you are at the mercy of these guards. How would you describe the World Economic Forum?
When I go to the UK, I see what our future will be five years down the road if we don't change boards.
Let me tell you what's terrifying about that. Hello, everybody.
I'm sitting here in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada today, and my guest is Ezra Levant. And Ezra Levant is the perpetrator of Rebel News, which was an early adopter of social
media technology on the news front, one of Canada's earliest adopters, and really one
of the earliest adopters in the world.
And he's been rabble-rousing for like a good, depends on how you count it, about 10 to 15
years.
And we first came to each other's attention when I was participating in a free speech debacle
at the University of Toronto just after my comments about Canada's infamous Bill C-16.
My well-reasoned comments, I might add, came to wide public attention and caused
a furor that never ended.
And Rebel News backed me in that enterprise and helped publicize what was happening and
supported my research financially for a year or so at the University of Toronto when the
federal government decided that I wasn't worth supporting anymore, despite my stellar research background and unbroken history of previous funding.
Anyways, I got a chance to talk to Ezra and so we did a bit of walking down memory lane
talking about, well, the strange situation that obtains in Canada, not least with regard
to the new likely liberal leader, Mark Carney.
We talked about the WEF
and their machinations. We talked a fair bit about Tommy Robinson, a political prisoner in the UK.
I did two interviews with him and Ezra worked. Tommy Robinson was a journalist working for Rebel
News for a good while. And we talked a lot about Tommy, who's in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in the UK for a civil crime,
which was distributing a film called Silenced, which is probably the most well-watched documentary that the UK has ever produced.
So that gag order didn't work very well.
We talked a fair bit about Australia, and we talked about the political situation in Canada and the UK.
We talked about the truck convoy and about the transformation of the news media from the corrupt government-funded legacy media in Canada,
say, exemplified by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC, and the rise of the new media, apart from wandering down
memory lane. And so, oh, I should mention something too. Even though Ezra was too shy to mention it
during the podcast, which is not something that you'd normally say about Ezra Levant,
too shy. He's got a new book coming out too, which is called Deal of the Century,
He's got a new book coming out too, which is called Deal of the Century, the America First Plan for Canada's oil sands.
And so, well, I'll keep an eye out for that because there's a lot of oil in the oil sands
and there's every reason to use it, despite the myriad of reasons that we're force-fed
about not using it.
And so, you know, Ezra is a battler for the Alberta economy and for Western energy independence
and the utility of being grateful, let's say, for the fossil fuel industry that stops us
from freezing to death.
In Winnipeg, for example, in the middle of the winter when it's minus 30 and everyone's
warm and so that's deal of the century, the America First Plan for Canada's oil sands.
In any case, join me today for my discussion with Ezra Levant, head of Rebel News.
They also, by the way, did a lot to publicize the truckers convoy.
Looking forward to it.
So we have lots to talk about today.
We can talk about our mutual friend, Tommy Robinson, and whatever the hell is going on in the UK.
We can talk about the WF, because I know you've sent journalists there and been there yourself.
We can talk about the stunningly dismal state of the political situation in Canada.
But I think I want to start with two other things.
I want to remember how we met, and I want to talk to you about what's happened with
Rebel News since then.
So I want to hear how you think we met and what happened when we first began our association.
I saw a courageous professor, and those words don't go together very often, standing outside
the University of Toronto making the case for freedom of speech while people tried to
shout him down.
And in fact, Antifa types brought loudspeakers to blast white noise.
And we had our cameras there and we said, who is this?
And doesn't he know that he's going to get squashed?
Doesn't he know to bend the knee?
And this was almost 10 years ago.
It was 2016.
Yeah.
And we were citizen journalists just planting our legs.
Rebel News was only born in 2015.
Yeah.
Lawrence Southern was there.
That's right.
And that was before the great demonetization
and cancellation of politically incorrect videos.
It was the golden age for YouTubers.
So things that were raw and interesting and real
just zoomed on that channel.
That all came to an end in early 2017 because all this
bubbling frothing conversation helped put Donald Trump in the White House in
2016 and Silicon Valley woke up and said we did that and so you saw Facebook and
YouTube and Google learn about community guidelines and throttling and boosting something that has really been
going on to this day.
Well, it's still going on, except it's increasingly invisible.
We have no idea how these giant corporations, Google in particular, manipulate behind the
scenes to ensure that the right slant is brought to bear not only on the content, but on the
viewership and the dissemination, which is even YouTube for example took us like about six months to figure this
out.
My YouTube channel, this was a couple of years ago, maybe even last year, our numbers were
slipping but my subscriber rate was continuing to go up and at a good rate.
Like I grew about a hundred thousand subscribers a month, which is quite a few.
And we found that some flunky, maybe, who knows why or on whose orders, scrubbed the
name Peterson from the autofill in the search bar. So if you typed in P-E-T, it didn't fill.
Didn't fill for Michaela, my daughter, because she has a podcast, but for any Petersons,
but it definitely didn't fill for me.
And so that was a hard thing to ferret out, you know, it was a subtle manipulation of
the distribution of the videos, because a lot of the way that people find new videos
is by autofill.
So that's just one example among many. A Google insider a few years back
showed me some internal chats that they had in their company.
There were more people at Google watching and talking
and commenting and criticizing Rebel News
than who worked for Rebel News.
And we're a fraction of your size.
So anything to touch your discoverability would be done, I wouldn't say a junior flunky,
you're being too kind. And we know that this goes straight to the top. Mark Zuckerberg pretty much
confessed to that a few weeks ago when he said he was going to stop doing that.
We know from some lawsuits in the US, especially during the pandemic. From the White House to the FBI to the CIA,
there was so many different government organizations,
including to do with health, that were plugged right in
to the backend of social media,
trying to throw out people even like RFK Junior.
Yeah, oh yeah, definitely.
And if you said anything that was contrarian
about the pandemic, even things that are now accepted, like the likelihood that it came from the Wuhan Virology Center, Research Center, you would be
demonetized, so you wouldn't be able to sell ads, you would be throttled in various ways,
you would be suspended. It happened to us. We were growing at 8% per month. Not quite the stats that
you described, but back in 2015, 2016, we were
the largest YouTube news service in Canada. More than Global News, more than CTV, those
are massive billion dollar companies. We were bigger. And then, bam, in January 2017, we
were cut by 85%. And then they later just took it all down to zero. We still have about 1.7 million YouTube subscribers and I love them and will always give them
content.
But we're not allowed to put a single ad towards them or get what's called a super chat.
And we love Rumble, which is a free speech alternative.
But really Elon Musk has not only saved free speech, but I think through that saved America.
How are you guys doing on X?
Well, I mean, I love it.
It doesn't make a lot of money for us.
But we have that kind of growth and engagement that we used to have back in the day at YouTube.
And I hope Rumble continues to grow.
Those guys have free speech on their mind, and they've got some big support.
They're doing interesting deals, not just with social media,
but cloud services.
And I don't know, there's a lot of ways that censorship works.
But I think the government has to get involved with rooting.
Here's an example.
Elon Musk and his Doge, they're going through
and finding all these cases where the government has been paying for raising journalists.
Well, I think in Canada, if I've got this right, maybe this is misinformation. So for
everybody watching and listening, there's your misinformation warning for the day. I
came across information from a variety of sources suggesting that about 25%
of the salary of the typical legacy media journalist in Canada is essentially subsidized
by the government. I think it's actually closer to 30 and that's just through one particular program
and 99% of Canadian journalists are on that program.
The CBC itself, the state broadcaster is larger
than all other media combined,
all other news media combined.
Yeah, but Ezra, they do get hundreds of views
on their YouTube postings, hundreds.
But that's the paying for a certain message.
What is fascinating and terrifying is to see how
US government and now Canadian government money and UK funds so-called fact checkers. For example,
news. Fact checkers. I don't know if you've ever heard of a news guard. Huge contracts with the US
Air Force for some reason. And they review any website and give it a rating, and that
rating is plugged into browsers, and it basically says this is safe and this is dangerous.
And it's purely political. I mean, they rate us every year. It's a BS exercise.
They ask us questions about Trump. they ask us questions about transgenderism,
and they ask us questions about vaccines. You can see they're pushing a very particular message
track. And they censor us for our opinions, not our facts. These things are all funded by the
government. Yeah, well, the thing is, if it was an easy thing to separate out opinion from fact,
the world would be a much less complex place. You know, today's fact is tomorrow's opinion and today's opinion is tomorrow's fact.
And partly we're exchanging information all the time to distinguish between the two,
but it's not like it's easy a priori.
And so many preposterous things have turned out to be true.
You know, I think the thing that shocked me most, two things that I discovered in the last 10 years,
I suppose, were kind of at the top of the list of shocking realities.
And one was that the public education system in North America, and in Europe, and in Japan,
for that matter, was literally created by fascist industrialists in the late 1800s to
make unthinking workers available for use in factories.
They based the public education system on the Prussian military model and the Prussians
had decided they were going to train rural people to be soldiers.
And the last thing they wanted them to do was think.
And so that's like, I just don't even know what to do with a piece of information like
that.
But nothing's changed in a hundred.
Well, that's why it's rows of desks and there's factory bells.
And you know, there was some reason for it.
Rural people were pouring into the cities, their kids were very likely to work in factories.
You know, they had to learn to work by the bell.
But the insistence that the products be unthinking, you know, because otherwise they wouldn't
be suitable factory workers.
First of all, that's a stupid otherwise they wouldn't be suitable factory workers.
First of all, that's a stupid theory because you actually want your factory workers to
think so they can see what's wrong on the line and help you work to continuously improve
your industrial processes.
The Japanese figured that out.
So it was a stupid theory to begin with, but it's also dehumanizing and, you know, that's
still the ethos of the public school system.
So that's appalling. And then the next bit of impossible conspiratorial reality
that I uncovered was not that I uncovered it globally.
I don't mean that.
But for my own edification was that the food pyramid
was formulated by the US Department of Agriculture.
And it was a marketing ploy.
And they knew that it was going to cause an epidemic
of obesity and diabetes,
because their own experts told them that.
It's like...
And those are, I don't even think those are particularly
acute crises.
Those are sort of long-standing problems
that it's not, oh my God, we've got to snuff this idea out
before this election, like the Hunter Biden
Oh, yeah, that's a dreadful story. So what you're talking about are big swaths of ideas
Right, and then there's the crisis ideas like the ones you which are so throttled around a lot of Biden laptop story
That's another one too. I talked to Miranda Devine. She broke that story for the New York Post
I've had her on as a guest twice and And that's another story that's just completely unbelievable.
I mean, Hunter Biden dropped three laptops off.
Not one, three.
Now, the first question you might ask yourself is, how do you water soak three laptops?
Right?
One, okay, you dropped it in the pool during your cocaine-fueled misery binge.
But three?
And he did that a week before his father announced his run for presidency and like a Freudian
would sniff around that for about 15 years and rightly so.
And then there was a lot of damning material on there, which you think he might have thought
about a little bit unless he was out for revenge, let's say.
And then, well, then the story broke and then just a calamitous tsunami of absolute lies.
They knocked the New York Post off of Twitter and that's the oldest standing newspaper in
North America.
Right?
I think it was Hunter Hamilton.
Yeah, it's a bit tabloid-y and nonetheless, it does some very good work and certainly
the work it did on the 100 Biden laptop story was good.
And then they called it Russian disinformation.
And this is like weeks before the election.
I truly believe that that was enough to throw the election.
Now it turned out maybe that it was worse for the progressives that Trump had four
years to think in, in, uh, what would you call exile?
You know, cause here he's back and he's been thinking for quite a while, but.
And then all those intelligence agents signed that document that said it was it had all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation. Such a funny phrase.
That's for sure. You know how conniving and miserable and wretched and
deceitful and traitorous you have to be to come up with a line like that? It's
like well we have to convince the American people that this is a hoax, but
we know it isn't a hoax, so we have to walk the line like that. It's like, well, we have to convince the American people that this is a hoax, but we know it isn't a hoax.
So we have to walk the line very carefully.
So if it comes back to bite us in the ass,
we can say, well, it would just always said
what it said that it had the hallmarks
of a Russian disinformation campaign,
not that it actually was one.
Hint, hint, wink, wink.
And Zuckerberg, I have some sympathy for Zuckerberg,
actually, I've talked to him. And maybe I'm naive and it's certainly possible because I tend to
give people the benefit of the doubt.
But you know, 10 years ago, if the White House came knocking at your door and said, you're
running a very complex operation here, we have reason to believe that it has been compromised.
We'd like you to aid us in our investigations.
You can think you would have been like free speech advocate number one and said no, but
most people will back off their free speech with a lot less pressure than that.
That's for sure.
And Zuckerberg definitely made mistakes.
And you could say that his admission of guilt, you know, in the Trump era is self-serving
and I suppose you could, you know, that's something to consider but you have to be pretty damn sure
yourself to think you would have done better. I'm not trying to excuse it or what happened on
Twitter, which was way worse, I mean. Well, we only know what happened to Twitter because Elon Musk himself revealed that he
sort of opened up his own kimono to show the world.
I've got to think it was the same at YouTube, Google, Facebook, Instagram.
They just haven't been as forthcoming.
Elon Musk is unusual that way.
And what I find...
Well, there is misinformation and disinformation campaigns.
It's not like TikTok isn't run by the Chinese communists, and it's warped a whole generation
of young women because that's where they get all their information.
And 18 to 35-year-old young women in the United States have political views that are way out
of alignment with everyone else's, hyper progressive and liberal.
And there's no doubt, there's absolutely no doubt that the Chinese communists are fomenting discord
using TikTok, obviously, clearly, in a documented way.
And they're tracking too, because today's 15 year old
in five years will be 20.
And maybe he'll be a soldier then.
And maybe at 25, maybe he'll be promoted.
Think of, if you're tracking someone
and all their conversations and all their networks
and all their friends, and if everything they say is being recorded from their gestures
to and if it's all being backed up in big data in Beijing, you're talking to a kid today,
but in 20 years from now, you've got some dirt on someone.
And I mean, TikTok is so addictive, Elon Musk said the algorithm, he felt it pulling on his mind, he had to shut it down.
It's an amazing algorithm.
It knows what you like almost more than you do.
And that's what makes it so-
Probably more, certainly explicitly more than you do.
Definitely.
And the thing is-
People won't admit to what they like.
And not just that, maybe you forgot what you said
in that phone call five years ago.
How can it forget?
It never forgets anything in some ways.
And there is some reason to be terrified about it.
But I think Donald Trump has decided if there's going to be AI, let it be in America rather
than China.
Well, that's Musk's take on it too, is that this is a dreadful war, this AI war, because
these AI systems use reinforcement learning and that's
how biological systems learn.
They're very lifelike, very, very lifelike.
And their intelligence is limited only by their database and the amount of power at
the moment that's available.
Computational ability, power, and the database.
And those are just growing like mad.
And so, yeah, it's clearly the case that these systems, well, in some ways,
without AI advertisers, the successful ones knew more about your preferences
than you did, but with AI, well, that's a whole different ball game, especially
when they're starting to do things like analyze your eye movements, cause eye
movements are very, very indicative of intentional focus, right?
They're almost, they're almost a perfect window into the soul, which is why we look at each other's eyes
when we talk, right?
So these cameras on your phones can track your eyes with no problem.
Well, and then the AI systems will know more about what motivates each of us and all of
us than we will.
They probably already do.
So yeah, so Musk's take on that is, well, better him than the Chinese.
If it has to be someone, and it seems like it has to be, because what, are you going
to stop AI?
Good luck.
There's no stopping it.
There's not even hypothetically a way to stop it, because you can't even define it really.
Like what are you going to do, make the mathematics illegal?
That's all statistics, by the way, so that's gone. No, that are you going to do, make the mathematics illegal? That's all statistics,
by the way, so that's gone. No, that's not going to happen. Let's go back to 2016.
Sure.
Okay, so yeah, so that was a shock to me that day. That was a free speech protest. Now that
was advertised as mine, but it wasn't. I was just invited to speak by a bunch of students
and I'd never been involved like anything like that in campus. Guy wasn't a controversial figure politically by any stretch
of the imagination, you know? And yeah, these bloody radicals showed up. Well, first of all,
the trans mob, so they were fun and these serious radical types. And yeah, they brought these white noise blasters to drown me out.
And I can't remember if I unplugged one or if there was a rough guy there who unplugged it.
And then there was a bit of a skirmish around that.
It's like, because I don't know, it's a tricky business.
Do I have the right to speak in public?
Does someone have a right to drown me out with white noise generator?
Well, it's not exactly obvious who's right triumphs in that particular instance.
It felt like a struggle session, in a way.
Oh, it was a struggle session.
Like a Maoist.
Bloody Maoists, yeah.
They were trying to put the hat on you and make you confess.
Oh, definitely.
Oh, definitely.
Yeah, and that didn't go so well.
And yours, I mean, if I recall, your grants, you always had.
Yeah.
And those were seized.
Yeah, it wasn't the university that did that.
That was the federal government, wasn't it?
Well, yeah.
Social Sciences.
So yeah.
So one of your requirements as a professor, essentially,
is to generate enough grant funding, usually
from federal agencies.
It's probably not a good idea, by the way, to keep your
lab running to fund your graduate students.
And there are small grants in Canada, but they're...
One thing I would say in favor of the Canadian granting system is it doesn't take all your
time to write the grants like it does in the United States.
Anyways, not only does that fund your graduate students some travel and some research costs, there's nothing in it that's personal, but it also funds the university to some degree,
because they take overhead costs. And I always got a grant. I had an unbrewed...
Until.
...until then.
Until.
Oh yeah, that wasn't accidental. I mean, it wasn't like I was a good researcher. I had an excellent
research dossier. And yeah, I don't know if I'm the most cited clinical
psychologist in Canada, but I've got to be in the top 10.
So still, by the way.
So there was absolutely no reason for them
to pull my funding.
But they did.
That's right.
And then you did a fundraising campaign, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know what?
This is one of those cases where the people were on one side and the institutions were
another.
That's where crowdfunding works sometimes.
Yeah, right.
Where it's sort of an 80-20 kind of thing.
I mean, transgenderism in sports is another example of that.
All the institutions are on one side and the people are on the other.
Trump like pipelines in Canada. I think so. It's 80-20 by the way. And I think people,
I don't think a lot of grassroots people think about government grants for scholarship and
academia, but they could see that you were being punished for it in a way that was designed to
hurt you. So severely normal people said, well, we're going to, we did crowdfund sort of a replacement
for that.
Oh yeah.
And that's where I met Lauren too that day.
She was quite the creature.
She wasn't very old then, eh?
She was only about 18.
Very young.
She's had a rough time.
Man, she's been through the mill, that girl.
Rebel News has met some colorful characters over the years.
That's for sure. You're one the years. That's for sure.
You're one of them.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
I mean, I think you've...
You guys have roused a lot of rabble.
But I think that's healthier than the alternative, which is a conformity.
In these controversial days, air it out.
Hear it out.
Let the both sides clash.
And that's what YouTube is like.
That's what we got
rolling with what we called citizen journalism. I remember what we called it that now.
Yeah, you were early adopters of that.
I used to be with a real TV station called Sun News Network. There were 200 folks in
real studios across the country. My studio in Toronto was a million dollar studio with
five people working in the control room. It was a real operation.
And a billionaire named Pierre-Carl Pelladot put a ton of dough into it.
But it was sort of euthanized by Canada's TV regulator, the CRTC.
How?
Well, in the end, the TV network had to do deals with different cable companies.
Will you carry it?
What channel will you carry it on?
How much will you charge customers for it?
How much will you pass on to Rebel News?
And all of these things are regulated.
And so the regulator basically euthanized it and said, we're going to give you a few
...
Regulators turn into censors at the drop of a hat.
It gets happened in the universities, so...
And in the UK, they're off-com.
They have a...
Right, right, right.
Especially with media, that's how you can kill it.
Yeah.
And they killed Sun News, and I resolved that I would never put myself in a position where
a government regulator could do that to us again.
So we went all internet.
We didn't try and do anything in a real TV or real radio.
Right.
But in the last couple years...
So what was your... We didn't try and do anything in a real TV or real radio, but in the last couple years...
What was your...
Okay, you talked about some of your motivation for doing that on the bureaucrat side, let's
say.
How do you think it was that you saw that that opportunity existed on YouTube?
I started putting my lectures on YouTube, I think in 2012 or 2013.
It was really an experiment, right?
What the hell is this video on demand?
It was all cute cat videos at that point, right?
It looked like nothing.
That was before Google bought it.
But I thought, well, huh, on-demand video, eh?
Permanent.
That's a revolution, man.
That's a revolution.
So what were you thinking about in relationship?
Was it specifically YouTube that you gravitated towards first?
Well, yes, because I had a YouTube experience that I'm going to say saved my life, maybe
five years or almost ten years earlier.
Let me tell you the story really quick.
I was the publisher of a print magazine called the Western Standard.
We would print it on paper and mail it out every two weeks.
It's even hard to imagine such a thing existed now.
And this was when the Danish cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad caused
such a fuss overseas. I think that was late 2005.
Yeah, right. Because you're not supposed to print an image of Muhammad.
That's right.
Well, at least there's some interpretations of Islam that make that claim.
Right.
And the noisy ones definitely make that claim.
So there were riots around the world, over 200 people killed, and every mainstream media
outlet panicked and refused to show it.
The Wall Street Journal, CNN, New York Times.
And so that actually added menace to it.
Wow, they'll print anything.
They won't show what these cartoons are like.
They must be awful.
No, in fact, they were pretty banal, nothing more controversial than what you'd see on
the cartoon, political cartoons in any major news, on any subject.
So we had this little magazine called the Western Standard, 40,000 subscribers based
in Western Canada.
And we were fortnightly, so we're not hot on the news.
So I thought, okay, by the time we published, I thought everyone else will have shown the
cartoon.
So we're not going to go with ta-da, here's what they are. We'll be more analytical. And we made the point you
just did, not all Muslims hold, that you can't depict more. We did sort of a think piece
kind of thing. The cartoon was not on the cover, it was tucked inside. But by the time
this came off the printing presses, it was clear we were the only people in the country
that were going to do this.
Yeah, yeah. Almost the only people in the country that were going to do this. Yeah, almost the only people in the world.
Very few did.
Very few, man.
There were like three news outlets, I think three or four, you were one of them.
And our phones rang off the hook.
A lot of people who called at the time were Muslim, I would say, exiles who said, I didn't
come to Canada to have Sharia law follow me across the world.
Yeah.
I found that very encouraging.
Yeah. And mostly people just appreciated the fact that we let them decide.
And we didn't show the cartoons saying we agree with them.
It was more like a prosecutor puts evidence to it.
It was news.
It was obviously news.
Exactly.
And if you're in the radio business, you paint a picture with your words, but when you have
a printing press, you show it.
So we showed it.
And it was wonderful. But then the Alberta Human Rights Commission, which
is a government agency…
Another commission, by the way, that does nothing like what its name says it does.
Exactly, exactly. Because there's no such thing as the right not to be offended. That's
a counterfeit human right. That's actually, you're torturing the language.
That's a power to silence.
Well, that's exactly.
That right, my right to not be offended by you, is my right to control your tongue.
We have the right to be offended, and just stop and think about that for a minute.
In some parts of the world, you're not allowed to be offended by things.
You're not allowed to express your outrage at things.
You have to suck it up.
In Canada, we have the right to be offended, not the right not to be offended.
So a radical imam.
Yeah, well, it was illegal in the Soviet Union to complain about your own pain.
And that's the thing.
The answer is, where does hatred come from?
Because I was charged, I still to this day remember the wording of the law under which I
was charged by the Alberta Human Rights Commission. And it is against the law to publish anything,
quote, likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt. Have you read Bill C-63? Very closely.
Oh my God. Do you think Carney will pass that when he gets coronated?
Very closely. Oh my God.
You think Carney will pass that when he gets coronated?
Well, he hasn't indicated that he won't.
Let me tell you what's terrifying about that.
Likely to.
So that's a future crime.
Yeah, right.
So how do you defend against a future crime?
Now, there are some future crimes in our criminal code, uttering a death threat, I suppose,
is a future crime.
Attempted something, something.
But likely to what?
Punch someone? That's very measurable.
No, likely to expose a person to hatred or contempt.
So you're gonna do something that's likely to cause him
to have hard feelings about him.
And how do you measure that and what's likely to?
And-
Well, they're playing with that in the UK
in a big, you know-
And truth is not a defense.
What's truth got to do with it?
You caused him to have hard feelings about him.
That's the truth.
That's the new definition of truth fundamentally.
So you know, that was a canary in the coal mine.
You fought that for how long?
I was pursued for 900 days.
And the apex of that was we managed to convince the interrogator for the Alberta Human Rights
Commission to allow
us to make a record of my interrogation. Now, we didn't say radio, so it was in my lawyer's office.
It was on a Friday afternoon and we managed to convince the interrogator to come to us.
So we had set up, it was conspicuous, it wasn't hidden. We had set up a camera. This was before smartphones. This was, I had never used a camera before.
And we sat up in the room. So the interrogator comes in, she looks at the camera. You can
see she's sort of hesitating for a second. But it's Friday afternoon and we had been
negotiating this meeting for months. So she just sits down and she proceeds to grill me.
And what do you think her first question was?
It was, why did you publish the cartoons?
Now the thing is, if anyone else had asked me that question,
I probably did 100 media interviews.
I would try and be the most reasonable version
of me I could be.
I would try and explain it.
Separation of mosque and state,
it's the central artifact in a news story,
we have to talk this out.
I would try and be as reasonable as possible.
I talked to a lot of Muslim folks and I tried to say, no, please understand why this was
– I was trying to appeal to their reason.
But when the government asks you the same question, you can't answer in the same way
because the government is not asking out of curiosity or out of intellectual growth.
They're asking because something turns on it.
Right.
Punishment turns on it.
If you don't appease them and say the right answer, you will be punished.
And so you can't answer the same way.
And so I remember what I said.
I said, because it's my bloody right to do so.
And I'm not trying to convince you and wiggle through, I want my maximum freedom.
And I recorded this on this video camera and I went home that day and I managed somehow
to edit that video, never done in my life.
And I set up a YouTube account, I'd never done that in my life.
This was when YouTube was pretty new. There was no social media back then.
There was no Facebook, no Twitter, anything like that.
And I uploaded the video of my interrogation
because I knew no one would believe me
if I said a magazine publisher was just grilled
for one hour about my political and religious views
for publishing.
That was a crucial case.
And people, that went viral. Right, before That was a crucial case. And people, that went viral.
Before viral was the thing, really.
That's right.
Hundreds of thousands of people.
What year was that?
I think it was 08.
Oh yeah, that's really early.
That's really early.
Right, so that clued you into the power of that media.
The asymmetry of it.
The asymmetry.
There were more than a dozen bureaucrats and lawyers for the Alberta Human Rights Commission
coming for me.
And the complainant, this radical imam, didn't have to pay a cent.
And his complaint was so laughable, he cited as legal basis, he was citing passages from
the Quran.
He said he personally was a descendant of Mohammed and I had offended him.
And I thought, oh, for sure this is going to be thrown out.
No, it was not.
A dozen people, I mean, human rights is the middle name
of the Alberta Human Rights Commission.
They were anything but.
I would have been flattened.
I would have been flattened, but the internet saved me.
That blogging was a thing back then and PayPal was new.
So that's how I funded my lawyer.
The Western Standard Magazine came to an end
as all magazines sort of did around then.
So I didn't have the dough to fight this.
Do you know what it cost you?
You know what, it was close to a hundred grand.
Yeah, and that's in 2008.
That's like $10 million now.
It was fascinating to deal with them.
They are so used to making deals
with rational business people who say,
there's no way I'm gonna win here.
Just pay it out and get it over.
They offered me, they said, if you pay that imam,
I think it was like eight grand,
and give him a page in the magazine
to write whatever he wants, we'll let you go.
And they assumed
I would take it and any rational decision maker would have taken that deal. Instead
of fighting, you're not going to win. Look at the law.
It depends on what you mean by win.
Well, that's right. And we can talk a little bit more about my friend Tommy Robinson and
how in a way he is irrational too if the idea is to save yourself.
Yeah. Like he was in court in the UK. I sat there and I watched the judge say to him, will you
take down that video?
It's shortly after you interviewed him, he put up a video on Twitter, a judge said, don't
do it, don't do it, he did it.
He was brought before the judge, I'm switching gears now, and he was in the dock, and the
judge said, I'm going to give you the maximum sentence. The video had been seen 55 million times. The judge said, you take it down now, I'm going to lop.
Silenced?
That's right. And Tommy wouldn't bend the knee.
Yeah. Well, he was out of the country too and he went back for his trial.
He went back.
He was in Spain.
We talked about that. And well, we discussed the pros and cons of him staying away or going back to face the music.
Well, you know, Socrates, when he was sentenced to death by the Athenians, they thought he'd run.
Like they told him, we're going to try you six months from now, hint, hint, wink, wink.
Why don't you get out of town, you troublesome old goat?
You know, because otherwise, you know, the axe is going to fall. And he went out and had a little discussion with his conscience
and it said, don't run.
Yeah. Well, same, I visited Tommy in Spain and came back with him on the flight because
we thought he would be arrested the minute he landed. They waited a few days and they
picked him up strategically so he could not attend a rally.
Oh, yeah.
And here's the, let me talk about that moment just for one second.
Tommy has flaws, but he also has within him a gleaming diamond that is rare.
And let me tell you what that is.
The video had been seen 55 million times.
The judge was saying, if you take it down now, you'll go home to your family months
earlier.
And I'll confess, I said to Tommy, I to Tommy I said look brother you've had the most watched
Documentary film ever produced in the UK. That's the biggest win of all time
Take it down and don't be away from your family. Yeah, and I said that to him as a friend
I said you have the biggest win you can't 55 million views. He said no
Hmm now there's over 150 views, and the world is talking
about it, including Elon Musk himself, who retweeted it. And see, the law isn't used
to dealing with people who are not rationalizing, maximizing the optimal outcome for reducing
pain.
No, the optimal outcome for reducing immediate pain.
That's a big difference, man.
So they thought I was gonna take the deal back in 2008
to let the Z-MOM have a page in the magazine
rather than to fight a six-figure fight for three years.
And with Tommy, they thought he would bend the knee
and take that thing down.
Instead, he said, no, I'll hold fast.
And so he's still in the clink.
By the way, they have him in solitary confinement.
They cleared out the whole segregation block.
He's the only prisoner in there.
He's in his cell 21 hours a day.
He's allowed out to have a shower.
He's allowed out to ride a stationary bike and to sort of a homemade gym.
The rest of the time he is in isolation. It's been over a hundred days.
Right now they've also forbade anyone with a social media following to visit him, which is a weird,
like what does that mean a social media following? I just got that letter. Three people? A thousand people?
Everyone has a social media following. And by the way, so it means whatever the hell they want.
A lot of his friends happen to be in it. I was scheduled to go and visit him on February 16th.
And I just got a letter from the prison governor saying, we understand you have a social media
presence and we're not going to let you in.
The trouble with that is these visitors, I mean, I'm interested to hear how he's doing.
Yeah.
Do you know how he's doing?
Well, I hear from his family and there are some, and he's deteriorating.
Well, yeah, no doubt.
You cannot spend, it is a form of mental torture.
It is, solitary confinement is how you punish a prisoner who's always already in prison.
You can punish a psychopath with solitary confinement.
That's how punishing it is.
You can take the most antisocial person in the world and put him in solitary and he's social enough
so that that's a punishment, right? A serious punishment.
But it's limited.
Now they have him in a maximum security prison too.
There are murderers in that prison. I visited him once before they brought in this no visitors
rule. And it was quite something to get through this labyrinth of doors. I met with him early and he was in high enough spirits in the first month.
Now he's in his fourth month there.
He's got five more?
That's right.
And he's falling apart.
Here's the problem with banning visitors.
Yeah, he doesn't know what's going on, eh?
Not just that.
The visitors want to visit for their own sake.
I want to talk to him about certain things.
I want to report back certain things on his health. But from his point of view, he needs the visitors to stay sane.
Yeah, definitely.
And he has certain visiting slots. His family cannot fill them all. His family is living
a life. His kids are in school. And so there, I was in court when the judge meted out the
sentence. The judge gave him the maximum sentence allowed by law to be served in solitary, no such thing.
The killer, the Southport murder.
Now, my understanding is that he requested solitary.
No, untrue.
Okay, so walk me through.
Okay, so what I garnered or gleaned was that because the prison was so dangerous and was full of the sort
of people, let's say, that might not be all that happy about Mr. Robinson, like the last
prison he was in where he got beat up very badly, that he needed protection.
But you're telling me that's not true.
In fact, he always says, put me in the ward, put me in the wing, and I'll fend for myself
and it's on you, prison.
The prison are putting, the prison don't know what to do with them
because you're correct to say in the UK,
they run it by the gangs.
Yeah, because it's a civil offense, right?
That's right, he's a civil prisoner.
It wasn't a crime what he did.
In the United States,
you have different kinds of gangs in prison.
There's the white gangs, the black gangs, the Latino gangs.
You go to a gang for protection.
In the UK, by far the dominant gangs are the Muslims.
Right, right.
In fact, you convert to join.
And the thing is Tommy Robinson is a skeptic and a critic of Islam.
And anyone who would put a knife into him would be a hero in the community forever.
Yeah, right.
And so there are some ways to imprison such a man, especially if he's a civil prisoner.
It's not a crime that he's in jail for.
He put a video up.
And let's get back to fact checkers for one second.
Let me say this.
The judge said, what you're going to put online is not admissible in court.
I reject it as the truth because it was not admissible in court under these rules of civil
procedure.
Okay, fair enough, judge.
But that doesn't mean it, Judge, but that doesn't
mean it's not true and that doesn't mean it's not useful and we don't all have to seek
truth through a particular legal system where lawyers and judges determine what you're allowed
to see and what you're not allowed to see. So, what's happening is there's a battle between
Tommy Robinson and the government of the United Kingdom over what is true.
And a judge says, in my courtroom, where Tommy did not have a lawyer, where he was sort of
doing homemade law, you were not allowed to bring certain evidence into the trial.
And so you're not allowed to put them in a different forum where you're more adept, the
social media video.
How is that anything other than a brutal fact check?
And when Tommy Robinson didn't accept it, solitary confinement, he'll serve nine months
in solitary.
I don't know anyone other than Julian Assange who's done that.
And there really is a two-tier.
Where's the prison?
It's called Woodhill.
It's in a town called Milton Keynes.
It's about a 90- minute drive from Heathrow Airport.
And I'm still hoping to go in, I wrote back to the prison governor just yesterday saying,
look, I'll sign an NDA, which is obscene.
And who is this, this prison governor, who is she to say, I can't say what Tommy said,
and I can't say what I see, but I want to actually put eyes on them.
Especially outside the UK.
It's just unheard of.
Yeah. But I want to put eyes on him. I want the UK. It's just unheard of. Yeah.
But I want to put eyes on him.
I want to see what he's doing.
Absolutely.
And they are delaying and delaying.
You know what?
They would like him to die in prison.
And I would be a mistake.
I think so.
And what I've learned, my advice to him three months ago was take the video down and don't
go to jail for so long, declare victory.
But his victory is magnified much more.
So they don't know how to deal with them.
I want to tell you one more Tommy story.
I know I talk about him a lot, but I think you can.
I know you do too.
And I think we love it for similar reasons.
It's the source of our language and our culture and our history, the source of our freedom.
The source of our common law.
You know, I'm in love with the place.
Yep, me too.
Absolutely.
I can't get enough.
But it's also my trips there, I call them a dystopian time machine.
When I go to the UK, I see what our future will be five years down the road if we don't
change course on matters like mass immigration that is not culturally net zero.
Yeah, they're what they call you lessZ, ultra-localization zones.
Which means peasants don't get cars. That's what ULEZ means. It doesn't
mean you have cleaner air, folks. It means you can stay in your goddamn
house and freeze to death in the dark. But you can also see what the
dissidents are like. Tommy Robinson being one dissident.
They have the things there, people who call themselves blade runners.
Yeah.
They go out with metal cutting saws who take down those surveillance cameras in less than
a minute.
But I don't…
We don't approve of the blade runners.
No, no, we absolutely don't.
That's right.
Just so everyone knows, we certainly don't approve of the blade runners.
It's amazing to see, I mean, remember what Orwell said, if there's any hope, it's with
the proles.
Yeah, right.
Which the left-wingers used to believe, you know,
back when they were on the left,
instead of wherever the hell they are now,
in the pockets of the WEF.
Tommy used to work for Rebel News back in the day.
I mentioned we had some colorful characters, you name it.
They passed the doors of Rebel News.
You and Menzies, too.
Oh, he's still with us, he's the best.
How many times has he been arrested now?
Five times last year alone. In Canada. In, he's still with us. He's the best. How many times has he been arrested now? Five times last year alone.
In Canada.
In Canada.
For being a journalist.
How many times have you been arrested?
Just once.
Just once.
You haven't worked on that.
But I was arrested.
I was on the street near my neighborhood.
I live in a fairly Jewish…
This is in Toronto.
In Toronto.
Jewish neighborhood in Toronto.
That's fun.
Yeah.
And who ever thought we'd say that in Canada?
Let me tell you what went down there, because it bothers me to this day.
Every week some Jews would wave Israeli and Canadian flags for the hostages who were being
held by Hamas. In a Jewish neighborhood, on a Jewish street corner, it was an attempt to
be positive. And they've been doing that for more than a year. A few months ago, Hamas supporters were driving all the way in from far away every Sunday
on the opposite side of the street to have a counter demonstration with anti-Semitic
signs, loudspeakers shouting insane, you know, from the river to the sea, swastikas.
And then one day, they had someone reenact Yahya Sinwar's
final moments. He was the head of Hamas, who was found in a chair. So they brought this
bloody chair and this guy with a…
How was he killed?
He was killed by… I don't know what finally did him in, but there was a drone photograph
of his final… drone video of his final moments. I see. So
They were reenacting it would be like reenacting a hitler's bunker or something
And I just thought this is crazy and there were so many cops there and i'm not particularly a fan of hate speech laws
Yeah, right, but they're on the books. Yeah, they're appalling and I don't know
What more you need than this? So I went there just to take a picture.
I didn't go there to count a protest.
This is in my neighborhood.
I saw it on social media.
Had you been at those sorts of protests before?
I had been to record because it's just astonishing.
But that day, I was at home, I had no plans to go because it's every single weekend.
But I thought, are they really reenacting this Hamas moment?
So I went there and I said to the cops, I got to take a picture of that. And the first cop sort of
escorted me in and when the Hamas types objected, they sort of pushed me out, which I didn't like.
Steve McLaughlin
Objected on what grounds?
John Ankerberg
That I'm Jewish.
Steve McLaughlin
You can't take a picture of their protest? Why do they protest?
John Ankerberg
That's exactly-
Steve McLaughlin
You can't take a picture of it.
John Ankerberg
I was-
Steve McLaughlin
Protested whole. John Anker. I was just at home.
I was escorted away.
I'm on the public sidewalk in my neighborhood.
There's a wall of 30 cops between me and the Hamas types.
And I'm sort of fussed because the cops pushed me away,
but I'll never push a cop.
I'm not that dumb.
And then the top cop says,
those protesters object to you being here.
I said, I don't care.
He said, your presence could incite them to breach the peace.
Oh yeah.
Well, that's on them.
But that's for sure.
Public sidewalk, my neighborhood.
The cop said, if you don't leave now, I'm arresting you.
I said, on what grounds?
On your presence here is inciting them to breach the peace.
Yeah, that's a crime?
It is not a crime.
In fact, I was not charged, but I was handcuffed, frog marched to a police car, searched, put
in the back of the police car, driven to jail, searched again, put in a cell.
What was that like?
Well, I knew it was BS.
And my friends, my colleague, David Menzies…
Were you mad at the cops?
I was mad, very mad at the cops who arrested me.
The ones who obeyed and handcuffed me, I'm not going to be mad at them.
They were doing their job.
When I was at the jail, you know, the guys in the jail had nothing to do with my arrest,
so I was light jail, you know, the guys in the jail had nothing to do with my arrest, so I was lighthearted, you know.
I mean, and that's another thing about being in jail, I've learned from Tommy Robinson,
is you are at the mercy of these guards.
You are at the physical mercy of them.
To me, that's the most terrifying thing about prison, is that they can do whatever they
want to you.
And what are you going to say about it?
What are you going to do about it? And if they… Especially if nobody can visit you they want to you. And what are you going to say about it? What are you going to do about it?
And if they...
Especially if nobody can visit you.
That's right.
Who can communicate.
Exactly right.
So, I knew I would be out in a matter of hours because they didn't actually charge me with
anything.
Right, right.
So you weren't worried particularly.
No, because I had been through this five times with David Menzies.
Right, right, right.
Menzies walked up to Denton...
Tell us, tell everybody who Menzies is.
Rebel News has some colorful characters.
One of my favorites is a guy named David Menzies.
He's in his early 60s, he wears a fedora, he's got an old fashioned style, he loves
old pop culture references from the 70s.
The guy's a character.
And he's a shoe level journalist.
He reported on that trans professor from York who was on the swim team with all the 13 year
old girls and got kicked out of the swimming pool for pointing that out.
You're right.
Which he should have pointed out.
Yeah.
And the parents let him get away with it too.
The professor.
You know, I mean, what the hell?
Seriously.
David and how many journalists would dare cover that?
Yeah, well him.
Yeah.
David went up to our Deputy Prime Minister
at the time, Christia Freeland, on a public sidewalk
at a public event.
And it was about Iran.
And the liberals hadn't banned a certain Iranian terror group.
And so David, with his lanyard and mic,
like there's no one, everyone knew who he was.
He went up to her and said, will you ban this group?
And the RCMP swarmed him, pushed him against the wall
and said, stop assaulting.
Like they, and they arrested him.
If the cameras hadn't been there,
we also saw that the police assaulted David.
They said David assaulted the police
and they charged him with assault.
When they saw that we caught it on tape, they let him go.
David's been arrested so many times.
During the pandemic, David went outside a Christmas party where Justin Trudeau was going
to fundraise with the Liberal Party.
But this was when we weren't supposed to have Christmas parties.
It was during the lockdown.
No, you weren't supposed to have Christmas parties.
And that was David's one question.
Why are you having a Christmas party
when the rest of us are told not to?
So David was waiting in the cold on the street
with his cameraman for an hour
for Trudeau's caravan to arrive.
You know, COVID was genetically engineered
not to infect important people, you know.
Here's how this story ends.
So everyone knows Menzies, he's very visible.
He's got his camera, he's a cameraman there.
There's no doubt who he is and what his purpose is.
He's waiting with the Toronto Police Service for an hour.
They're bantering, they're all just waiting for the Prince to arrive.
Andaraj pulls up, they obviously radioed ahead and said, who's there?
Oh, just Menzies. The RCMP bodyguards for Trudeau jump out of the vehicle,
go straight to David and beat the daylights out of him,
smash him against the wall, dump him on the ground,
beat him, and then let him go.
They don't even arrest him.
They don't even arrest him, let alone charge him.
They just beat him up.
We're suing the police. Our other reporter in Quebec,
Alex Lavoie, you know, the trucker convoy, Rebel News, that was really our time to shine.
The regime media were all on Justin Trudeau's script. This is the maple leaf insurrection.
This is the January 6th moment for Canada.
Yeah, it wasn't just for Canada either. Like that demonstration triggered all those farmers protests in the UK and it was a big
deal.
It was huge.
It was the time when people paid attention to Canada in an interested, focused way.
But Trudeau tried to have the script being these are violent, racist people, fringe minority
with unacceptable views.
That was his exact view.
Confederate Nazis.
You know Canada is full of Confederate Nazis.
So we were down there just with our citizen journalists, just filming everything on our
phones and in that month we had 400 million views and impressions, which is more than
the average bunch of the CBC state broadcaster.
I believe we helped stop the Trudeau narrative
from taking root.
Anyways, that trucker convoy was completely peaceful,
except one thing, there was one shooting.
There were probably 10,000,
or tens of thousands of people in Ottawa,
and there were echo events all across the country.
Who was the shooting?
Our reporter, Alexa Lavoie, clearly marked as a reporter, holding her cell phone, filming
riot police and truckers.
One riot cop with the RCMP takes out his riot gun at close range and shoots her in the leg.
Her, the only person in the end, and with the wadding and a huge bruising,
and you can hear her screams of pain.
And by the way, the police don't offer her help afterwards.
They shoot her and go.
We're suing the RCMP for that as well.
We've discovered that that weapon
is not meant to be shot at a person,
won't surprise you to learn.
You shoot it into an area on the ground and it releases tear gas. And you only do that with that weapon if things are very escalated,
if there's like a riot underway, if people are storming something, you do not use that weapon
preemptively because there's a bunch of people chanting. So it was used inappropriately,
both in terms of manner and time. And is it a coincidence, and this is my conspiracy theory side, is it a coincidence that the
only person in the country who was shot during the convoy was our reporter?
And we complained to the RCMP, we're suing them, but we also complained to them.
You know who, the police have an internal complaint system, you know who they assigned
it to.
You know where the RCMP officer was based
who looked into this matter?
You're not gonna guess, but why don't you guess for fun?
I couldn't.
Toronto, Prince, Haiti.
Oh, no, I wouldn't have guessed that.
I gotta tell you.
The RCMP is part of Trudeau's outreach
to the Haitian community in Montreal.
It has RCMP officers stationed in Haiti
to teach them how to be cops.
You can accept that or not, but that was where the cop who was going to do this investigation
of the shooting of Alexis Lavoie, our reporter, was based.
It's so absurd.
And the RCMP-
So what's the status of that investigation?
We're still proceeding.
Oh, the investigation?
Yeah, and the court case.
A whitewash.
A whitewash.
Yeah, of course. David Manzi is arrested five times.
Alex Lavoie shot.
We brought our whole team to Montreal to cover the curfew.
I don't know if you remember, but Montreal had a curfew, I think from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.
Sick or not, jabbed or not, you couldn't leave your house.
Yeah, I know.
Now, journalists were exempt, as if journalists are some higher class.
So we had a reporter who would go out and the police would hassle him.
So then we sent three and the police would hassle them.
And I said, damn it, we're bringing the whole team.
So we brought 17 rebels into town.
And I thought, well, I wonder if there's an Airbnb we could all fit in, because that's
a lot of hotel rooms.
And I found an Airbnb, like a houseboat in the old port of an Airbnb we could all fit in because that's a lot of hotel rooms. And I found an Airbnb, like a houseboat
in the old port of Montreal where we could all fit.
It had room for 24 people.
Summer, winter, when were you there?
This was, I think it was the spring.
Okay.
I'm gonna double check that.
That's okay.
But we were there to do reporting on the streets
during the curfew because the cops had been pushing
around our people and we brought a lawyer with us.
We're walking the streets at midnight and we have a lawyer with us on the ground to
engage with French-speaking police, en France, just to flex our muscles.
And by the way, the Montreal police had never seen journalists out and about because they're
so incurious and so obedient in the regime media that they would never think to report on this absurd
curfew.
So, we had a great night out.
We did curfew reporting late at night.
Then we all go to our Airbnb houseboat and then we get up the next morning and there's
going to be a protest.
Well, wouldn't you know it, but the old Port of Montreal just happens to be the staging area for the police for this huge... So 50
police cars show up and they find out that's where the rebel news people are. So they seal
off our houseboat with yellow police tape and they come on our little houseboat and say,
we're searching this place. And I was off the boat at that time, but our young students...
Had you flushed the cocaine by then?
Our young students know to say, where's your warrant?
I'm so proud of our young people and they all said, get a warrant.
And the cops said, you're going to play that way.
They sealed off our boat and for the next 10 hours, they wanted to search every person
and every room.
For what?
It's not yet clear.
I think they just wanted to.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
And we said come back with a warrant.
And I don't think they used to be talked to that way.
For 10 hours, they shopped this around Quebec to try and find a judge.
And God bless it, they couldn't find a judge to give them a search warrant.
Well, thank God for that.
That's an amazing thing in and of itself.
That's the miracle of the story.
That's for sure.
Thank God.
Now, we sued them and they actually settled.
They settled because they harassed a bunch of our people.
They paid a bunch of our different journalists a certain sum of money.
And then they wrote a letter, sort of a grudging, ironic apology, but it basically said, well,
we didn't know who you were, and
you always had your journalistic rights, and we sued the Montreal police, they paid our
people, the people who were roughed up, they arrested Menzies.
Yeah, of course.
It took them to a crappy jail.
Seems like his fate.
Yeah, you know, Menzies, he's stubborn in a good way.
And you don't want everyone in the world to be stubborn in a good way, but you want a few. I always like to say he's one in a million. Pause. Thank God.
Yeah, right.
It's a joke. He's actually a national treasure. There's only a handful of journalists who are on
the street. A lot of journalists just sit at their desk and Google, how about get out into the world?
You never know what you're going to see. And that's the rebel style. We love to travel also. We're from Canada. We got a fellow in Melbourne, Australia, Abiyamini.
That was a real lockdown center too.
Yeah, right.
He recorded a lot.
Just about as crazy as Montreal and Toronto.
That's right. But we travel. For example, every year we go to Davos, Switzerland. That's
this town that the World Economic Forum takes over.
Yeah. How would you describe the World Economic Forum for everybody who's watching and listening?
It sounds super boring, doesn't it?
World Economic Forum, that sounds like economists studying the world, sounds good.
It's not.
These are the masters of the universe.
I call them the VVIPs.
These are prime ministers, presidents, royalty, pop culture stars.
Yeah, the question is why?
You know, I asked some Davos attendants who were very well positioned, like who the hell
Klaus Schwab is.
It's like how in the world did this cartoon dictator of the world character manage to
convene all these VVVIPs, as you call them.
And Klaus Schwab
is a convener fundamentally and he's certainly not elected he has no... He owns
it he's an owner. Yeah right. I call it a crypto government. Here's what I mean. Yeah yeah
definitely. You have members of government, Christia Freeland, Mark Carney, these are
the two leading contenders for... Hear that? That's Christia Freeland and Mark
Carney for those of you who are thinking about voting for them.
A vote for them is definitely a vote for the WEF, and there'll be a lot more about that
on this channel soon.
They're both board members of the World Economic Forum.
Justin Trudeau was a global young leader, and Klaus Schwab-Brad, and I'm going to say
it in his German accent, we have penetrated the cabinet of Canada.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, But what do they do there? Here's why I call it a crypto government. Number one, a real government has an independent press.
Just a scrutinized thing.
The World Economic Forum, there's lots of journalists,
but they pay to participate.
So they'll never be skeptical or accountability journalists.
We go, but we are not allowed in.
We're kept outside the security perimeter
because we ask unvetted questions.
Oh yeah, so that's where you're always lurking out there
on the street, like an ambush squad.
That's right, and I'll tell you in a minute some of our favorites catches.
Number two, in a real government there's an opposition and sometimes they rotate people
through.
That's a form of a check and balance.
In a real government, there's a lobbyist registry.
Who is meeting with them?
It's technically a fascist organization.
And fascism means to bind together, right?
And the fascists were big into the idea that, and this is kind of what defines fascism,
that media, corporations, government should all be working together as a unit to push
forward whatever the interest happens to be, whatever the agenda happens to be.
And the WEF is a place where exactly that happens,
is that the elites of all the different power hierarchies meet and, well, conspire morally to
improve the planet despite the fact that they have no democratic standing. And as you said,
no opposition and no journalistic coverage. And that it's a pay-to-play arrangement that's made Schwaben's cronies
exceptionally rich and that's really demented and twisted the world in unbelievably pathological
ways. Net zero, that's a WF initiative. ESG, right, that stakeholder capitalism, that's all
pouring out of the WEF. That's the sort of thing, by the way, that Carney supports in Spades. He's
an architect of those policies and a distributor of them all the way around, all around the world.
Carney believes that 85% of the world's fossil fuels have to remain in the ground and that
somehow magically, Alberta in particular, is going to have even better jobs under this
new green economy that he can't define. It's going to apparently run on hydrogen of all
bloody things, all the pathological idiocies you can possibly imagine. So he's like Trudeau on steroids.
And so yeah, that's the WEF, man. In a nutshell, every stupid idea you can possibly imagine the
last 15 years has been promoted by the Davos crowd, all to virtue signal, because they're
guilty about being, you know, I don't know, guilty about being rapacious billionaires, I suppose.
They could work a little on the rapaciousness, a little less on the virtue signaling.
So anyways, okay, so you're in the WEF and you're out there trying to what?
What are you doing?
Well, we're outside the moat.
I mean, it's a very high security place.
It's hard to get there.
They buy up every hotel room in town.
So we stay one town over and take the train.
Right, so it's isolated to protect.
That's right.
And so we have to fly to Zurich, take three trains up
and we're not allowed in.
So we're just on the cold streets.
Where do you stay?
We stay one town over called Closters.
We in an Airbnb typically,
and they couldn't topple the prices that week.
Of course.
That week more, the local airport, the private jet airport,
they say that they do, they make their whole year's money
in that one week.
Yeah. Yeah.
And if you go and watch the private jets.
And think of all the lovely carbon that's being produced.
The private jets.
All the plants.
They come in and it's such a small airport
that they drop off the VVIPs,
but then the planes have to go fly
to another airport to park.
And then they come and fly,
like it's an extra flight just to park the plane.
I've never seen anything more carbon intensive.
And then there's helicopters.
It's probably got slightly greener around Davos
in consequence.
That's right, because of all the CO2.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, they're against fuel
and they're against food, even though they-
No, no, no, no.
They're against fuel and food for peasants. And that's the, so they're in food, even though they- No, no, no, no. They're against fuel and food for peasants.
And so they're in their private jets,
but you have to take public transit.
I was in the streets of Davos two weeks ago,
and I see a guy handing out energy bars.
Like there's a lot of kiosks and people giving away
grab bags and goodies, and it's cold,
so they give away hot chocolate and tea.
So one guy's giving away energy bars,
and people are flocking to it.
But I notice, I notice on some box he has,
it says insect protein.
Oh yeah.
So I say, who are you, what are you?
And he actually talked to me for 15 minutes.
His company is called Pumba.
And if you know your Disney movies,
there's a character that eats insects called Pumba.
But on this candy bar, it does not say the word insect anywhere.
In the ingredients in tiny print, it uses the Latin genus and species for the mealworm.
Oh yeah.
It's like Adolphinus diaparinus or something.
Sounds delicious.
I don't think one in a hundred thousand people knows what that is.
And he was giving them away and he was saying,
there's insect protein in it, but no one heard him.
I was there with my cameraman, I said, did you hear him?
He said there's insect protein in it.
And some people were repulsed by it, others didn't care.
They are doing creepy and weird things.
If you- Bugs are the right thing to do creepy things with.
If you want to eat bugs, I'm not going to say don't.
But don't sell it or give it away and hide it.
There's a lot of strange things going on in the World Economic Forum.
And I feel like...
I need a t-shirt that says that.
A lot of strange things going on in the World Economic Forum.
Rebel News.
Rebel News were sort of scruffy. I mean, I say the drawbridge comes down and these princes
walk out onto the town and we're there, these grubby peasants asking them questions.
Two years ago, I think it was, we scrummed Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer.
This year we scrummed Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock.
They're fun.
And we had a lot of questions.
We asked 70 questions, I later count.
We walked and talked with Larry Fink for nine minutes and we asked 70 questions.
He answered zero.
In fact, his bodyguard sort of pushed us a bit. And then Fink took out his cell phone,
put it right in our face, click, click.
I said, you intimidating me?
I'll tell you my name.
I'm gonna make, it was so weird.
Well, you haven't been on social media much, Ezra.
But, and Albert Bourla, we were asking real questions.
Yeah, we were annoying, I'll grant you that.
But real, like my first question, Larry Fink,
is have you spoken to the president yet? Are you moving away from ESG? And are you going to come to his
way of thinking like Zuckerberg did? I really am curious because Larry Fink is a real-
Yeah, because Vanguard has moved away from ESG to some extent.
So it was a real question. And then I asked a bunch of questions. I said, are you putting
your ideology above shareholder returns? Like if you're making-
That's the definition of ESG.
Yeah.
And those, that's a real question.
And maybe I wasn't as, I was fairly polite.
I said, Mr. Fink, et cetera, why would he walk with us for nine minutes, but not Dane
to give us an answer?
And Albert Bourla, the same thing.
We said, when did you know that the vaccine didn't actually block transmission?
You said it was a hundred percent effective than 90, 80, 70.
So when did you know?
I asked him real questions,
and my colleague Abhi Yamini did too.
The fact that we were on the street and not vetted,
disgusted these men.
Both of them had probably done 10 interviews that day,
but the interviews
were with trusted partners who had actually paid to attend the World Economic Forum. The
idea that they would be in an unscripted moment and oh, an answer to anyone was beneath them.
That contempt, if you ask me, what is the World Economic Forum? That's what it is. It's
these masters of the universe who like to hang out with other masters of the universe
and who have contempt to talk about humanity, but they actually hate people.
And I've been going for four years, and you never know what you're going to get there.
Yeah, I'm very afraid that that's exactly the sort of attitude that characterizes Mr.
Carney, and I'm more convinced about that after reading his book quite carefully, Values. It's like, yeah, he likes humanity, but, you know, food, shelter, clothing and heat or
air conditioning for you or your car, you know, do you get to have a car under Mark
Carney?
You know, the globalist utopian types, they'd like to see a 95% reduction in private car
ownership.
Right?
This is a place that came out with the think piece, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
Yeah, yeah, or else you'll bloody well be happy or at least you won't get to complain.
You'll own nothing and you won't get to complain.
But let me say one thing, I've just spent 10 minutes criticizing the World Economic
Forum, but I'll say this, and it's probably a compliment of Switzerland more than the
World Economic Forum. There are hundreds of very well armed police and military endavos with big firearms.
It feels extremely safe, by the way.
They have never once tried to stop us from scrumming these VVR Eats.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, that's interesting.
As long as you don't touch them, not that I would ever touch anyone.
Yeah.
John Kerry, the former Secretary of State and climate ambassador, he walks around all the time
and he actually talks to us while we walk.
Very interesting.
And like all these VVIPs, Larry Fink had two sort of
tough guys within that pushed us a bit,
but as long as you don't touch the VVIP,
you can scrub them, the cops don't care.
In fact, I think the cops get a kick out of it.
Condressed.
You think the cops in Canada would get a kick out of it too, really?
Well, they've been politicized by their mayors and police commissions and all the way down.
The police in Canada are becoming more political every day.
In Switzerland, they would never do what they did to me or to Manzies or to Alexis Lavoie.
Never do that houseboat raid.
They actually are gentle police with a light touch there. Yeah, well, it's a terrible thing to think of that harder-handed, politicized police
presence being part and parcel of Canada.
That's really not a good thing.
Yeah.
And I think you guys love you or hate you or maybe a bit of both.
You guys have been canaries in the coal mine for Canada for a long time.
And also not just Canada, right?
Because how much of your viewership is international?
You know, I'd say 60% is Canadian, and then US and the UK after that, and then Australia.
Right, so 40% international.
Is that primarily the US or?
Yeah, the US.
Well, it's such a big population center.
That's right.
And then the UK, especially when we covered Tommy, because the domestic media in the UK,
they're uniformly against him, which is strange because so many ordinary Brits really follow
Tommy.
Yeah.
How many people do you think were at that last rally?
That was what, two weeks ago?
Maybe something like that.
It's February 9th today, and so it would have been about two weeks ago.
And that was a free Tommy Robinson rally, right?
That's right.
And I couldn't get any reasonable estimate of the number of people that showed up.
And it was peaceful again.
There's been a bunch of rallies that Robinson has been involved in or at the core of that
have been, like the trucker convoy, markedly peaceful, right?
And that's very weird because you'd also expect them
to be sold with agents provocateur,
who are there to cause trouble,
to discredit the organization.
But even given that, those rallies have been peaceful.
And you can see in the UK that the working class,
the genuine working class,
like the actual inhabitants of Britain are not happy
and hold viewpoints that aren't well represented by the standard political parties and certainly not by the media.
You know the city of Rotherham?
Yeah.
It depends on how you measure the size of the city and the counties, but a hundred thousand
souls there.
So about 50,000 are women.
Take out the children and the old people.
I don't know, is it 25,000 women of a certain age? 1,400 of them were raped by rape gangs.
And when I say raped, I don't mean raped once. I mean raped every night for months or years
by multiple men. But these were working class British girls.
They don't count. And the rapists, over 80% of them were British, Pakistani, Muslim men.
So you had the perfect storm.
You had girls who were nobody's nothing.
Oh, what are they?
Slags.
And then you had perpetrators.
Oh, we don't dare mention them.
And so this went on for years, for decades even.
Yeah, I know. It's one of those crimes that has... Look, look. I always think of my mother when I'm
having a conversation like this. I took my mom to Australia and I traveled with her and her sister,
and they're conventional Canadians, and they were accustomed to believing CTV,
believing Lloyd-Robertson, believing the CBC.
And you know, for a long time, that wasn't completely unreasonable, right?
The legacy media in Canada, like most Canadian institutions, was pretty damn solid, centrist,
pretty reliable.
And then, well, and then it wasn't, and that started probably 15 years ago,
maybe something like that, but when you guys, you know, popped your
head above the turret and, uh, you imagine someone like her or her sister,
these conventional, hardworking middle-class or working-class Canadians
who are accustomed to trusting their institutions.
And then all of a sudden, all of goes sideways. And they're asked to believe things like what we're talking
about. They're asked to believe that the food pyramid's a scam and that the school systems
were set up by fascists and that the WF is a global conspiracy of crypto-fascists who want to
take everybody's vehicles and that there are rape gangs operating
at a scale in the UK that involve maybe a million girls.
No one knows, right?
No one knows.
And even that's like, is it 10,000?
Is it 100,000?
Is it a million?
Oh, we don't know.
Well, maybe you should look into it.
Well, if you're in the shoes of a person like that, you either have to believe that everything that you thought
was true in your life is flipped upside down or that you're being scammed by conspiracy
theorists.
Well, of course you're going to believe the latter because why the hell wouldn't you?
You know, you have to kind of be dragged.
Even Michael Schellenberger, you know, he broke the W path story, right?
That's that preposterous group of perverted psychopaths who purport
to be experts in psychopathology and have defined the standards of care for gender-affirming
butchery conducted on minors. That's WPATH, run by Marcy Bowers, I think it's Bowers or
Bows, who's a transsexual surgeon, who is involved in the Jess Jennings case, which they
made a reality
TV show out of.
Yeah, that W-Path.
Well, Schellenberg told me when I interviewed him that I had interviewed, was it Helen Joyce
or Abigail Schreier?
I talked to both of them who were early investigators into the gender-affirming scandal.
He said when he first heard the interview, he couldn't believe it was true.
And that's Schellenberger, you know, and he was a lefty back in the day and clued in and woke up
and he's a hell of an investigative journalist, but even Schellenberger couldn't believe it.
There's like 50 things that are happening that you can't believe.
And that's, you know, one of the things that you guys have done in Rebel News is like you've been
on the forefront of cracking these preposterous
stories and then you're arrested for your trouble in Canada.
It's so preposterous.
It's like how the hell did Canada become a place where, well, first of all, muck-raking
journalists are necessary and they certainly are.
That bloody CBC, right?
It's 1.5 billion a year plus $600 million in advertising
from the federal government.
To have no audience, they have no audience, right?
Except people over 60.
And they've been struggling to get a purchase on YouTube
for like 10 years.
They've disallowed comments
because that's how clueless they are.
And no one watches their material.
Like they literally get hundreds of views,
which means that even the staff
that made the shows don't watch them. Right. And so here we are in Canada and Mark Carney's
come along to save Canada, but really to save the planet and Canadians are daft enough to
start. You can see the scales tilting in his favor. I mean, we were going to decimate the
liberals because Trudeau's been such an absolute bloody
nightmare catastrophe in his narcissistic and incompetent manner.
And now Carney's coming waltzing in from the Bank of England with his ESG and his DEI and
his net zero, and his you don't need fossil fuels, peasants or cars, and Canadians are
lining up to vote for him.
Jesus.
I saw an opinion poll about Trump's idea, his social media banter about Canada becoming the
51st state. I think he just likes poking at Trudeau. I mean, Trump is a master of the
insulting nickname. Like he's just-
Yeah, he sure is. He's definitely got-
That's an art.
He's an entertainer and he's a quick thinking, mischievous fellow.
So he met with Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago and he detected certain...
He didn't let him stay there that night.
No.
And he poked at him a bit.
The thing is, 10 years ago, you would have said to Canadians who want to join the States,
I think Canadians would say, no, first of all, we're wealthier.
There was a point in time when the average Canadian on an individual basis was wealthier
than... Yeah, well, we've dispensed with that.
It's 60%.
There were a lot of things that Canadians were saying,
you know, we really like America, but boy, we're glad.
We're good.
But what's happened over the last 10 years on everything,
forget tangible things like money, mass immigration, crime.
What about intangibles?
What about a Prime
Minister who took John A. Macdonald off our $10 bill who says the country has no national
identity but insults Daniel Smith for not being patriotic enough to sacrifice the Alberta
economy to Canada, a Canada that's a patriarchal oppressive, what would you say, post-colonial
identity-less state.
And he said those things in an interview with a foreign newspaper nonetheless, it was the
New York Times.
But not just that, Trudeau says we're a genocidal country, the genocide continues.
He says we're sexist, transphobic.
He in so many ways, he makes grand apologies all the time, but not for himself, for the
country.
So, you've had almost 10 years of him degrading and demoralizing and denaturing,
cutting people off from our roots and our history and our culture and our identity.
And destroying the economy at the same time.
So if you're a young man and you want to buy a home and start a life and get a job,
all of those things, a lot of young people live with their parents that well into their 30s,
not because they're failure to launch.
You can't buy a home in Canada, there's twice as much in the States.
We don't have much land, you know.
But all of a sudden, when Trump says, would you like to join the US?
We'll trade in your dollars at par.
Well, there'll be no terrorists and you'll have a strong military.
You know, you're a young man.
And for 10 years, you've been told by Trudeau that your country means nothing.
It's just a hotel.
Worse than nothing.
And here's this strong masculine guy who's commanding authority and he truly is making
America great again.
And when he says that, it's plausible.
And when he says it's a golden age.
When he's got these monsters like Musk on his side, he was tromping through the grapevine.
And the world is bending the knee to him, whether it's the Japanese Prime Minister or
a Korean investor or whatever.
Yeah, and he just made a deal with the Japanese prime minister.
It's truly no big deal.
Yeah, yeah.
For a deal where Trudeau had, because the Japanese prime minister had come to Canada
and Trudeau said, we can't make a business case without...
So, it's a surprise that young men of all the demographics say, you know what, I'll
take Trump up on that deal.
I forget the, I think it was 43%.
I think 43% of young men, I'm going from memory here,
said, yeah, we'll take that deal.
And that's without a campaign.
That's just based on a few tweets.
Casual.
Yeah, Instagram.
And there's many things to love about America.
There's an amazing number of things to love about America.
But imagine abandoning your history, your culture,
your tradition, your borders, your institutions.
That's how Trudeau has eroded in the country.
And I don't blame Trump for finding that weakness and shaking it.
That's what you do when you're America first.
You get in when you're negotiating.
Well, I don't think Canada has learned a damn thing from it yet.
I mean, the Quebec Premier came out this week and basically said there was no damn way they
were going to put pipelines across the country, right?
You can't make an economic or a global case for that. It's like, hey, you know, have it your way, buddy.
Where do you think your transfer payments
are going to come from if Alberta decides
to pack up and leave?
I think that Mark Carney's ideas are 10 years too late.
10 years ago, carbon taxes, ESG, wokeism.
And he made a little statement the other day
saying he's for wokeism. In his mind,
that means inclusiveness. That's not what woke means one bit.
Yeah. He knows exactly what it means to the degree that he knows what anything means.
He absolutely is the world economic forum candidate.
Yeah, absolutely. 100%.
But I think that's not-
And a leader rather than a follower, because Trudeau was a follower.
Right.
Carney's a leader.
Carney is smart, and Carney is a doer.
Like you don't get those,
Chairman of Brookfield,
Governor of the Bank of Canada,
and Bank of England.
Yeah, well, and he looks to Canadians,
you know, and you can understand this.
Carney looks like someone with
vast international experience of credibility.
He looks the part.
Yeah, he certainly does.
Well, Trudeau looked a certain part to it quite effectively.
But this is different.
Carney has that senior statesman appeal, but values that, I mean, and then for Carney to
announce his leadership as an outsider, it's like that, I see.
So you're going to start off on an American TV channel.
The imposter is lying.
Hey, yeah, I'm an outsider.
I can't imagine any American candidate for president announcing their candidacy on a
foreign network.
Could you imagine Trump or Kamala Harris announcing they're running for the president of the United
States on the BBC?
But absurdly, Mark Carney announced his candidacy in New York City.
I think if Carney takes over, when he's going to win on March 9th, and then he's going to do a deal
with the NDP and he will become Prime Minister till October, without ever having won an election.
I think they'll stretch it out till September of 2026 because there is some grounds for
presuming they could do so.
Well, look, what's the alternative?
At the moment, unless things invert in the polls, if Carney led the liberals to an election,
they're going to get decimated.
So why would you do that?
Right.
I'm also worried about foreign meddling.
Carney is deep with China, Communist China.
And that's been a problem in Canada.
There was the various CCCs, that's Canada's spy agency,
saying that the Chinese Communist Party
interfered in at least 11 electoral districts.
Trudeau turned a blind eye to it because he was the beneficiary of that.
In fact, communist donors would come and make donations directly to the Trudeau
Foundation. I'm worried about ties to China and I'm
worried about ties to Iran. And I just don't think that, I don't
think that Canada is gonna survive
as a first ranked nation,
if the liberals aren't turf this year.
Are we a first ranked nation now?
We're clinging on by our fingernails.
The only reason we're still a first ranked nation
is because Europe has done itself in
at about the same rate Canada has.
And we're lucky that we're right next to America,
not only do we benefit economically,
but a lot of their cultural discussions wash over into us.
And I think, I mean, look what Trump has done
on transgenderism in sports.
He's just ended with a stroke of a pen.
Gender affirming care too.
Even small things like saying we're done with paper straws.
I mean, I know that sounds small,
but show me someone who's ever liked that and yes.
I like the paper straws that come in plastic,
the single use paper straws that come in plastic wrappers. I'm very fond of those. But what does it say about a country that abides that
stupid rule that no one likes but we just abided it we just accepted it what does it say about the
nature and the of the character of 40 million Canadians? It says that we're willing to virtue
say in the lateral expense. And we saw that during the pandemic and the lockdowns when things went so hard in Canada.
Yeah, that's for sure.
And it was an opportunity for people to, I'll show my righteousness by being a voluntary
self-appointed enforcer.
The phenomenon that-
People enjoyed that.
Man, Toronto was rife with informers.
It was something to see.
I certainly understand.
The mass patrols who would come up to you and give you,
and here's the thing, and I know where pandemic's gone now,
but this said something about our character.
If you actually-
We can have another one.
If you, yeah, if you actually were worried about the virus
and you saw someone without a mask, you would walk away,
you would run away, you would take your children and run.
If someone with Ebola came into the mall without a mask,
you wouldn't go up to them and say, hey, put on your mask.
Well, you would if you were sacrificing yourself for the good of the planet.
But there was an opportunity to be more virtuous than that person. But I think this is what
I watched so many of those videos and I myself was a bit of a mask not wearing a dissident. So I had a lot of encounters and here's, it wasn't even virtue signaling, it was I'm worried
that if I didn't wear a mask, the rules would come down on me, there would be some consequence
on me.
So if you're not wearing a mask and no consequences are happening to you, the world is out of
joint and I made the wrong decision.
You're an indication of my cowardice. I must fill the gap and be the consequence to you to justify my cowardice.
So, it's not so much that I'm better than you, it's, oh my God, you're getting away with it,
and I didn't think I could. I better stop you from getting away with it,
because otherwise what's my excuse for being so submissive?
Yep, yep.
It was atrocious things.
Well, and then there's the ever present enjoyment
in getting to rat on your neighbors.
And we never wanna underestimate
just how pleasurable that can be.
So I think 70% of people in Toronto
would have worn a mask for the rest of their life
if they could have continued to inform on their neighbors.
I gotta tell you one last story.
I know where time is of the essence.
Do you know what the Amish are?
Have you heard of the Amish?
Oh yeah.
They're Christian from Europe.
They speak German amongst themselves.
They're like the Mennonites in Alberta.
Yeah.
They're very old fashioned.
They don't use modern technology at all.
They don't drive.
They don't have electricity.
They don't have smartphones.
They're farmers, very poor.
And they keep to themselves and they're pacifist.
That's another thing to know about them.
They do not want to engage in any disobedience.
They keep to themselves, they're reclusive.
There's a lot of them in Pennsylvania, and there's a lot of them in Ontario.
We heard about this from a friend of the Amish, that the Amish used to go back and forth between
Ontario and the US to visit the other colonies down there for dates, for family events.
So every time the Amish would come back across the border into Canada during the pandemic,
there was a border officer who would say, have you downloaded the ArriveCan app on your
smartphone?
Right, right.
Now, for your American viewers, they don't know what ArriveCan app on your smartphone. Right, right. Now, for your American viewers, they don't know what ArriveCan is.
It's a mandatory app, sort of spyware, that you have to give all your health details,
all your VAX details.
You have to put it in this app on your phone or you get a $6,000 fine.
So the Amish, they don't know what download or app, they know what a smartphone is, they
just don't have them.
ArriveCan, so they would go, every time they would come back to Canada, every single
person including children would get a $6,000 fine.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Oh yeah.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they're not on the internet, they're not on phones
or faxes, they're really cut off. So years go by and an Amish goes to the
bank to get a loan for some livestock and pledges the farm as the security and the banker
types in and says, I'm sorry, I can't give you the loan. There's a lien against your
farm.
Oh, yeah.
And then another Amish passes away, wants to bequeath the farm to his son.
Can't, there's a lien on it.
You got to sell the farm to pay the lien.
Soon the whole community does this, hundreds of thousands of dollars in tickets.
Now it was a miracle we found out about this because they don't know what revolution is.
They don't follow the internet or watch TV.
A friendly non-Amish neighbor heard them talking about this and heard it.
So we helped, there's a charity called
the Democracy Fund, I know you've spoken at one of the events before, the Democracy Fund has
dispatched lawyers to help the Amish and to crack open these cases again and redo them and basically
these were trials in absentee, the Amish were not there, and we're having some success at, it's hard
to crack open a case once it's guilty.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
But just stop for one second.
The Amish, they're not hidden, they wear the black hats and they're unique, they almost
look like Orthodox Jews in a way.
And in chem they go on horse and carriage.
You know an Amish when you see it, and you can probably detect that they're not smartphone
friendly.
How many people in the Canadian bureaucracy would have been involved from that first border
agent to his manager, to his manager, to the court, to the prosecutor, to the judge, and
then to convict?
But I have never heard of a lien being put,
liens on all their farms.
How many people-
Well, that's what would happen if you didn't pay the tickets.
I haven't met anyone else in the country
who has had that happen to them.
Oh, I see. Oh, okay.
For a arrived can app?
Yes, that is the ultimate way
that the government gets their money.
I've just never heard of that in the country.
How many people were involved from that first time? Wasn't that the government gets their money. I've just never heard of that in the country. How many people were involved from that first time?
Wasn't that the same arrived can app that the liberals paid 45 million dollars for?
Indeed it was.
Some team of hackers built over a weekend for 350?
Indeed it was.
Yeah, that derived can app.
But the, not one person, there must have been a hundred people involved. Not one person said,
What the hell are we doing?
What are we doing? Not one person said, what are we doing?
Not one person.
Not one person.
Now, I'm not saying that's Canada only.
I bet stupid things happen in America too.
In fact, the Amish were persecuted in America.
That's why they became politicized under the administration.
They started cracking down on raw milk.
And I think that the Amish realized their way of life was in jeopardy.
And so a very un-Amish thing to do was they became political.
And I saw, I really saw the footage also of these horses in carriages with the Trump flags.
I've never seen an Amish do that before.
They must have thought this is do or die time.
That's one of the reasons why Trump carried Pennsylvania is because the Biden administration
was an existential threat to the Amish way of life,
including no connection to the government, just natural living.
Very interesting the contrast between America where they, anyhow, but the Amish in Canada,
they're being helped by the Democracy Fund now, so I'm pleased.
So let's close with just a bit more about rebel news in general, and then we'll go to
the daily Wire side.
I think I'll talk to you on the Daily Wire side
about the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,
because I know you went to our first conference
and so we'll chat about that.
We can talk a little bit more about the Trump administration
and what Elon Musk is finding and USAID.
And so if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side for that,
please, please feel welcome to do that.
The Daily Wire makes all these podcasts possible and follows me all around the world. join us on the daily wire side for that, please feel welcome to do that.
The Daily Wire makes all these podcasts possible and follows me all around the world.
I'm in Winnipeg today.
I was in Florida yesterday in Washington before that.
They set up the camera crews and everything wherever I go.
It's extremely useful and handy and make all these YouTube videos possible.
And so we do an extra half an hour on the Daily Wire side, and that's for subscribers only, but if you're inclined, follow.
All my material from the last 15 years, including a bunch of specials I did too for the Daily
Wire, Western Civilization, specials on marriage and vision and success, and on Exodus and
the Gospels, that's all available there as well. So give it a shot if you're inclined.
Ezra, why don't you let people know where they can follow Rebel News?
Like, what's the best place to watch you or the multiple places to watch you in your intrepid,
trouble-making, rabble-rousing reporters?
Sure.
I mean, rebelnews.com is our homepage, and some of our talents are on Twitter.
You can follow us on Twitter also,
it's just Rebel News Online.
And we're mainly operating in Canada.
We have Abiyamini based in Melbourne, Australia,
but we love to travel to World Economic Forum,
to when there was a big freedom of speech rally
in Sao Paulo, Brazil, when the Brazilian government
banned the entire Twitter app for everybody.
We went down there.
I've never been in a crowd of 100,000 people, or maybe it was 200,000 people.
It was astonishing.
And they actually were rallying for freedom of speech.
I'm so glad we went.
So that's a kind of kamikaze flight to Sao Paulo for one day to go to a rally and come
back. We just went to Mau to a rally and come back.
We just went to Maui, not for a vacation. Sure, that's a true-to-sense.
How's the wildfire reconstruction going?
I wanna know because I got some friends in LA
who want a premonition of what's to come.
It's been 18 months since the wildfires
destroyed the town of Lahaina.
95% of the lots have not had a brick of reconstruction.
They're just covered with gravel.
But FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration,
has set up camps of tiny homes a year and a half into it.
And there's all sorts of schemes to take the land and do other things with it.
Low income housing, environmental housing.
Oh yeah, same thing's going to happen in LA.
It's heartbreaking.
A year and a half later, so I mean, Maui's a beautiful place, that city is a heartbreaking
place and over a hundred people died in that fire too and there was politics in that.
So rebel news, we love covering Canada, we love covering Trump, we have a reporter in
the United Kingdom now, Sammy Woodhouse.
She was one of those 1,400 girls in Rotherham.
She was the whistleblower.
She was the one who rang the bell.
She was the one who broke the silence and went to the newspapers.
Sammy Woodhouse, moral authority, resilient.
She's our new reporter in the UK.
So Revoluze is here and there, but we also travel to find the news where we see it.
Let me give you an anecdote.
I went to the town of Dundrum, Ireland.
I know you haven't heard of it because it's less than 200 people there.
It's like a picture book.
It's so beautiful.
And then the Irish government contracts
with the local hotel to take over all the rooms.
And it was in 240 military-aged migrant men.
And in one fell swoop, Dundrum,
is now a minority Irish village.
No, just what is going on over there?
And rebel-
In Ireland? In Ireland?
There's a crazy country for you.
Man, if you want a country on the forefront of every woke nightmare, you can possibly
imagine you'd be hard pressed to find a better example than Ireland.
I mean, they resisted the British for centuries.
They resisted domination, but they're welcoming it now.
I don't understand it.
They never colonized anyone. They don't understand it. They never colonized
anyone. They don't have some repentance to do. They don't have to pay reparations to
anyone. They're the ones, why are they doing this? I don't know. It's astonishing. I'm
glad I visited Ireland while it was still Irish. And I would say to anyone out there,
go visit that beautiful country while it's still Irish.
Well, we've got another half an hour to do for the Daily Wear. Good to see you, man.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for coming to talk to me.
Thanks for having me.
And to everybody watching and listening,
thank you very much for your time and attention.
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