A spring election is coming, and Justin Trudeau will win again
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Summary
A Canadian election is coming, and I think it s going to be a doozy. I ll tell you why I think an election s coming and how the conservatives are doing so far, and why I m worried about it.
Transcript
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Hello, my rebels. You know, I think it's pretty clear the stars are aligning.
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We're going to have an election this fall in Canada. Pretty sure about it. There's a cabinet
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shuffle. Trudeau's sharpening his blades. The media party's getting revved up. And I'm a little
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bit worried about Aaron O'Toole. I'll tell you why I think an election's coming and how the
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conservatives are doing so far. That's ahead. Before I do, let me invite you to become a video
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viewer of this podcast. I think the video version is the bestest version because it's got all the
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extra stuff in it. It's just eight bucks a month, which is less than Netflix. Go to rebelnews.com,
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click subscribe. And not only do you get my show, you get Sheila Gunn-Reed's weekly show,
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Tonight, a spring election is coming, and I'm afraid Justin Trudeau, he's going to win
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again. It's January 12, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my
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bloody right to do so. The last election was October of 2019, just 15 months ago. But it
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feels like an eternity ago. The whole world has changed. The pandemic was unknown and unthinkable
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back then. The world's economy was being led by our close friend and ally, the United States,
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and that's usually enough for us to benefit by being just close to them. But then came the virus
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from China that scared us all and killed 17,000 Canadians. I acknowledge that those statistics
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are questionable. I see headlines that there are no flu cases this year, and I wonder if
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they're simply being counted as COVID cases. The symptoms are similar. I know that every year,
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about 6,000, 8,000 people die from the regular flu, so it's fair to say COVID-19 is like a bad
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flu season. And no one should be happy about that. But it is simply not true that this meets
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any reasonable standard for a national emergency, a national lockdown, a national flattening of our
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civil liberties. In Alberta, which is one of the few jurisdictions to publish useful information,
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you can see that a grand total of 33 people in all of Alberta have died from the virus who did not
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have serious underlying conditions. Out of 1,307 total deaths, and I'm not saying there is a moral
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difference. A life is a life. But it is useful to govern our public policy to know that this virus is not
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a serious risk to people under 70 who are healthy. Statistically, it's just not. So why are those
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people, young, healthy people, being locked down, curfewed, fined, and economically and socially
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devastated? If the average age of people dying is 82, why are we threatening to taser a 21-year-old
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extremely fit hockey player on an outdoor skating rink? What's the science or the public policy there?
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But you see, no one in authority is asking such questions, and everyone is stressed and confused
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at best, scared at worst. I know there are some people who will never again emerge from their homes
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in a normal way, never again visit their grandchildren again, never go to the restaurant again, never travel
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again. I know one grandparent who told me his own daughter refuses to meet him, not because they're
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not getting along. She just is terrified, she says, of killing him. So she just won't visit him. She has
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been psychologically abused, I guess, turned into such a terrified person, and she is now abusing him
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in a way? I don't know. It's very unhealthy what's going on, and I'm sure that's one of thousands of
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such cases. So imagine what such a population en masse looks like in an election vote. The answer is they
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vote from a position of terror, or at least many of them do. They vote for the party that has taken
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the pandemic the most seriously, and by seriously I don't really mean scientifically, I mean the most
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dramatically, the most extremely. There is no reason for a curfew as Quebec has done. The virus is not
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safe at 7.59 p.m., but deadly at 8 p.m. That's not science, that's theater. It's public health theater.
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I saw this insane headline in the Montreal Gazette, doctors saying they're going to have to start
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killing people if we don't have a curfew. Imagine saying that, how unethical that is to say.
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You know, we're going to have to start putting up with this public health theater, much like we've
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all learned to put up with airline security theater airports, except for that charade takes what,
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an extra 20 minutes of your life and only when you travel? It's limited in scope and cost. Sure,
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it's over time, cost hundreds of billions of dollars in lost time and destruction to the
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travel industry, but that's chump change compared to what lockdowns have done to all of us all the
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time. A perpetual airport security line for everything, just for stepping out of your house.
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Trillions of dollars in damage already, but also countless profiteers too. This is so absurd,
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it sounds made up like satire. Californian's Gavin Newsom, he's the governor, saying, sure,
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lots of little people have gone bankrupt, lots of working class people, lots of small businesses,
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but the billionaires are doing even better than ever. Yeah, paradoxically, the crazier the politician
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is about the lockdown, the more likely they are to be reelected, or at least the more dramatic they are,
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the most concerned they are, the most authoritarian they are. So far in the past year, when provinces
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have gone to the polls in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, those governments
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have come back with increased majorities. Trump lost his election, but barely, and I put it to you,
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it's because of the pandemic in a couple of ways. The fear mongers made people afraid, slowed down the
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economy, and of course, most importantly, the pandemic allowed mail-in voting to be approved by the
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courts. In the last moments of the campaign, as our friend Joel Pollack says, it wasn't free,
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it wasn't fair, but it was made legal. The Democrats saw to that. So here we come now in Canada.
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Look at this. Cabinet ministers who aren't running again have been asked to step down
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to clear the decks for new cabinet ministers and new candidates. Why would you do that just 15 months
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after the last election? Obviously, an election is coming. A cabinet shuffle. No important changes.
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The foreign ministers shuffled, but not disavowed. No major changes, but just getting ready for the
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looming election. This is the team that will govern if they win again, which I think they will.
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And you know that because the liberals have revved up their smear machine, they're getting ready.
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Their go-to move in a campaign, I mean, it worked last time, it'll be their go-to move again now,
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is calling everyone they hate a Nazi. Everyone they hate is a Nazi. It's childish,
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but it works. Because the media party uses the same playbook, so they'll go along with it again,
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of course. They'll add a new word to that, terrorist. Domestic terrorist. Because of what
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happened in Washington last week, a summer Black Lives Matter riots, they would never use the word
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domestic terrorist, but now they'll call any conservative terrorist, they'll simply call their enemies
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Nazis, terrorists. In other words, they'll actually incite violence against their own conservative
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opponents. They're all in on it. And naturally, they're putting us here at Rebel News on that list
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because we are the largest independent news media company in Canada, the largest that has an audience.
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We produce an awful lot of news. Contrary to the official narrative, we're rebutting, we're refuting
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the official line all the time. They can't have that. And because we don't take Justin Trudeau's
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bailout money, he hasn't been able to buy us off or buy our silence. So I fear they're going to try
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and come for us in some other way, like the big tech companies silenced Donald Trump by just banning
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him. Like they silenced the new app called Parler, just shutting it down, smashing every company that
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did business with it. So of course, Justin Trudeau is going to have a spring election.
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Here's an aggregator of every public opinion poll in Canada in recent weeks and months.
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Now this is from the CBC's website, but it really isn't the CBC's opinion. It's just them
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compiling the work of other pollsters. And you can see the polls for weeks, for months.
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The polls have all said the same thing with remarkable uniformity.
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The liberals are going to win. The only question is how big. Pretty much a 50-50 chance of Trudeau
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either getting a majority or a minority. Less than 10% chance of the conservatives winning
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and only with a minority. Now again, this isn't really the opinion of the CBC. It's what these
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polls would suggest if you aggregate them. Now things can change in an election campaign.
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Events matter. But you really think they're going to change? Has the new conservative leader Aaron O'Toole
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put together a battle plan and a team to execute that plan? Well, he has something called a shadow
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cabinet, right? With official critics for different subjects, right? But as we showed you with that
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simple quiz, his front bench has pretty much been invisible this past year. That was the quiz. Can you
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name, without Googling it, the health minister? Can you name the environment minister? Can you name
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the minister of other things in the news, the foreign minister, the defense minister? Very few
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people can, which goes to the fact they're not getting the message out. Here's Michelle Rempel,
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the health critic. I had to Google that. Take a listen to this.
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I'm going to be totally upfront with you guys. I spent Christmas alone in Calgary.
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It was a really hard decision to make. I didn't get to see my family at Christmas.
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I miss my husband. He's in Oklahoma. But I knew if I went down to Oklahoma, I knew that I would have
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vultuous CBC reporters reporting on my whereabouts, saying that I was a bad example to the Canadian
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public. And I knew I couldn't go. So it's a personal complaint that although she has a six-figure
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income, and she's recording that from home, she's complaining that she can't actually skedaddle
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off to the United States to be with her family there, because she's worried she's going to be
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caught and embarrassed. So she wants to go. And she's letting you know she wants to go, but she's
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worried about being caught. So she told us what she actually wants to do secretly. So she doesn't want
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to live under the rules that the rest of us have to live in. And certainly she doesn't want to stay
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here and fight. She wants to go to the States. Now, some might expect her to actually fight given her
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job title. It's her job, which is paying her six figures plus endless perks and expense accounts.
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She is the health critic for the conservative opposition. But she just wants to go to the U.S.
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during the lockdown. How about stay and fight? Look, I want to go to the U.S. too. Millions of the rest of
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us. Want to go somewhere nice and warm, where you don't have to wear a mask, where you can go to a
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restaurant. But she is actually the only person in all of Canada called official opposition critic
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for health, which should tell you your job. Oppose the government on matters of health,
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the pandemic. But instead of fighting, she wants to run away and only because she's worried she'll be
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caught doesn't she go. This is not very inspiring. Come on, we're going to get slaughtered in this next
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election. And by we, I mean the opposition to Trudeau, anyone who's worried about him. He's
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going to get a majority this time. Although I'm not really sure what he would do differently with
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the majority, as opposed to what he's doing now. I mean, has he been stopped with any of his plans
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now? He has us all in a state of emergency now. Parliament barely functions now. It's borrowing what,
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a billion dollars a day to spend now. Massive sweetheart contracts to liberal insiders
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now. A totally lapdog media now. Really, what would Justin Trudeau do with a majority that he can't do
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with his minority now? A few things, the parliament, the committees looking into ethics, they would be
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even more toothless finding out his own corruption, his own ethics, like the WE charity in the SNC
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lab land. He'd control the ethics committee about things like that, his secret vacations.
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But really, he's never apologized. He's never admitted doing anything wrong. He just keeps
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operating. He pays his $500 ethics fine and moves on. It's worked for him his whole life. Why would
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he stop now? I think he'd do more in the way of civil liberty squashing if he had a majority. His MPs,
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more or less, are calling for conservatives to be labeled terrorists and extremists and violent
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people now. That's enough to scare Aaron O'Toole, apparently. I mean, just hours after we published
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our email interview with O'Toole yesterday in the morning, O'Toole then told the Globe and Mail
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that he wouldn't have anything more to do with us. Why? What happened in those few hours? Did we
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misquote him? No, we didn't. Did we do something wrong? Of course not. We ran the interview verbatim.
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It was a good interview. I thought he looked good in it. He panicked, though, because the fancy
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people, who are also the mean people, told him that they would call him a terrorist or a Nazi or
00:14:12.680
whatever if he didn't disown us, even though he just did that interview with us, which is pretty
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weird. I mean, we're a media company. We don't really need the endorsement of politicians. It's
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sort of the opposite. Normally, politicians try to get the endorsement of media, except the media is
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completely bought and sold in Canada already. They're all for Trudeau. So for O'Toole to say
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he's not going to give us his endorsement, that doesn't make a lot of sense. It's sort of upside
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down. Now, we will keep reporting the news as we always do. We really do good work during elections,
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if I may say so myself, and we'll do an even better job this time, given our expanded team.
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We've got new reporters now. We've got Drea in Vancouver. We've got Andrew and Tamara in Ontario.
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We're looking to hire in Montreal and Ottawa. I'm excited about things. And obviously, we still
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think that Aaron O'Toole winning is better than Justin Trudeau winning. We just don't think that's
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very likely. And after O'Toole showed how quickly and pathetically he caves into the media party,
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the mean girls on Twitter, well, I really don't think O'Toole needs to worry about us. I think he
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needs to worry about his own party's base, which is surely demoralized. If you cave in so quickly,
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you're not ready for a campaign. I'd expect more from a military man. I won't tell you any names,
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but I can assure you that today I have received a large number of messages from very senior
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conservatives, even in O'Toole's own staff, who say they're flabbergasted by his complete surrender
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to the media party. I mean, forget about O'Toole's repeated promises to stand up to cancel culture.
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Now he's in charge of cancel culture. He's trying to cancel us. I don't think that's going to happen
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though, mate, because he's worried the media party will cancel him if he doesn't cancel us.
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He can't cancel us. I promise you we will still be here fighting hard the day after the next federal
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election. I'm not so sure if O'Toole will be. Not that I don't like the guy. I mean, he seems like a good
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enough guy, but he really hasn't done anything since becoming leader and neither of most of his
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critics other than complaining about not being able to escape the lockdown. And at the first whiff of
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gunpowder yesterday, they surrendered to the media party about us for no reason. Come on. Well, I think
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we know how it's going to go every day during the campaign. I mean, really, is something going to
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change now? So we're getting ready for the election, just like we did last time. We'll be covering the
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campaign everywhere we can, including the leaders' debates, even if we have to go to the federal
00:16:44.300
court to get an order to let us in again. And unlike O'Toole's critics, you won't have trouble
00:16:51.060
finding out where we stand on Justin Trudeau or his policies, will you? Stay with us for more.
00:16:57.960
Well, as you know, one of our favorite things to do is to talk to conservative authors or authors with
00:17:15.500
the other side of the story, people who have a dissident opinion. Tragically, it's very rare in
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our media literature landscape. But what a pleasure to have such a thoughtful book published today
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against the establishment opinion on COVID-19. The title of the new book is called COVID-19,
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The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic. And that's exactly what it is, isn't it? And it's published by
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the Frontier Center for Public Policy, one of the good guys, that's for sure. It's co-authored with
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Marco Navarro-Gini and Dr. Barry Cooper, who joins us today via Zoom. Dr. Cooper, great to see you
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again. Congratulations on this book. And I have to say, I'm a little bit surprised that Amazon is even
00:18:05.760
letting you sell it because they have censored other books that take a skeptical view of the
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pandemic moral panic. Well, what we do, I mean, we footnote things up the union. We got, I don't know
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how many hundred footnotes. So it's actually not meant to be a polemical discussion of all of the
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misinformation and kind of goofiness around COVID-19. It really is a scholarly analysis.
00:18:34.020
And we use, believe it or not, a certified lefty intellectual, Michel Foucault, to provide the main
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conceptual lens through which we look at all this stuff, namely his concept of what he, in French,
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he calls it pouvoir savoir, power knowledge. And that, we think, is the central issue in all of this
00:18:57.880
nonsense that's been going on. Well, you talk about an idea that was popularized about 50 years ago
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in a book written by Stanley Cohen called Folk Devils and Moral Panics. And right away, I think
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you're getting into it because it's an emotional thing. It's a, it's a faith thing. It's a superstition
00:19:20.560
thing without even, I have not read that book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. But right away, I'm thinking
00:19:26.840
the madness of the Salem witch trials. I'm thinking of madnesses, maybe even some anti-Semitic pogroms.
00:19:34.500
Oh, the Jews have poisoned our well. We have to get rid of the Jews. Like, or some of the superstitions
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that grew up around the great plague, the Black Death. I think that there's a great psychological fear
00:19:47.880
over things. I mean, listen, COVID-19 is a real disease and it has killed around 17,000 Canadians.
00:19:54.680
But I point out that the flu on any given year kills 8,500. So it's, it's twice as bad as an
00:20:00.200
average flu year. But this is not the apocalypse that our political class says it is. Or am I wrong?
00:20:06.220
No, that's exactly right. When the guy who is a sociologist in the UK, you're probably too young
00:20:13.800
to remember the mods and the rockers. I remember them. I didn't realize until I started studying this
00:20:20.000
stuff in graduate school. That in the UK, this was almost seen as the, as the end of the world as
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we know it. A bunch of young men, mainly, going down to Brighton and fighting each other. This was
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supposed to be some kind of apocalyptic event that would end civilization in the UK. Well, that
00:20:40.780
attitude can be transferred to all of the examples, the historical examples you just cited.
00:20:45.900
And it is certainly important in the COVID panic. I want to, I just have your blurb here, the book,
00:20:52.160
and I want to read it because it's really in bullet point form. And this really, I think you've grasped
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the way of thinking here. Let me read just 50 words. The process occurs in stages. One, an event or
00:21:07.080
perhaps a person is defined as a threat, perhaps only a vague threat to existing values, traditions,
00:21:12.480
or interests. Two, the event is simplified and presented in the mass and now social media in a
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stereotypical way. Three, moral barricades are manned by editors, politicians, experts, and other
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right-thinking people and socially authorized knowers. Four, ways of coping with the disturbance
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are developed. And eventually, five, the public profile of the disturbance, event, individual,
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et cetera, declines and is forgotten or is retained as a memory and as a diffuse or potential threat.
00:21:43.840
The folk devil. I really think that's the thinking going on. And I think people wearing masks,
00:21:50.140
it's like they're maybe in the past they would have worn a garlic around their neck to be immune from a
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Dracula or even a religious, you know, rosary or something. I think the mask is a quasi-religious
00:22:04.100
pagan symbol of, oh, I'm a believer. I'm against the folk devil. Be gone, folk devil. Be gone. Oh,
00:22:10.800
you're not wearing your mask? You must be in league with the folk devil.
00:22:15.520
Yes, exactly. The number of people who have, I just encountered them in stores, some of whom are
00:22:22.920
wearing masks, some of whom are not, have said exactly that, that their customers who come in
00:22:29.380
who are not wearing masks, they are treated by other customers as if they're somehow, you know,
00:22:36.220
infected. Those who are think of themselves as being morally superior. What they, they don't seem
00:22:43.400
to get the symbolism. I mean, the whole point of a mask is to shut you up. You know, the experimental
00:22:51.020
evidence on the effect of masks is, let's say, mixed. Nobody wants to talk about that. So you
00:22:57.380
get these authoritative doctors saying one thing and other equally certified doctors saying other
00:23:04.620
things. And so normal people just get confused and they say, well, I guess I get it better do what
00:23:10.200
everybody else is doing. And that's why they do it. One of the interesting things in the last month,
00:23:15.840
doctor, is how many of this official class, you talked about the official knowers, the high priests
00:23:23.820
of this moral panic, how many of them have in their personal and sometimes private and even sneaky
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conduct, have exempted themselves from the rituals that they command us to do. I'm talking about
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politicians going away on a sunny beach here in Ontario. You had one doctor take five
00:23:45.160
vacations. Now he just gets a $1 million severance. A police chief who's enforcing the laws. He goes to
00:23:53.360
the beach. And by the way, I'm, I'm all for going to warm and sunny beaches, but these are the enforcers
00:23:58.460
of the new austerity. And I think this is how it always is, is that all these inquisitors, all these
00:24:06.980
investigators, they don't, A, they don't believe in it. And B, they're the biggest hypocrites of all.
00:24:12.580
What effect, if any, do you think that this almost daily discovery of lockdown cheaters,
00:24:19.760
and I'm only using that word for the lockdown enforcers who cheat, you and I are normal humans
00:24:24.360
trying to live our lives. But when an enforcer is caught lockdown cheating, what do you think the
00:24:29.160
impact of that is, doctor? I would say that the first impact is that nobody says we're all in this
00:24:35.040
together anymore. You remember that slogan, a meaningless slogan. We haven't heard that lately
00:24:40.640
because everybody in this country and in most other countries know we're not all in this together,
00:24:46.780
particularly when these enforcers and other authorized important people go off to Hawaii or
00:24:53.540
to the West Indies or something like that. We've never really been in it together. Everyone has known
00:24:59.980
from at least last March, probably from February, that the effect of this virus on human populations
00:25:08.380
is much, is differentiated. I mean, old people who are sick are the ones who get it and have serious
00:25:16.260
effects. And then there are huge problems with the statistics. Do you die with or from COVID?
00:25:23.020
There's been so much evidence about people who die with it are diagnosed as having died from it.
00:25:30.980
And people know this. And so they simply distrust, and I would say quite properly, distrust these
00:25:37.300
self-styled authorities because they are not really authoritative. They refuse to acknowledge what they
00:25:43.860
don't know. And the rest of us can figure that out pretty quickly. Yeah. I mean, the absurd case of someone
00:25:50.000
falling off a ladder, dying from falling off a ladder, and it was tagged as a COVID-19 death.
00:25:57.200
So how do we get out of this? Because I think that things are getting worse, not better in 2021.
00:26:03.520
I mean, I recall, and I point out that the mandatory masks were not brought in until August, September,
00:26:11.380
when the months after the pandemic peaked in early, mid-April. So it all, the masks all came in
00:26:21.640
together in August, September. And now the vaccine, I'm certain we're going to have vaccine passports,
00:26:27.340
freedom passports, flying passport, whatever you want to call them. I think things are about to get
00:26:34.300
tougher. And I think all these previous waves of civil liberties violations, those were just to
00:26:41.000
condition us to, I mean, now they've got curfews in Quebec, and they're talking about it in Ontario.
00:26:46.960
What's the end game here? Like, what's next? Is this how it's going to be forever?
00:26:53.060
That's a very good question. It would take a kind of responsibility among our politicians,
00:26:58.580
for which there is absolutely no evidence at the present, for them to start behaving responsibly.
00:27:04.580
I don't think that's going to happen. They, I mean, Lord Acton did not say absolute power
00:27:09.600
makes you more generous. It is a very corrupting thing in terms of our entire political system.
00:27:17.000
And it divides in terms of the lack of trust that ordinary Canadians have for their political leaders.
00:27:23.060
It's not going to end well. I can't see how our politicians are going to actually use some common
00:27:29.660
sense for a change. They certainly haven't in the last year. You know, I'm pretty sure we're heading
00:27:35.120
into a spring election. Justin Trudeau shuffled his cabinet. They're making announcements that sound
00:27:40.120
like they're clearing the decks for a campaign. The media is in almost complete support of the lockdown.
00:27:46.880
There's a few skeptics out there, but I really think they're an anomaly. Opposition parties are
00:27:54.320
either silent or egging on the governments to do more. The only government in Canada that has tried
00:28:02.440
to put on the brakes a bit is Jason Kenney in Alberta, and he was undermined by his own caucus,
00:28:08.980
and the media has just been pillaring him. I can't see any organized opposition to this. Doctors
00:28:15.640
who speak out are getting complaints to the College of Physicians and Surgeons. I see no institution
00:28:22.840
that's acting as a brake here. I see a lot acting as an accelerator, but none acting as a brake.
00:28:30.100
Yeah, I agree entirely. On the other side, reality is still what it is. And, you know, eventually,
00:28:38.480
reality, as all of the climate change guys say, reality gets the last innings at bat. I mean,
00:28:46.780
we'll see. I suspect, you know, I'm not in the business of predicting, but I suspect that there
00:28:53.040
may be a sufficient number of Canadians who say this, we have a technical term in political science,
00:28:58.420
the short firm is BS. This is so much BS that we're not going to take it anymore. But that will lead to
00:29:05.540
some very serious, I would say, political disorders. But I can't see any other way out.
00:29:13.640
We're talking to Dr. Barry Cooper, the author of the new book, COVID-19,
00:29:17.640
The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic. You know, I don't wear a mask. I sometimes wear a mask
00:29:27.620
exemption button just to stop scolds from coming up to me. I have noticed in the last two months
00:29:33.780
a souring of the public mood, whereas people never used to remark or anything. Now I see people with
00:29:41.720
masks on that are either not wearing them properly or clearly hate wearing them coming up to me in
00:29:47.560
scolding me. And I think it's because they have a cognitive dissonance. They hate the masks.
00:29:54.960
They're irritated by it. I think their own use of the mask is in a manner that indicates they don't
00:30:02.540
really believe in it. But they're saying, if I have to do this, you have to also. It's not that
00:30:08.480
they're actually worried about the virus. They're just saying, how come you're not complying like I am?
00:30:13.420
There's a sourness there I didn't notice until a few months ago. I don't know. It reminds me of
00:30:22.140
how people in the Soviet Union used to live. There was your public face and then there's your secret
00:30:28.760
honest talk that you would have only with true friends and close family members. You had a public
00:30:34.400
facade and then a private facade. You always have to worry about informants and snitches, which by the
00:30:39.740
way we're seeing again. I wonder if an if all the compliant mask wearers and people cheering along,
00:30:47.420
if they secretly know this whole thing is a scam. I don't know. I just sense a sourness out there
00:30:53.660
against people who are not believers. What comes after the sourness and these sort of laser
00:31:00.560
looks of disgust when you're not wearing your mask are jokes. The Soviet Union was famous
00:31:08.320
for its very funny and completely critical of the establishment jokes. So when, say, Teresa Tam gets
00:31:18.520
ridiculed, that's a good sign. When the Prime Minister gets ridiculed because of this, that will be a good
00:31:25.700
sign. And I suspect it will be coming fairly soon. You know what? I take your point. And of course,
00:31:31.220
jokes are, I mean, the Ayatollah says there are no jokes in Islam. He hated jokes. Stalin, I mean,
00:31:39.120
he sent, I think Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag for writing a joke about Stalin's mustache.
00:31:46.200
Yes. But both of those stories make the point that, yeah, jokes are a sign of rebellion. Was it Orwell who
00:31:53.340
said every joke is a little revolution? I think it was him. But that didn't stop Solzhenitsyn from being
00:31:58.260
sent to the gulag. So we can make jokes. But as they're, as they're still cracking down on us,
00:32:04.340
as they're giving us $6,000 curfew fines in Montreal, you can joke about that gallows humor,
00:32:11.000
black humor. But the jackboot is still there. If you're banned from Twitter, if you're banned from
00:32:18.080
flying on an airplane, you can make all the jokes you like, but it doesn't make the situation much
00:32:21.940
better, though. That's absolutely correct. This form of tyranny is what Hannah Arendt called
00:32:29.880
administrative tyranny. And she said something very interesting about it. It is the worst kind
00:32:36.700
of tyranny because the desperate measure of tyrannicide is not available. It is just an
00:32:44.120
administrative blob about which most of us are. We can be ironic. We can make jokes and so on.
00:32:51.660
But we still have to put up with the mask police. We still have to put up with dirty looks when we go
00:32:57.260
into co-op and we're not wearing a mask. But, you know, you have to do what you have to do, I guess.
00:33:03.640
Yeah. I mean, listen, I don't mind the dirty looks and I don't even mind the scolding. I assure you,
00:33:09.060
I give better than I get. But it's the cops with guns and tasers. Like it's the cops screaming at
00:33:17.740
Ocean Weisblatt on that outdoor hockey arena in Calgary and threatening to taser him. That's what
00:33:25.000
I don't know how to deal with. And I'm worried that there will be much worse things before things
00:33:31.160
get better. In the meantime, Dr. Cooper, congratulations on your book. We'll have a link
00:33:36.700
to it underneath this video. And I think I'd like to send this video out to our viewers across Canada
00:33:42.880
because I think they'd be very interested in hearing your thoughtful points. The book is called
00:33:46.960
COVID-19, The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic. I think that's such a helpful way of looking at it.
00:33:54.560
Yes, it is a real disease that has killed twice the annual death toll of the annual flu. It is. But
00:34:02.120
the civil liberties restrictions, the diminution of parliament,
00:34:10.300
the overweening powers of the police, that has nothing to do with the virus. That has everything
00:34:14.880
to do with, as Dr. Cooper says, absolute power. Thanks for your time today. I wish you good luck
00:34:21.160
with this book. And we'll have to have you back on to talk more about this in the future.
00:34:26.280
Thanks, Ezra. All right. You take care. There you have it. Dr. Barry Cooper,
00:34:31.060
co-author of the book with Marco Navarrogini. And you can get it at the link below. Stay with us.
00:34:36.460
On my show last night, Paul writes, conservative party members let the media party choose who is
00:34:52.820
and isn't electable. So we get controlled opposition. Canada dies in weakness. You know,
00:35:01.320
I was watching this whole thing unfold yesterday. And it was like some Twitter chatterboxes gossips that
00:35:07.940
managed to provoke O'Toole's communications director in making it a big deal. Like, seriously,
00:35:13.840
if she would have just focused on doing her real work, rather than wasting time on Twitter,
00:35:18.000
it would have been a nothing. Who let some Twitter trolls command their whole day and turn
00:35:24.000
it into a two-day story? I'm so embarrassed for them. Nellis writes, big tech has now become the
00:35:30.840
ministry of truth, it seems. Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. So therefore,
00:35:35.440
whoever controls the medium controls the messages on it. You are so right. You know, it's funny.
00:35:40.920
Twitter was starting to censor candidates in Uganda. Apparently, there's some political thing
00:35:46.640
going on. Maybe it's an election. I haven't followed it. So Twitter was trying to do their
00:35:49.900
moves in Uganda. And today, the Ugandan president said, no, we're just going to shut you down on
00:35:56.940
Facebook too. And look at this tweet from Twitter. Oh, how dare you censor us? Do you forget that you
00:36:05.020
just censored the president of the United States last week? And they're outraged at censorship.
00:36:11.100
You know what? I'm on Team Uganda in this one. Bruce writes, the interview with Calvin Robinson
00:36:18.040
shows us how dangerous these militant leftists are to freedom. It's true to that those who love
00:36:25.040
deplatforming others might end up the same way themselves. It reminds me of Orwell's 1984. It's
00:36:30.740
a book worth rereading. You know what? I should reread it. I like to read it every five years.
00:36:36.540
Probably time to read it again. That's our show for today. Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us
00:36:43.920
here, the Rebel World Headquarters, and we're around the world, but Canada's the big fight,
00:36:49.020
you know. Good night, and keep fighting for free.