In this episode, Ezra takes you through the anti-Semitic protest that took place in a Jewish neighborhood in Toronto, and talks to Joel Pollack about the State of the Union address in the U.S. Why is anti-Semitism being normalized in Canada?
00:11:17.200Well, having this kind of hate mob blocking a road and in a residential neighborhood with such hateful and insane comments towards Jews, it freaked out a lot of Jews who called their local MP, their local MPP, that's what they call the provincial politician, their local mayor.
00:11:37.880And they all signed this letter together, the mayor, the member of parliament, the member of provincial parliament, of how they were going to stand by the Jews and nothing, nothing.
00:11:51.000There were a lot of police there and they just stood and watched.
00:11:56.200In fact, you could say they escorted the Hamas protesters.
00:11:59.600They didn't clear them out because the police across Ontario and I would say across Canada are DEI police, diversity, equity and inclusion police now.
00:12:10.600Of course, if it were white KKK protesters outside a black church in a black neighborhood, the batons would be swinging and they'd arrest people like they were truckers.
00:12:20.600But these are Islamic extremist protesters, most of them foreign born from what I can tell.
00:12:27.100And they're demonizing Jews who in the main are white, although there's a lot of minority Jews, they're called Sephardic Jews.
00:12:35.040But so what? Jews are the oppressor class.
00:12:37.480So the oppressed class, Palestinians can do anything.
00:12:41.300Police did not arrest any of the protesters, but they arrested some of the counter protesters.
00:12:46.920They arrested a woman who used pepper spray on a Palestinian protester.
00:12:51.160And I can understand that. That's a weapon.
00:12:52.900It's like the other day when they arrested a man with a nail gun, who I understand was a Russian Jew.
00:12:59.340And I'm against people using violence on their own accord.
00:13:03.920I think that's morally wrong and I think it sets back the cause politically, which is one of the purposes of these Hamas protests is to drive the peaceful residential Jewish communities to some hasty act that they'll later regret.
00:13:17.960But I can understand why a woman is terrified by a Hamas mob and uses her pepper spray.
00:13:25.360And I can understand why a man is terrified by a Hamas mob and reaches for a nail gun.
00:13:30.940I can understand it because they're thinking, oh, my God, the police are actually not going to stop this.
00:14:22.220They demonized every trucker because someone took a photo of a Nazi flag that no one else could find.
00:14:28.020It was obviously a staged agent provocateur.
00:14:30.600That was enough for the entire media to demonize every peaceful trucker across the country.
00:14:35.980You have Hamas flags, Hamas chants, genocidal calls from the river to the sea, calls for a violent intifada, calls for by any means necessary.
00:18:34.220Personally, I believe that everyone should have the right to protest.
00:18:36.760Everybody should have the right to worship whichever god or religion they believe in.
00:18:40.700But to come to a Jewish neighborhood, to come to a Jewish place of worship to protest, I find absolutely disgusting.
00:18:45.740I do believe that the police are taking a peace officer approach.
00:18:51.440In other words, they're less interested in upholding the law than they are in keeping the peace.
00:18:57.120Anywhere in the world, anytime anyone has called out Islam or even come close to anything, drawing an image, whatever you might call it, it's led to violent, destructive behavior.
00:19:12.320What I am seeing now, I thought I would never see that in Canada.
00:19:16.820What a dive, what a dive, what a dive, what a dive.
00:19:36.440The state of Israel, in my way, represents world unity.
00:28:35.560Watch your hands, bud. Hey, hey, hey. Just watch your hands. Watch your hands.
00:28:39.560I think we're going to need more law enforcement. The cops are really outnumbered here.
00:28:51.300I think we're going to need more law enforcement. The cops are really outnumbered here, and I really fear for the safety of the people here.
00:29:07.080I can see this quickly getting out of control. There are tempers flaring on both sides. Let's see if some reinforcements come along.
00:29:17.820I think Toronto needs to do better. I think Canadians need to do better, and I think they really need to read the truth.
00:29:29.560Our mission is the truth. Our mission is the truth. Our mission is the freedom to be Canadians, to be Jews in the place that we live.
00:29:49.880We're just asking, release the people that you took, which you shouldn't have, and I know that we're all going to come to the table.
00:29:56.980You know, a recent opinion poll asked Canadians if they think the country is broken.
00:30:01.260Seventy percent of Canadians say the country is broken.
00:30:05.760I take that to mean that most Canadians don't like what they see on the streets in Toronto and Montreal.
00:30:11.160Most Canadians don't like the anti-Semitism. They don't like this violence.
00:30:15.740They don't like the threats in residential neighborhoods. I think woke people, college grads, may hate Israel, and Trudeau's Hamas base, his migrants, hate Israel.
00:30:26.660But I don't know. I've been around for 52 years, and I think that most Canadians don't like this. Most Canadians are not like this.
00:30:35.020I think most of the hate marchers are actually foreign provocateurs, often paid. Remember the Global News report that there are 700 Iranian agents in Canada.
00:30:47.560It doesn't take a lot of work to drum up 30 or 40 protesters in a city the size of Toronto.
00:30:52.940The same people again and again on that bridge over the 401, at the Jewish synagogue, outside a Jewish restaurant.
00:31:01.26040 or 50 people every day paid to protest with a professional organizer can make an entire community feel defensive.
00:31:10.100Granted, sometimes there are marchers with thousands, but I think it's a hardcore of probably about 100 or less in Toronto and the same in Montreal.
00:31:17.420They're not out there to persuade you to support Gaza. They know what they're doing is odious.
00:31:23.920It's not about persuasion. It's about dominance. It's about moving the Overton window.
00:31:29.040It's about normalizing what was not normal before. It's about demoralizing Jews and their allies, dispiriting them.
00:31:36.460It's about emboldening the Hamas supporters and radicalizing Muslim moderates.
00:31:41.540And it's about showing old stock Canadians who the new untouchable class is, who you can't question, but showing you what the new rules are.
00:31:53.400Do we accept it? Trudeau does. He loves it.
00:34:27.700Of course, it will reflect the president's ideology.
00:34:30.700Of course, you see the party that supports the president standing and applauding and the party that opposes the president typically sitting down for many of the portions of the speech where the president's talking about his policy agenda.
00:34:44.740So there's always a partisan element to it, but it's never used to attack the opposition as a focus of the speech.
00:35:17.000Trump would fight with people, insult people on social media and so forth.
00:35:20.540But when Trump delivered a State of the Union address, it was really about the presidency and Congress and the grand spectacle of American government.
00:35:29.840Trump would even say things that would make his opponents stand up and applaud.
00:35:33.240In 2019, when he lost the House to Democrats, or just after the new Democrats had taken their seats in the Capitol, he earned a standing ovation, even from the likes of left-wing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when he devoted part of his speech to praising the role of women in leadership positions in American politics.
00:35:52.100That's how you do a State of the Union address.
00:35:54.760You don't abuse the platform to take pot shots at your opponents.
00:36:00.000He also took shots at the Supreme Court.
00:36:02.120That hasn't been seen since Barack Obama did the same thing.
00:36:04.860It was probably the ugliest moment of the Obama presidency, or one of them.
00:36:08.620I suppose it would be a long list, because Obama had a penchant for doing things like that.
00:36:12.240But Obama, the great constitutional scholar that we were told he was, took a shot at the Supreme Court.
00:36:18.400And, of course, the justices seated in front of him, I think six of the nine were there, they're not allowed to respond in any way.
00:36:37.000This was not an appropriate State of the Union address.
00:36:39.680However, it did achieve one great thing for President Biden, which is that it showed he can speak for an hour or more without falling asleep, without falling down.
00:36:53.640And he may not be in full command of the country at times or the details of policy, and he forgets names and dates and so forth.
00:37:00.580But this display was very important as a message to his party that they should not try to replace him before the 2024 election.
00:37:10.540And actually, before the speech, I said, if you want Joe Biden to lose in November, you should want him to do very well tonight, because the chances of Democrats winning are lower with Joe Biden in office.
00:37:21.680They're higher with another candidate.
00:37:23.180If you have another more vigorous candidate who can replace him, then that candidate would theoretically do better against Donald Trump.
00:37:30.920Joe Biden is possibly the only Democrat who could lose to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is, in fact, beating him everywhere.
00:37:36.640So if you want Trump to win or you simply just want Biden to lose, then you needed him to do a good enough job last night to convince his own party it would be a waste of time to replace him.
00:38:19.580And there was more heckling than I've ever seen or heard at a State of the Union address.
00:38:24.120And much of it was well-deserved, because after they had heard the president go after them so viciously, many Republicans decided they'd had enough.
00:38:32.460People were shouting things about how the president was lying.
00:38:35.720There was a gold-star father, the father of one of the 13 U.S. servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan in a terror attack during the evacuation.
00:38:44.480He was there in the gallery, and he started heckling Joe Biden.
00:38:46.800He was eventually arrested and taken out.
00:39:25.580You would never start the State of the Union by talking about another country.
00:39:29.140You don't start by talking about Ukraine.
00:39:31.440He mentioned Sweden and Finland before he mentioned the people of the United States.
00:39:35.560I don't know who the speechwriters are, and I don't know why Washington thinks that these issues, like NATO expansion, are the number one thing they have to tackle in the State of the Union address.
00:39:46.900It was a terrible, terrible way to start.
00:39:49.160He didn't even wait for the speaker to introduce him.
00:39:51.100He just launched right into his speech about Putin and Ukraine and so forth.
00:39:54.540And this is a moment like World War II and all nonsense, but also just deeply offensive.
00:39:59.620The purpose of the State of the Union, the constitutional purpose, is the president has to report to Congress about the state of the United States.
00:40:09.840And the other thing is, you know, we heard over and over again during Trump's presidency about what an anti-Semite he was.
00:40:16.900While Trump spent a lot of time in his State of the Union addresses dealing with anti-Semitism, criticizing anti-Semitism, praising Holocaust survivors, talking about the Jewish community, speaking out against prejudice, he spent several minutes in 2019 in his speech talking about exactly that.
00:40:32.740Biden didn't mention anti-Semitism at all, not once during the entire speech.
00:40:37.380We've got a wave of anti-Semitism here.
00:40:39.720I know that there are incidents in Canada as well that you just mentioned.
00:40:42.640Biden didn't say a thing about it, not one thing.
00:40:47.460It was not the speech of a man leading a country and really confronting the challenges that Americans face.
00:40:53.500Yeah, you didn't talk about anti-Semitism, but he certainly scolded Israel, implying that they're invading Gaza the wrong way, because General Joe Biden knows better.
00:41:04.300I can't talk about Israel in a second.
00:41:08.780He expressed empathy for Israel, and that was actually good.
00:41:12.960That was the best part of the speech, actually, because he talked about how Hamas had used sexual violence against Israeli victims and so forth.
00:41:49.700The problem in Gaza isn't getting aid to Gaza.
00:41:52.400It's distributing it within Gaza, because Hamas steals the aid, and the United Nations is incompetent and cannot distribute the aid.
00:41:59.680So you can bring as much aid as you want.
00:42:02.300And, in fact, more aid, as the U.S. government has admitted, comes in by truck than could ever come in by airdrop or by sea.
00:42:08.920But the problem is, how do you distribute it once you get it there?
00:42:12.580And the best way, in my view, to distribute the aid would be to allow Israel to win the war and the threat of Hamas, and then you can go wherever you like, all over Gaza.
00:42:21.440There's no security risk anymore if there's no terrorism.
00:43:08.220But to watch Joe Biden give priority to the fact that Sweden and Finland are no longer neutral, they're now part of NATO, that's so obscure.
00:43:21.000And the fact that he was told and he agreed to make that the lead item.
00:43:27.960When Americans are hurting too, I think Canadians are hurting more.
00:44:26.140And really for an entire generation of Americans, Americans under 50, home ownership has become an impossible dream.
00:44:33.480There's just no way that middle class families can afford a middle class lifestyle anymore.
00:44:39.480And Biden and his cohort are completely insensitive to that.
00:44:43.980And every time Biden talks about the middle class, he falls back on these old ideas of unions and organizing.
00:44:51.040And that's all well and good, except that is not how most people earn money.
00:44:56.700They don't have union jobs, most people.
00:44:58.960And that's not how our economy works anymore.
00:45:00.680We don't have guaranteed jobs with nine to five and benefits in retirement.
00:45:05.620People live in an economy that's rapidly changing.
00:45:08.340That's one of the reasons it's so successful, that people are adaptable and industries change.
00:45:13.380But things are getting more expensive.
00:45:15.200And Biden keeps imposing new regulations, new restrictions.
00:45:17.700He boasted in his State of the Union address about passing legislation to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.
00:45:26.100Well, some of us thought that was a pretty good idea.
00:45:29.080In fact, if there were anything to praise him for, it would be investing in the network that would be necessary for the country to move to electric vehicles.
00:45:39.080It's now been more than two years, and we haven't seen, I don't think, more than a handful of these stations built.
00:45:46.800How can it take two years to build at least a significant portion of the electric vehicle charging stations?
00:45:55.340The difference between Biden and Trump is Trump is a builder, and he knows how to cut through red tape, and he knows how to get things done.
00:46:02.700He wants to pass legislation and hand out money to interest groups, and the Democrats are the party of government, so they apply all the regulations and all the environmental rules and all the rigmarole and the union requirements and everything like that.
00:46:15.580They're not focused on getting the job done.
00:46:17.920They're focused on getting paid and keeping the issue alive so that Biden can refer to it in speech after speech.
00:46:22.920So I think Americans feel that the future is uncertain, not bleak necessarily, and I do think that if our economy weren't growing and we had higher unemployment, people would feel much worse.
00:46:37.320But I just feel that there's a lack of confidence in our leadership.
00:46:41.460The approval rating of the president is abysmally low, certainly relative to the economic performance that he's had in office, although the inflation is almost entirely of his own creation.
00:46:51.080We had 2% inflation when he took office.
00:46:52.980He then spent all this money that was unnecessary to spend, and the inflation promptly took off.
00:46:58.840Now, the Fed has had to raise interest rates to bring it back down, and I think that the economy has so far had a soft landing.
00:47:07.480But people just don't trust Joe Biden's leadership, not since Afghanistan in 2021.
00:47:12.200They don't trust that he knows what he's doing, and we haven't even talked about the border yet.
00:47:17.200I mean, the border is the most important crisis facing this country, and Biden is trying to say it's the Republicans' fault because they haven't funded what he wants to fund, and they haven't passed a law that he would sign, which would basically accept current levels of illegal migration, several thousand people crossing the border every day.
00:47:37.600Well, Republicans won't accept that and can't accept that.
00:47:40.280And Biden's claiming that it's only because Trump opposed the bill that Republicans have refused to take it up in the House of Representatives.
00:47:46.280If Trump supported that bill, Republicans would tell him to get lost, just like many Republicans are telling him today that he's wrong about TikTok.
00:47:52.760Trump somehow decided to defend TikTok, and many Republicans and conservatives, including strong Trump supporters, are telling him he's wrong, that TikTok is a threat to American national security and culture, and it's a threat to kids, and it's not about free speech.
00:48:07.320It's about foreign propaganda coming into our living rooms and coming into our devices.
00:48:11.640So people are telling Trump he's wrong about that, and he'll probably change his view.
00:48:16.280But if Trump supported Biden's border security bill, which really belongs in scare quotes because it's not about border security, then the Republican Party would tell him to get lost because if you read the bill and look at the bill, which they hid for as long as possible, the bill is unacceptable.
00:48:30.100It does not actually provide border security.
00:48:33.000The bill simply accepts the status quo, which is a crisis level of migration.
00:48:38.360So Biden's not grappling with the real challenges facing the country.
00:48:44.140People like the fact that the economy is growing, but, you know, Americans are so resourceful and entrepreneurial that the economy will almost always grow if you just let Americans do what Americans do.
00:48:54.440So I'm not even sure how much credit Americans give to Biden, and they really shouldn't give much because the recovery started under Trump.
00:49:26.200And we're hearing the same lines over and over again about lowering the prices of insulin, which is something Trump did, and then Biden reversed so that Biden could say he did it.
00:49:35.540You know, there's no direction left in this administration.
00:49:38.360And the fact that he started with Russia just tells you how directionless it is.
00:50:27.540Twenty years ago, when George W. Bush was president, it was fashionable to look at the United States and Israel as two Western countries that had defied the general demographic decline.
00:50:38.300You could look at Israelis having a lot of kids and Americans having a lot of kids.
00:50:42.480And Americans and Israelis both have high levels of religious observance.
00:50:45.740Most Israelis are secular, but there's a huge religious portion to Israeli life.
00:50:49.640So the U.S. and Israel were in a category on their own.
00:50:52.280Today, Israel is still religious, and Israelis are having more kids.
00:50:56.340But the birth rate in the United States has fallen off a cliff to almost Eastern European post-communist levels because we are not going to church.
00:51:06.260We're not encouraging young people to meet each other anymore.
00:51:11.600And people have deeply unfulfilling personal lives because they're spending all their time on their phones.
00:51:17.240And because we're not led by people who set any kind of example.
00:51:21.180I'm not talking about a moral example that, you know, that was the idea of a president setting a moral example went out of fashion with Bill Clinton.
00:51:37.660And that's what Kennedy's address was about.
00:51:39.180So I think that he is on the right wavelength, even if he's not necessarily talking about the economy and foreign policy and other issues that he talks about in other contexts.
00:51:47.720The Republican response to the State of the Union was given by Senator Katie Britt, and it was terrible.
00:53:34.260The Homeland Security Secretary wrote to the Kennedy campaign that he had consulted with a committee of five people with whom he consults about these kinds of decisions.
00:53:43.980It turns out that four of the five are the leaders of the parties in Congress, Senate majority leader and minority leader, House majority leader and minority leader, or Speaker of the House.
00:53:53.540And so the committee is comprised of four out of five people who are from rival political parties, and they get to decide whether Robert F. Kennedy, who's running as an independent, deserves secret service protection.
00:54:12.560Well, you know, we're used to that in Canada, but it's shocking that a decision about security, which is not a political matter, it is a scientific matter.
00:54:19.780Does he need security? Are there threats?
00:54:21.700It's a policing matter, an intelligence matter.
00:54:25.180And frankly, shame on those political parties, especially the Republicans who denied him that.
00:54:30.380That's disgusting and a disgrace, and I certainly hope nothing bad comes from it, although he's spending an enormous amount of money on his own security.
00:54:37.900Well, very interesting, and it's already March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, eight months till the election.
00:54:46.580It's coming up quickly, and of course, we care about our Canadian election.
00:54:50.320A lot will turn on it, but I put it to you that the difference between a Trump or a Biden win, that difference will have a greater effect on Canada.
00:55:00.360Well, I mean, I suppose a Polyev or a Trudeau win is a big difference, too.
00:55:04.360But the American decision will have an enormous effect on Canada.
00:55:08.100Well, listen, I think if I can make a prediction, you know, I'm always wrong.
00:55:13.300I predicted in 2016 Hillary Clinton would win, so that was wrong.
00:55:16.460Even though I didn't want her to win, I thought she had to be inevitable because there was so much opposition to Trump.
00:55:22.780I don't think Joe Biden is going to be reelected as president of the United States.
00:55:28.100I think Donald Trump is likely to return for a second presidential term, but he will do it with help from Kennedy.
00:55:35.380I do think that Kennedy is going to spoil the race in enough states to allow Trump to take those states and their electoral college vote.
00:55:43.040And there will be a huge outcry about it.
00:55:46.740But Kennedy is where the Democrats are on social issues, especially on abortion and other issues that are very important to female voters.
00:55:58.120But he's also where conservatives are in terms of his regard for free speech.
00:56:05.180And I think that many people who can't bring themselves to vote for Biden are going to choose Kennedy.
00:56:11.940He's going to hurt Biden more than Trump, even though he'll hurt Trump a little bit.
00:56:16.280And I think that puts him in a very important position to make decisions or to perhaps serve in a next Trump administration in some capacity or to guide the policies of that administration.
00:56:29.560I think we could be sitting here in mid to late November this year talking about what Robert F.
00:56:36.060Kennedy Jr.'s role will be in a Trump administration.
00:56:44.560We actually host in the Democracy Fund, a Canadian civil liberties charity, hosted Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for an hour on a giant Zoom screen.
00:56:56.360I found him very strong charisma and personality, but I found him substantively a thinking man who gave real answers, not just political cliches.
00:57:08.400A man who cares, who spent a life actually trying to do the right thing in his mind.
00:57:13.280Like, he's been an activist rather than a political hack.
00:57:17.620I hope he has a role in American public life, and I hope he has a role in government.