EZRA LEVANT ｜ Are they really going to arrest Trump like they do in banana republics？
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
164.9339
Summary
Is the DA planning to arrest Donald Trump? And why is it so important that he does so? Plus we hear from Janine Younis about her lawsuit against the Biden regime and why she thinks the DA should be brought to justice.
Transcript
00:00:00.180
Hello, my friends. Today, we're going to talk about the Manhattan DA's plans to arrest Donald Trump.
00:00:06.920
That was the best million-dollar campaign gift that George Soros ever made, don't you think?
00:00:12.300
Then we'll talk to my friend Janine Younis about her lawsuit against the Biden regime.
00:00:17.020
Very interesting stuff today. But first, let me invite you to go to rebelnewsplus.com.
00:00:21.360
That's our video version of this podcast. We put a lot of effort in the video. I'd love for you to see it.
00:00:27.200
It's just $8 a month. Go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe, and you'll also have the satisfaction of supporting Rebel News
00:00:34.300
because you know we don't take any money from Trudeau, and it shows.
00:00:39.400
Tonight, are they really going to arrest Donald Trump like they do in Banana Republics?
00:00:59.720
It's March 21st, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
00:01:02.500
I don't think it's happened yet, and all we have to go on is rumors and leaks, but they say
00:01:23.000
that Donald Trump, the former U.S. president, could be arrested at any moment.
00:01:27.460
In fact, today was supposed to be that day. Now, it's all just leaks and speculation,
00:01:34.480
but it appears to be serious enough that the various law enforcement agencies at hand are meeting each other.
00:01:40.120
I mean, you've got Donald Trump's Secret Service detail, as all ex-presidents have,
00:01:45.560
that's armed and on 24-hour duty to protect him from anything and everything, including terrorism,
00:01:51.560
kidnapping, revenge, just even ordinary crimes. So he's really got this personal police detachment
00:01:58.220
with him, with serious counterterrorism training. So how does police force A arrest a man protected
00:02:07.100
by police force B? And for what, by the way? Stormy Daniels, and whether or not Trump gave her a
00:02:16.040
payment to hush up something that he did do or didn't do, but she said he would do, that whole
00:02:21.520
thing is being litigated to death. In fact, litigation, she had to pay Donald Trump hundreds
00:02:26.520
of thousands of dollars after their court battle. Stormy Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, is in
00:02:32.800
prison right now. I remember when the left said he was going to be the candidate for the Democrats in
00:02:37.820
2020 and beat Trump. So it's hard to imagine that that would be the crime that would cause
00:02:45.780
the former president to be arrested, handcuffed, jailed, and prosecuted, especially by the New York
00:02:53.960
City district attorney, given the skyrocketing crime in that city. I mean, if we're suddenly going
00:03:01.740
to prosecute crimes, really? The Stormy Daniels stuff? Not actual political crimes like Hillary
00:03:08.460
Clinton destroying tens of thousands of documents. Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, who was running
00:03:14.600
the Clinton Foundation when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, steering hundreds of millions
00:03:19.900
of dollars of donations from countries she was making decisions about as Secretary of State,
00:03:25.500
those countries would pay money to the Clinton Foundation. No charges there, no investigations,
00:03:31.740
no raids on their homes, only a raid on Mar-a-Lago. How about Hunter Biden? The crimes that you can see
00:03:39.400
him committing in his own selfie videos on his laptop. Well, forget about Hunter. He's not actually
00:03:45.500
a politician. He's just a gateway to his father, the big guy, Joe Biden. As we mentioned on our live
00:03:54.900
stream the other day, Democrats and Republicans alike see that a million dollars, records of a
00:04:01.720
million dollars paid to a Biden family member. Why? For what? And Biden just simply denies it, no
00:04:08.600
investigation. It's just Trump that obsesses the left. You know, in many other countries, sitting
00:04:16.580
politicians, sitting legislators are immune from criminal prosecution. Now, I always, whenever I heard
00:04:24.540
of that, I always thought it was a terrible idea. I always thought it obviously encouraged corruption.
00:04:29.800
If being a politician meant you got to get out of jail free card, you could never be criminalized for
00:04:36.020
what you do, then surely criminals would all want to become politicians. How would you ever root it out?
00:04:42.180
But I now see the logic of that in a corrupt country. It's a logic that only works in banana
00:04:47.900
republics where charges against political leaders are trumped up and used for political gain.
00:04:52.820
I don't know if you saw, but the Oscar for foreign documentary called Navalny. Navalny is the name
00:05:04.840
of a Russian opposition leader to Putin who was charged with corruption. I think he's in jail right
00:05:09.740
now. That's the kind of thing that countries, authoritarian regimes with bully rulers do. They
00:05:16.000
arrest and trump up charges against their critics. But that's what's allegedly, purportedly, reportedly
00:05:23.560
going to happen in the United States, maybe even today. And whose direction? Well, the district
00:05:33.400
attorney of New York County, really the DA of Manhattan, this guy, Alvin Bragg. You've never heard of him
00:05:40.700
before. Don't feel bad. Most people haven't. He was elected district attorney. They do that in the
00:05:45.940
states. They vote for their prosecutors. And he won. And typically we hear of sheriffs or prosecutors
00:05:53.500
running on a tough on crime platform, a hang them high platform, but not on the Democrat side in the U.S.,
00:06:00.480
not in the blue states. They run on the opposite. They run on sanctuary cities. They run on, for example,
00:06:07.200
not charging anyone if they are shoplifting less than $1,000, not getting involved at all. It's insane.
00:06:15.960
The race to the left is the opposite of tough on crime. And this guy, this DA, won the Democratic Party
00:06:25.000
primary for being the DA with just 85,000 votes. Really, if you're in New York City, you know the
00:06:33.640
Democrat's going to win. So it's Democrat versus Democrat. He just squicked by his competitor in
00:06:40.720
the primary who had 77,000 votes. So just by a 10,000 vote margin with fewer than 100,000 votes
00:06:47.340
altogether. Oh, but he had something going for him. A million dollars from George Soros. Of course,
00:06:54.940
we have to find out about that, as we often do, in the U.K. press. As I say, crime is way up in New York
00:07:02.780
City. Small crime, petty crime, big crime, racial crime, crimes against Jews, crimes against shopkeepers.
00:07:10.160
I didn't know this, but it was this DA who made the atrocious decisions in the Jose Alba matter that
00:07:16.900
we covered. Jose Alba was a shopkeeper, and he was attacked in his shop, and he defended himself,
00:07:24.980
and in the tussle, he killed his attacker in self-defense. Bragg wanted to throw the book at
00:07:32.660
Jose Alba, demanded a half a million dollars bail. He couldn't come up with that money.
00:07:38.180
The judge lowered it to 250,000. The attacker's accomplice, his girlfriend, also stabbed Jose Alba,
00:07:45.580
the shopkeeper, but no charges against her. That DA that would throw a shopkeeper to the wolves and
00:07:54.140
free his attackers, that is the Soros DA coming for Trump. And it's brilliant. I mean, think about it,
00:08:02.640
a million bucks for a DA in New York City. That's a bargain at twice the price. Certainly easier and
00:08:11.020
cheaper than beating Trump in 2016 or in 2024. And you know what? It divides the United States
00:08:18.640
against itself. It demoralizes half the country and teaches the other half that you can game the
00:08:25.180
system and have an inside job. It makes conservatives the worst part. It makes conservatives lose respect
00:08:31.760
for law and order and police and prosecutors and the rule of law. And that is a huge win for the left
00:08:37.340
too. Demoralize half of America, the law and order half, the support the cops, back the blue half,
00:08:46.040
turn them against their institutions, just like they turn them against their institutions in
00:08:51.720
football with the taken knee. You know, there is no justice anymore for conservatives or Republicans
00:08:57.840
in blue counties. This is what happens. Now, will the red counties, will the Republicans respond in kind?
00:09:05.040
Will they prosecute Hillary Clinton or Obama or any leftists for their crimes? Well,
00:09:11.980
we know the answer to that. They will not. We know that because they did not. Even Trump himself
00:09:17.040
didn't use the power of the prosecutor to go after not just his enemies, but those enemies committing
00:09:22.580
crimes. I think part of it is that conservatives respect the rule of law. They don't want to
00:09:28.160
weaponize it. They want to follow the rules, whereas the left will do anything for power.
00:09:33.280
I think this whole circus, and that's what it is, is to demoralize America. But it's also a
00:09:41.020
distraction from terrible things that are happening right now. Xi Jinping is in Moscow visiting Vladimir
00:09:49.580
Putin. They are teaming up against America and the West. You know, that was a major strategic
00:09:56.620
victory during the Cold War to break China away from Russia. It was an enormous accomplishment
00:10:03.440
because those two together could have, the thinking goes, overwhelmed the West. And now
00:10:09.240
they're forged as a union, as allies. That's on the foreign front. There's the Ukraine war and the
00:10:15.820
hundred billion cent over there. Then there's the bank failures, the runs on the banks. And then
00:10:21.300
there's the domestic drug crisis, the open border with Mexico, which is related. Arresting Trump,
00:10:29.040
we'll take those stories off the front page. We'll keep an eye peeled for that story. It's an incredible
00:10:34.760
one, and I feel very bad about it. But back to Canada, I want to talk a little bit about
00:10:38.620
the speech or a couple of speeches that Justin Trudeau gave.
00:10:43.000
I've watched too many speeches from Trudeau, and I really find it hard to pay attention to them
00:10:50.000
because really it's like listening to a substitute drama teacher. He used to give speeches for $20,000
00:10:57.720
or $30,000 a pop, almost always to teachers unions or some government-oriented group. They
00:11:04.260
weren't really paying for him to give a speech. It was like he was reading a bunch of cliches. It was
00:11:08.500
really a form of money laundering. Pay $30,000 to Trudeau to spend an hour with him. Buy influence
00:11:14.520
with him. You're not paying to listen to what he has to say. You're paying to pay him, and the speech
00:11:19.720
is just the legal way to give him a tip. But I saw part of this, and I certainly would never
00:11:26.320
suggest that anyone watch the whole hour-long video. You'll lose 10 IQ points just listening to it.
00:11:32.520
But just the tone deafness of Trudeau who enforced the brutal lockdowns, the demonization of the
00:11:40.740
unvaccinated, who enforced banning the unvaccinated from planes and trains, who said, should we even
00:11:48.880
tolerate them? This is the Trudeau who's talking about protecting minority rights and stopping the
00:11:54.920
tyranny of the majority. Listen to this guy. Does he even have any self-awareness?
00:12:01.220
One of the challenges in democracies is known as the tyranny of the majority. When you say,
00:12:09.780
well, it's a democracy. We'll vote on it, and we'll do the right thing as we move forward.
00:12:15.460
That's the principle we run with. Democracy, the majority is always right. Except, of course,
00:12:19.840
when it isn't. If you were to imagine a scenario in which someone proposed to pass a law that said,
00:12:27.940
people who are right-handed will pay fewer taxes, and they'll be compensated by people who are
00:12:34.180
left-handed. Because, you know, left-handed people keep cutting themselves with the wrong-headed
00:12:37.460
scissors, and they open doors the wrong way, and there's more addition to... Sorry. One lefty appreciates
00:12:43.780
that. You know, it's a ridiculous thought, right? But imagine for a second, people decided, okay,
00:12:52.020
I'm going to vote with my self-interest. And you had a bill pass, 80% that was unfair to people who can't
00:13:04.100
help the fact that they're born left-handed, no matter how many nuns wrapped on their knuckles when
00:13:08.820
they were in school, to try and force them to be right-handed. They're just left-handed. You can't
00:13:13.380
change anything about that. That wouldn't be fair, even though you can imagine right-handers voting
00:13:20.260
massively, and therefore, hey, it voted on it. It's a democracy. That's decided. Well, no. It doesn't
00:13:25.700
work that way. And that's why most, if not all democracies, have some sort of recognition of
00:13:33.060
fundamental inalienable rights that can't be taken away by governments making laws that please the
00:13:41.140
majority. This is the prime minister who campaigned in 2021. Should we tolerate them? Should we even
00:13:49.620
tolerate them? If you're not vaccinated, you cannot sit on the... This is the guy who's talking about the
00:13:56.500
tyranny of the majority, the one who demonized the minority for his own political benefit.
00:14:02.020
You deserve better. You deserve a government that's going to continue to say, get vaccinated.
00:14:08.340
And you know what? If you don't want to get vaccinated, that's your choice. But don't think
00:14:14.100
you can get on a plane or a train besides vaccinated people and put them at risk.
00:14:19.220
You know, it's incredible. And I wonder if he even listens to himself or if he's just playing some
00:14:24.740
message track that he memorized. And then there's this substitute teacher-level lecture. Oh my god,
00:14:30.340
take a listen to this. We increasingly live huge parts of our lives online. We get our entertainment.
00:14:38.340
We talk to our friends. We learn new things. We share stories. We engage in politics. We shape our
00:14:47.140
communities. The connectivity and the access to information that you will have all your life is
00:14:55.460
going to be incredibly empowering. But at the same time, it comes with real risks as well. Because
00:15:08.500
there is a lot of bad stuff out there on the internet. And we have laws against hate speech,
00:15:16.420
and we have laws against incitations to violence, and we have laws that are out there to try and
00:15:23.220
protect kids and protect people from the bad things on the internet. One of the things about the internet
00:15:28.580
is you can have access to just about anything, everything, all the time.
00:15:35.940
And any government that wants to try and limit what people can access on the internet has to be very,
00:15:41.780
very, very, very careful. Because in a free society, and there are places around the world where the
00:15:48.180
internet is very carefully controlled, a place like China or Russia, where it's very, very difficult
00:15:54.740
for someone to actually find out anything that is critical of the government. Not the case in Canada,
00:16:02.500
really easy to find things critical of the government on the internet in Canada and in other democracies.
00:16:08.580
But we need to make sure people continue to be able to have access to their freedom of speech,
00:16:14.100
their freedom of expression, the freedom of information. But there are real challenges around that,
00:16:19.860
in terms of keeping you safe, in terms of keeping your community safe.
00:16:23.060
He was asked by someone in the crowd about internet harms, and he immediately says that China
00:16:28.100
and Russia are bad, apparently, because they make it hard to find criticism of the government. But
00:16:32.980
that aspect is specifically in legislation that Trudeau himself is introducing in parliament,
00:16:39.860
the power for Trudeau to alter the discoverability of news that he doesn't like, to force YouTube and
00:16:47.300
Facebook to hide critics of his regime, like Rebel News, and make it so if you type in Rebel News into
00:16:53.300
Google or YouTube or Facebook, you go through page and page and page and page of CBC and CTV and
00:16:58.180
global news before you get to Rebel. That is literally in the legislation that he's imposing
00:17:03.540
in parliament. He's criticizing China and Russia for making it hard to find their critics online
00:17:11.140
Here's another excerpt from the same town hall.
00:17:13.700
Right now with the internet, people can find themselves in little corners where all they hear
00:17:22.420
is what they want to hear. And they're surrounded by people who think exactly the same of them,
00:17:29.460
and they get spun up into a world that is increasingly disconnected from the world.
00:17:34.980
I remember a few years ago, before the pandemic, before much of this, I got fascinated with the
00:17:44.020
idea of flat earthers. Now, this is an entirely new phenomenon. There wasn't really any moment back
00:17:54.580
in recorded history. Not the ancient Greeks or the ancient Babylonians or the Incas or whoever else,
00:18:03.620
who actually wondered whether the earth was actually flat or not.
00:18:07.780
And Christopher Columbus, they knew the earth was round. There was no danger he was going to fall off
00:18:12.100
the edge of the world. That wasn't what people worried about when he was setting off to discover
00:18:16.100
the Americas or discover a shortcut to India. There are a whole bunch of people out there who have
00:18:21.300
decided that the earth is flat. And they hang out with each other and they find different ways of
00:18:28.740
proving to themselves that the earth is flat. Now, that may not seem like a very serious thing,
00:18:34.660
because someone who believes the earth is flat is not going to necessarily cause tremendous harm to
00:18:41.060
everyone else. But the ability to start to believe something that simply isn't true,
00:18:47.300
because enough people are telling you and reinforcing that around you,
00:18:57.060
I think he's just telling old stories that he used to tell at those $30,000 speeches. There's no
00:19:04.500
flat earth ever in history. People always knew the earth was round. He's just, what an awful
00:19:10.500
substitute teacher he would have been. But flat earthers, that's his new name for people who disagree
00:19:15.700
with him on the vaccine. The vaccine, as we now know, does not stop transmission, does not stop you from
00:19:22.180
getting COVID. The vaccine has more side effects than we're known. And yet he dares call skeptics
00:19:28.260
the flat earthers. Never him. He's the guy who thinks if you raise the tax when you buy gas,
00:19:34.500
that will make the weather cooler by raising a tax that will change the weather. But you're the flat
00:19:39.380
earther. He knows the truth. You don't know your place. But listen to him when he talks more about
00:19:45.940
censorship plans. Take a listen. It's a reality. Our job is to keep you safe. And we're working
00:19:51.780
on it as a government. One of the challenges though, and this will be my last thought,
00:19:56.740
one of the challenges is governments used to have the ability to protect people. If a shipment of
00:20:06.660
Nazi propaganda was coming over to Canada, well, border guards could stop it at the border and make
00:20:16.100
sure that it wasn't distributed in bookshops across the country. We had an ability to make sure that if
00:20:24.420
someone walked up to someone else and said terrible things and were spewing hatred or taking a swing at
00:20:32.820
someone in the public square, we had tools and structures and police officers and rules that
00:20:39.620
could respond to that. Governments could keep their citizens safe. But now the internet means there's
00:20:48.420
a lot of people spending a huge amount of time in places that governments have no ability to keep you
00:20:55.140
directly safe from. Internet companies, specifically the web giants like Facebook and Google and others,
00:21:05.540
have a huge responsibility on how we shape our democracies, how we get along, what we see. They
00:21:12.660
are using algorithms that pick the right YouTube videos for you. They show you the cat videos or the
00:21:20.340
baby videos that you love to watch to make you giggle. I mean, there are really, really
00:21:24.820
powerful choices going on every single day in terms of what you're seeing when your homepage pops up,
00:21:30.420
when you're surfing the web, and it's learning constantly what is going to distract you better.
00:21:38.820
There is a responsibility we all need to start having and that those companies need to have for the
00:21:43.700
impact that they have over your lives. Right now, we're seeing a moment where both Google and now Facebook
00:21:52.500
are threatening to prevent Canadians from being able to access the news
00:21:58.180
because they don't want to make sure that journalists are properly paid for the work they do.
00:22:04.500
That's the fight we're having right now with the big internet giants.
00:22:09.540
Our job is to keep you safe. You know, I don't think that's his job. That's certainly not in the
00:22:17.220
constitution. In fact, the word prime minister does not even appear in our constitution. But what does
00:22:21.940
he mean to keep us safe? To keep us safe from, from ideas? I suppose part of the job of a government
00:22:28.980
is to keep us safe through a military and a police. But he's not talking about keeping us safe from crime.
00:22:35.060
He's not talking about keeping us safe from foreign marauders. He is specifically talking about ideas
00:22:41.700
that you get on the internet. Well, who chooses which ideas he's going to keep us safe from? Well,
00:22:49.540
him, of course. And look at him lie. It's so weird. Take a look at this clip.
00:22:53.060
The journalist who wrote this article should receive compensation if you're going to share
00:22:58.820
that article on your platform, that journalists should be paid for their work. It seems pretty
00:23:04.820
obvious to me that that's something we have. But the internet giants are so worried about having to
00:23:11.220
actually pay our journalists for the professional work they do, they'd rather remove people from having
00:23:19.780
access to the news. These are the kinds of things that we're struggling with as a country. And we're
00:23:24.340
going to have to have really important debates about because access to news and information
00:23:30.420
is that foundation that we can all build a better society from.
00:23:35.380
No, Facebook and Google are not mad that they're being asked to pay for showing some journalist work.
00:23:43.860
That's not what the law says. The law that Trudeau refers to is a law that would require Google and
00:23:49.380
Facebook to pay for even linking, just for a link to someone's story, which makes no sense because
00:23:55.780
every journalist and every media company loves being linked to on Google and Facebook. It's how you get
00:24:01.060
traffic. I think there's a reason why Trudeau is lying about his bill because it makes no sense. And
00:24:05.780
if he describes it in a way that it is not, maybe it's more appealing. I think that Justin Trudeau
00:24:13.380
and his substitute teacher level blather, I think he's hypnotized the media who have never been
00:24:21.220
critical towards him before. They're just trying it out now with this China stuff and it looks good
00:24:25.460
on them. I hope they keep it. I think Justin Trudeau is just as corrupting a force in our democracy
00:24:33.140
as the New York D.A. is. Stay with us for more with Janine Younis next.
00:24:38.900
Well, there has been an enormous amount of information that has been publicly released
00:24:56.660
by Elon Musk since he bought and took private Twitter. It reminds me in some ways of when the
00:25:02.980
Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union and its allies tumbled down and a lot of material was shredded or
00:25:10.740
burned, but a lot of it was preserved and later studied to prove the diabolical nature of the
00:25:18.340
Soviet regime. There are to this day museums dedicated to the KGB and the Stasi so people know
00:25:25.700
what happens and learn and try not to forget about it. That's the feeling I get when Elon Musk
00:25:33.060
takes secrets from deep within Twitter and reveals them, which is fascinating because he owns the
00:25:39.780
company and at first glance you would think, what is he doing? He's destroying the reputation of
00:25:45.700
Twitter. No, it's the opposite. He's showing what he bought and one of the reasons he bought it and
00:25:50.340
he's showing that he is not like that. Well, even before Elon Musk was voluntarily revealing what
00:25:59.700
Twitter had done, one of the friends of the Ezra LeVant show was going to court to prove it on her own
00:26:07.380
with people who had been silenced and censored by Twitter at the behest of the government. You know
00:26:14.340
who I'm talking about, Janine Younis, staff lawyer at the new Civil Liberties Alliance in Washington, D.C.
00:26:20.500
She joins us now via Skype from that city. Janine, it's great to see you again. It's wonderful to
00:26:25.540
have Elon Musk willingly disclose and declassify, so to speak, internal Twitter documents, but you
00:26:33.220
went to court to prove the same thing, not just with Twitter, but other social media companies too, right?
00:26:38.580
Yeah, that's right. So this case, the allegation is that the government was basically co-opting
00:26:46.100
private industry, in this case the tech companies, in order to censor the voices of Americans that
00:26:50.900
didn't like on topics ranging from COVID to the elections, but our clients were all about COVID.
00:26:57.540
And the judge granted discovery a while ago, back in June, in relation to an early motion in the case.
00:27:04.820
So we obtained a lot of information from the companies showing that the government has been
00:27:09.380
coercing and pressuring them to censor in accordance with its own views.
00:27:14.980
Yeah, I mean, if companies do that on their own, it's very frustrating that there are strong arguments
00:27:20.340
about private property, private companies. I mean, there are arguments that they are the new public
00:27:25.300
square and they should have some First Amendment, you know, requirements. But when the government
00:27:33.060
is threatening, cajoling, pushing, carrot and sticking those companies, then they become agents,
00:27:38.820
they really become de facto bureaucrats when a private company does the bidding of
00:27:44.900
the federal government. And whether or not they're sympathetic to begin with,
00:27:48.580
when the President of the United States or when senior officials ask you to do something,
00:27:52.340
there's an implied coercion because they have the power to hurt you, right?
00:27:55.460
Right. And to be clear here, it wasn't merely asking. They were actually making threats,
00:28:00.900
saying, you know, we're going to look at repealing Section 230, which gives companies liability for
00:28:07.220
the content that people post on their platforms. So Section 230 is really important to the tech
00:28:12.100
companies. They, you know, said things like, we'll make sure they're held accountable. We're going to
00:28:16.260
find out, you know, we're going to find ways to make sure they're held accountable. So these are
00:28:20.100
actual threats. And the case law is pretty clear in our country that the government can't use private
00:28:25.620
companies to do what it can't do directly. And the government can't punish people or censor them
00:28:31.380
for expressing certain viewpoints. And that's exactly what's going on here. They're using the
00:28:35.700
companies to establish, sorry, to accomplish what they can't do themselves. And so that's a First
00:28:40.660
Amendment violation. Now, I understand that the other side of this battle went to court with a motion to
00:28:49.380
dismiss this whole lawsuit. In Canada, I don't think that those motions to dismiss are as commonplace.
00:28:58.980
But there's a lot more costs for frivolous lawsuits. There's some differences between our systems.
00:29:05.700
I think the American way, you correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not an American lawyer, is that
00:29:12.660
in shakedown lawsuits, in political lawsuits, in hopeless lawsuits,
00:29:17.220
there is a lot of screening at that very first stage. Am I right? And that's what the defendants
00:29:22.900
try to do here. They try to say, oh, this is a fishing trip. This is a political battle. There's
00:29:27.460
no real case. But the judge said, no, no, there's enough here to warrant a full hearing. Have I described
00:29:32.580
both the US system and what the judge said in the motion to dismiss here? That's about right. Yeah.
00:29:37.780
So motions to dismiss are filed in nearly every case, and certainly constitutional law, which is the
00:29:44.100
area I practice in. So they, you know, the government just always tries to see if it can get the case
00:29:48.660
dismissed. So yes, here, the judge said, you know, nope. You know, they've stated a claim that
00:29:54.260
a valid claim, the allegations in the complaint substantiate those claims. And so we're not throwing
00:29:59.780
it out. And he said he used a lot of language that was very good, I think, you know, indicates
00:30:04.580
that he may be on our side, you know, for the for the long haul, not just the motion to dismiss.
00:30:10.020
And I mean, the crucial part is the state action theory that I was discussing earlier,
00:30:15.300
because the government's defense is, oh, no, no, these companies want to do this. This is what they
00:30:19.860
had, you know, COVID misinformation policies, other misinformation policies before, they were just
00:30:25.540
asking the government for advice and help, which they can do. And I acknowledge that they can do that,
00:30:29.940
if that's what was going on. But I think, you know, the emails and other communications that we've got,
00:30:33.940
combined with the public threats, make clear, that's not what was happening. The companies weren't
00:30:37.780
seeking input to enforce the policies that they wanted to have, they were being coerced
00:30:42.100
by the government first into adopting certain policies, and then into enforcing them along
00:30:46.420
the lines, and sorry, the way that the government wanted them to do, which it can't do.
00:30:50.580
That's incredible. So the judge who ruled in your favor on this motion to dismiss is seized
00:30:56.020
with this matter all the way, it'll be the same judge who'll be hearing the substantive case?
00:30:59.700
Yes. Now, I do think there's going to be a, it's kind of, these cases are very complicated. So
00:31:06.660
on a separate track, we had filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, that's emergency relief.
00:31:12.260
That was actually filed some time ago. So there's going to be a hearing on that in May.
00:31:16.500
And that, I think, the losing party there will appeal to the Fifth Circuit, that's the Court of Appeals.
00:31:22.660
So, and that will be a very important, what happens in the Fifth Circuit is going to be very important.
00:31:28.340
So this is certainly not a quick lawsuit, and you wouldn't think it would be. You've got,
00:31:31.460
on the one hand, tech companies with bottomless pockets, and you've got the government, which is
00:31:36.980
limited, literally unlimited resources. So they're certainly not going to make it easy for you. But
00:31:43.060
so far, you've had some surprise, I don't know if surprising, but pleasantly surprising,
00:31:48.340
let me put it that way, successes. I feel like it's going well.
00:31:52.420
Well, yes, it's going very well. I mean, it's a pleasant surprise in some ways, because
00:31:57.780
it really establishes that, you know, we have a strong case. It's unfortunate, on the other hand,
00:32:03.940
because it was sort of beyond my wildest dreams in terms of what it turned out the government was
00:32:08.340
doing and the expansiveness of these efforts. So it turned out there were, so far that we know of,
00:32:14.660
over a dozen federal agencies involved in these efforts, up to 100 federal officials that we know
00:32:21.140
of now, we keep finding out more. So, and the coercive tactics that were employed behind the
00:32:26.500
scenes, you know, sort of backdoor tactics, aggressive tactics to get these companies to
00:32:31.380
do what they wanted, were really surprising to me. I didn't, I actually didn't expect it was going to
00:32:36.420
be that bad. So that's disappointing to see that we really have an administration and
00:32:41.460
a lot of agencies that don't expect, sorry, don't respect Americans' First Amendment rights.
00:32:46.820
You're in the United States, a different court system. And of course, your First Amendment is
00:32:50.100
very robust. In Canada, we don't have the same freedoms. And we don't have as strong a public
00:32:59.220
interest law firm tradition in this country. Our version of the ACLU basically snoozed for two years
00:33:05.860
during the pandemic and the lockdowns. And I, I really don't see the kind of public interest
00:33:10.900
litigation that you're doing up here in Canada. But I have to say, Janine, I am most certain that
00:33:16.420
the same sort of censorship that you are discovering in the United States, how could it not be happening
00:33:23.140
in Canada, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, and especially in continental Europe, countries where,
00:33:30.180
in some cases, like Germany, they're proudly pro-censorship, at least on certain issues.
00:33:36.420
They say it's their historical legacy from the Holocaust, frankly. If you ask Germany about
00:33:41.780
freedom of speech, they have large carve-outs for censorship. I think that what you are revealing
00:33:47.060
in your lawsuit surely is happening around the world. What do you think of that theory?
00:33:52.660
Oh, I think that's almost definitely true. And I mean, in Canada, for instance, I think,
00:33:56.980
you know, we've even seen pretty overt efforts to silence doctors and other people who dissented on
00:34:03.220
COVID. So it's not even a secret. They don't have to keep it a secret because they're not violating
00:34:07.140
the law because, you know, you have as robust free speech protection.
00:34:11.540
Now, the Twitter files, as they're being called when Elon Musk releases tranches of these internal
00:34:18.580
documents. And by the way, it was incredible for me to learn that there were FBI or other government
00:34:24.020
affiliated staff who remained with Twitter after Elon Musk bought it and beavered away within new
00:34:32.260
Twitter to try and quash some of the release of this information. I thought that was amazing.
00:34:39.780
And I think it it caught Elon Musk by surprise if we're to take him at face value.
00:34:44.820
I think it's amazing what he's doing. I think I now look at Twitter and other social media is really
00:34:52.020
just a giant intelligence agency. You know, we can say that easily about TikTok being spies for China.
00:34:57.700
But I think that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google really were the same for the and again,
00:35:04.820
I don't want to sound like I got a tinfoil hat on, but really was government agencies from the CIA to the
00:35:09.940
FBI to health agencies. Like it really was a government operation to filter information in and
00:35:16.820
out. I think free speech was the least of its purposes. It was it was all about control and
00:35:23.700
propaganda and filtering. I mean, it's it's just so clear to me now. Elon Musk bought himself a digital
00:35:30.580
digital FBI, digital CIA. Yeah, I think I think that's right. And what we're seeing now, I think sort of
00:35:38.580
exemplifies or illustrates why we have a First Amendment and why free speech is actually the way
00:35:43.460
to go rather than these censorship regimes, like as you mentioned in Germany. So I mean, the way this
00:35:49.060
actually started was the fear of Russian propaganda, Russian disinformation interfering with elections.
00:35:55.300
And OK, that sounds reasonable. Yes, sure. The FBI should be able to make sure that Russians aren't
00:35:59.540
infiltrating Twitter and Facebook and convincing Americans to vote a certain way based on false
00:36:05.380
information. One can sort of understand that or Russian bots who are just, you know, basically
00:36:10.260
spreading propaganda. But then what happens is that starts to filter in to censoring the views of
00:36:18.340
Americans who just disagree and think Trump won the election or Trump should have won the election.
00:36:23.220
And so I think this sort of shows why we don't want the government making these decisions. We don't want
00:36:27.140
them involved in this. The best way to deal with bad ideas is to let good ideas come out. And you do that
00:36:34.100
through more free speech, not less. You know, a related weapon besides censorship
00:36:39.940
are these government backed so-called fact checkers. I recently learned, for example, that NewsGuard,
00:36:48.180
which purports to be a fact checking agency, it's actually hardwired on some on some web browsers,
00:36:54.100
that they got a major government contract from the Pentagon. And and I'm not sure if I've ever told you,
00:37:01.300
but Rebel News, we learned that defense contractors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock,
00:37:08.580
nothing to do with Canada. I've never been to Arkansas. We have no connection whatsoever. But
00:37:13.060
the U.S. Navy hired defense contractors at in Arkansas to work up a memo on Rebel News.
00:37:24.100
Were we a foreign psyops information op? It was the craziest thing I ever saw.
00:37:31.460
I don't understand it. In my mind, I'm thinking, well, maybe Trudeau wanted to do that, but he
00:37:36.420
asked his American counterparts to do it for him in case it would violate Canadian law. And maybe
00:37:41.940
America asked Canada to spy on. I mean, I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole. I was,
00:37:46.580
I got to tell you, I was completely shocked to see that the U.S. Navy was spying on Rebel News. We
00:37:51.780
don't even have any boats. I got to tell you. And it was so bizarre. And we started doing access to
00:37:57.940
information requests. Our viewers know this because it was quite a story when it happened. And I learned
00:38:04.820
just how much of this so-called fact checking of domestic political conversation. And by the way,
00:38:12.900
we're critical of China. Like we are on America's side on the China issue. It's the military that's
00:38:19.300
fact checking us. I find that super creepy. And I bet you 99% of people do not know that it is the
00:38:25.380
Pentagon financing and in some cases commissioning these so-called fact checks. I think that's crazy.
00:38:32.020
And I wonder if it's related in any way to the kind of stuff you're doing in court.
00:38:36.740
Yeah. I mean, it is, you know, nobody's brought a case yet, but there's some other relatedly,
00:38:41.140
uh, this, and this just came out last month. Um, there's the U S state department has been funding
00:38:47.620
what the organization called the global disinformation index in Britain. And that, uh,
00:38:52.980
organization rates news outlets by how reliable they are. So risky, you know, it's considered
00:38:58.740
misinformation, not risky, not misinformation. Now, if you look at the list of organizations
00:39:03.460
deemed risky and not risky, it's, it's laughable. It's just conservative are the risky ones.
00:39:07.860
Um, liberal are the non-risky. I mean, they have Huffington post, which is
00:39:13.140
a ridiculous in the, you know, in the, in the non-risky because it's liberal, obviously.
00:39:17.700
So what you, I mean, what you have going on there is it's effectively a government
00:39:21.540
censorship regime. They're just doing it through the third party. So I think these cases are all
00:39:25.460
going to be very interesting. Um, and how they come out will really impact things for a long time.
00:39:30.100
Well, I tell you, if there's ever an action against some of these fact checkers,
00:39:34.100
we were taking Facebook's fact checker in Australia to court. And I don't know how that's going to go,
00:39:40.180
but, uh, we're doing that on behalf of our Australian correspondent.
00:39:44.420
You know what? I, I'm, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's very hard to do that when in court,
00:39:48.740
they say, Oh no, no, no. We're just offering our opinion. Oh, hang on. I thought you said you were a
00:39:53.060
fact checker. It's quite a defense for a fact checker to plead. Oh, it's just our fair opinion.
00:39:57.940
You can't censor us. Um, if ever there is action against these so-called fact checkers for being
00:40:04.660
government agents, boy, we'd love to get a piece of that as a plaintiff. I just thought I'd throw
00:40:08.740
that your way. Hey, you know what? It's been great to catch up with you on this very important case,
00:40:12.660
but I want to leave on sort of a, and I don't know if this is a fun note or amusing. I found it
00:40:18.900
fulfilling, satisfying, entertaining. Um, it's a, it's a video. I think it was taken a couple of years
00:40:27.460
ago. Like, I don't think this is very recent. This is Anthony Fauci, St. Fauci walking through
00:40:34.100
the neighborhoods of Washington DC with a DC mayor and just encountering regular folks. And
00:40:41.700
he had his camera crew in tow. I think this was a PBS documentary and he was going to be,
00:40:47.540
of course, the star in this. I can't believe this footage was released. And he encounters a lay person
00:40:53.700
who I'm going to call severely normal, obviously not a scholar, obviously not a
00:40:57.940
researcher, a journalist, but someone who's got more common sense in his pinky.
00:41:02.420
And they go back and forth, they spar. And then finally, Fauci just sort of
00:41:07.940
sulks away. And the last scene of it, if we have the right version, he's in his car putting on lots of
00:41:13.220
hand sanitizer after this grubby encounter. Janine, I'd love to watch this clip with you for a minute and
00:41:19.300
then get your feedback because this was one of the most interesting, entertaining,
00:41:24.260
and revealing videos I've seen about Fauci in a while. Let's take a look and then I'd love your
00:41:29.380
thoughts on it. Here we go. People in America are not settled with the information that's been given
00:41:35.860
to us right now. So I'm not going to be lining up taking a shot on a vaccination for something that
00:41:43.220
wasn't clear in the first place. And then you all create a shot in miraculous time. It takes years
00:41:50.740
to create vaccination. Well, it used to take years. You know how many years we're invested in this
00:41:59.060
approach? About 20 years of science to get us to be able to do it. 20 years is not enough. And nine
00:42:04.820
months is definitely not enough for nobody to be taking no vaccination that you all came up with.
00:42:09.700
The only reason I'm talking to you right now, as close as we are, is that I've been vaccinated.
00:42:14.580
Right. But if a lot of thousands of people like you don't get vaccinated, you're going to let this
00:42:20.020
virus continue to percolate in this country and in this world. Something like the common flu then,
00:42:24.340
right? It's much more serious than the flu. Well, the flu kills a lot of people.
00:42:29.940
You know how many people died of the flu the last year? I mean, not this year, virtually none,
00:42:35.380
but the previous year, about 20 to 30,000. You know, how many people have died from COVID-19 in
00:42:40.580
the United States? 600,000 Americans. Well, you, well, that, well, the number that you all
00:42:46.660
given that died, that's, that once again, that's you all's number. You're going to pass. Yeah,
00:42:51.460
definitely. All right. Because when you start talking about paying people to get vaccinated,
00:42:56.020
when you start talking about incentivizing things to get people vaccinated, there's something else going
00:43:01.220
on with that. Something else, something else going on. It is something going on. You're right.
00:43:05.780
But I'm glad millions of people like me and most everybody here didn't get an incentive. You know
00:43:10.820
what their incentive was? Protecting their health and protecting the city. But I won't keep you
00:43:15.460
anymore. It's okay. My, my, my, my, my campaign is about fear. It's about inciting fear in people.
00:43:21.780
You all attack people with fear. That's what this pandemic is. It's a fear. It's fear,
00:43:26.500
this pandemic. That's all it is. Oh, I just love that ending. He, he ran away. Like he walked away
00:43:34.900
mid conversation. He didn't even say goodbye or thank you or agree to disagree or you're very,
00:43:41.140
he, he, he just sort of stomped away and then he put the hand sanitizer on. That's just wonderful
00:43:47.780
editing. I can't believe that that video was released. I'm, I'm shocked. He didn't say
00:43:52.740
delete that video right now. Let me ask for your reaction to that clip.
00:43:59.060
Well, I, I love that guy. I think he's been reading our Twitter feeds.
00:44:04.580
He just, I mean, he was, he knew so much more than them. He made so many good points. I mean,
00:44:08.740
you typically test a vaccine for much longer than this one was before you start to widely distribute
00:44:13.380
it. Um, it's pandemic of fear. He just, he, you know, he was so much more knowledgeable,
00:44:18.660
uh, had so much more common sense than those two. And they, it showed Bowser and, uh, Fauci both
00:44:23.620
treated him with contempt and the things that they were saying were anti-science. You know,
00:44:27.140
she's, she's saying, uh, the only reason I I'm going to talk to you now is because I'm, um,
00:44:32.420
I'm vaccinated, you know, as though he's just a disease vector. Well, first of all, he had no
00:44:36.180
symptoms. So unlikely to spread it. They're outside unlikely to spread it. And the vaccine also doesn't,
00:44:41.300
uh, protect you from getting it. So that doesn't actually make any sense. So I don't know. It's
00:44:46.580
just a very telling clip. Oh, there was. And, and even his comment, you, I think you heard him say
00:44:51.460
you were in, why do you have to incentivize people to take such a miracle drive? I thought that was a
00:44:56.740
clever point, very succinctly said. Um, and even just challenging the authority of this,
00:45:04.340
I am science. Oh, well that's your data. Remember when they were arguing numbers and, and, and the
00:45:10.820
fella said, no, that's your, your numbers. Right. Right. Right. So an inherent skepticism.
00:45:17.140
And I don't, I don't know what neighborhood that was. I'm going to guess that was a lower
00:45:22.420
income neighborhood in Washington DC. I'm going to guess that that fellow there has had a hard
00:45:26.660
knock life. And this is just, that's just a pure prejudice on my part and stereotype. And I hope I'm
00:45:30.820
not off base there. But the reason I say that is because he had so much common sense because I'm
00:45:37.220
guessing he has to be skeptical in life, uh, because he, he's deals with bamboozlers all the time.
00:45:43.620
And here's a bamboozler who's got a, you know, a lab coat and a clipboard and the mayor and, and
00:45:50.660
unlike the, uh, you know, the media party, unlike the, the woke elite, he's got a built in skepticism
00:45:58.260
in life as opposed to an automatic trust and conformity. Uh, and, oh, well, this is the new
00:46:05.060
thing. Everyone's going along with this. I will obediently accept this. I think that that
00:46:09.860
gentleman had a natural skepticism that, you know, as Orwell said, it's the proles who will save us.
00:46:17.620
And that ordinary working class man had more common sense in those two minutes than, and,
00:46:23.220
and better questions succinctly put. And he wasn't rude. Was he, there was no reason for
00:46:28.100
Fauci to run away. He didn't swear. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's my point. They ran away. He didn't
00:46:34.020
swear. He didn't call them names. They came to his house. He didn't come to their house.
00:46:38.980
And I thought that was just so perfect. I I've watched that clip several times and I see online
00:46:46.180
it's had 10 million views in a day. That just made me feel good. That gave me hope for America.
00:46:52.580
Really? I know that sounds a little bit much, but that gave me hope that people like that are out
00:46:57.140
there. Janine, great to see you again. Uh, thanks for your, uh, for making time for us and thanks for your
00:47:02.020
great work fighting for freedom and standing up for the first amendment in America. Hopefully
00:47:06.500
some of that will splash over to us up here in Canada. Thank you so much, Ezra. All right.
00:47:11.620
There you have it. Janine Yunus with the NCLA. That's a new civil liberties alliance in
00:47:18.660
Hey, welcome back. Your letters to me. Jane says, hi, Ezra. It's terrible. What has been happening
00:47:34.900
in women's sports? These athletes worked so hard for years. My heart goes out to April. I think there
00:47:39.700
is a big money behind the trans agenda. And I do believe it's part of the globalist agenda to mess
00:47:44.580
with the roles and relationships with people in our society. There's obviously big money behind it.
00:47:49.300
I remember when Hollywood rolled out a show called Transparent with Jeffrey Tambor,
00:47:54.020
and I thought, who's watching this? Who's financing this show? I don't believe that broke even. I think
00:48:01.700
that was a bought and paid for propaganda film out of Hollywood, which is what Hollywood's so good at.
00:48:07.700
Daniel Charles Films, probably one of the only men lifting professionally in the women's event and has
00:48:17.140
the Alberta bench and deadlift record already. The faster we can get more men into the women's
00:48:22.660
events, the faster people will realize. I think it's only a matter of time before the entire podium,
00:48:32.020
first, second, and third place is men. I mean, why not? If you see one guy beating two gals,
00:48:38.260
every other guy could say, oh, I can do that too. I could get praise. I could get attention.
00:48:43.620
And a bulletproof vest, if you dare say the word against me, you're transphobe.
00:48:47.780
I'll get media coverage. I'll be important. I can't compete against the guys, but I can crush
00:48:53.700
those girls. Clone 42 said, ever heard of tides? Unless the photos were taking in identical times of
00:49:00.900
day, conclusions cannot be drawn about sea level change. Photos taken at low tide, then high tide,
00:49:05.540
could equally be contrasted to construct a doomsday narrative. And I think climate hysteria
00:49:09.460
is psychotic and that higher CO2 concentrations have potential to increase human flourishing
00:49:14.020
by increasing crop yields. But I still know what tides are and recognize that presenting a
00:49:18.020
comparative argument using these photos is flawed reasoning. Yeah, that was the point made by all
00:49:24.100
those fact checks is that we did not know resolutely what the tide level was. Okay, so you don't know.
00:49:33.140
That doesn't mean it's wrong. There's still some value in seeing the two photos. And you raise a point
00:49:40.100
which is we cannot conclusively, based on that photo, not knowing when the tide, what you're talking about
00:49:45.300
that photo of Fort Dennison in Seattle. See, you're saying it correctly, which is we don't know
00:49:52.660
how high or low the tide was when that photo was taken, so we actually don't know precisely
00:49:59.700
if the water levels are higher or lower. Okay, fair enough. But every single fact check I showed you
00:50:05.300
called it a lie, propaganda, meant to deceive. And they resolutely said it's false instead of,
00:50:11.380
well, we don't really know because what was the tide at then. I think, and we talked about it with
00:50:16.500
Janine today, all these fact checkers are government propagandists. They're all on the government dime.
00:50:22.340
That's our show for today. Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters,
00:50:27.140
to you at home, good night, and keep fighting for freedom.