There really is an information war on for the control of your mind, and the government is no longer just fighting for control of the facts, but also for control over what you should and shouldn't believe. In the latest episode of the Ezra LeVant Show, host Ezra Levenkamp takes a look at government disinformation and disinformation.
00:00:30.200But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
00:00:32.960Eight dollars a month. You get the video version of this program, plus the satisfaction of knowing that you're helping to keep us strong because we don't take any money from the government.
00:01:46.900If there's message control, whether everyone is saying it doesn't have a bearing on whether or not it's true.
00:01:56.020That's a bizarre thing to say, and it's a bizarre thing for the government of Canada to be paying to promote a definition of what you should or shouldn't believe and to be some sort of arbiter of what is true and what is not.
00:02:08.580I want to show you another liberal emanation.
00:02:13.580This is from a Canadian liberal MP named Jennifer O'Connell.
00:02:18.380She's got vocal fry, which is very unbecoming in an MP.
00:02:23.200And she says, speaking of disinformation and misinformation, she says the uncontroverted fact that China interfered in the last election.
00:02:34.400No one is denying it, and the uncontrovertible fact that China is now placing listening devices in the Arctic.
00:02:41.520She says that if you even talk about these facts, you're a conspiracy theorist like a January 6 Trump extremist.
00:03:50.740Pete Buttigieg, if I'm saying his name right, is the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, a portfolio that you might think is very important given the trend enrollment and explosion and other crises that unfolded in the town of East Palestine, Ohio.
00:04:08.780And he didn't visit there until today.
00:04:11.140Weeks after the explosion, we sent a team, as you know, over a week ago.
00:04:16.120So an enterprising young journalist in Washington, D.C. happened to bump into Buttigieg and his husband as they were walking home from some dinner or bar, I presume, and put in a very polite way questions to him about why he hasn't been to East Palestine, Ohio.
00:04:35.160And what he gets, very basic accountability questions.
00:04:39.280There was nothing even close to a threat.
00:05:28.900No, I'm going to refer you to the comments that I made to the press because right now I'm taking some personal time and I'm walking down the street.
00:06:24.300And sometimes people ask for selfies with politicians just the same way people used to get autographs of celebrities in the era before smartphones.
00:06:48.380But the thing you did in the 70s and 80s and 90s was you asked for their autograph, especially if you were a super fan and had, say, a photo of them.
00:07:13.080But he asked for a photo of this young reporter, not because he was enamored with her, not because he was excited or impressed with her, but it's obvious why.
00:09:06.160Well, Pete Buttigieg obviously felt sparked into action by that embarrassment.
00:09:12.080And so he finally found the time to put aside everything less important and go to East Palestine, where our friend Savannah Hernandez, a young reporter we've worked with before, including at Davos, Switzerland.
00:09:24.820She was there with her team, and she thought she would scrum Pete Buttigieg, who didn't have the excuse now of being in the middle of private time for a little bit of me time.
00:10:55.440I would like your cameras to be off, and then I'm happy to talk to you guys.
00:10:57.980Well, if you are the press secretary of the secretary of the Department of Transportation, don't you think you should be able to ask questions from the American public that you serve?
00:11:44.260All right, y'all, so we are with the press secretary for Pete Buttigieg, and right now we are being told that we are not supposed to be filming.
00:11:51.180Again, we are here on behalf of the American public because we would like to have the conversation, and we would like to ask the question as to why, again, it took almost three weeks for Pete Buttigieg to be here on the ground.
00:12:05.120He waited until Donald Trump came here to actually be here and speak to residents.
00:12:09.240The people here have been quite tight knit about when we can ask questions, and again, we're here on behalf of the American public, and we wish we could be able to ask these questions, but for some reason, you know, we're not allowed.
00:12:22.780I like the cop there who said to Pete Buttigieg's press secretary, if you're uncomfortable, just walk away, as in I'm not going to arrest these journalists for asking you basic questions.
00:22:31.600In an era of propaganda and state disinformation, in an era when you can't get a straight answer from your transport secretary, Pete Buttigieg,
00:22:41.140when you can't get a straight answer about Chinese interference in the Canadian election because you'll be called a conspiracy theorist.
00:22:50.260Is it a possibility that these industrial accidents, fires, derailments, explosions, computer glitches in the United States?
00:23:16.960Or is it just possible that as the West is taking the war to Russia, not in the theater of Ukraine anymore, but in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and in the Kerch Bridge and threatening long range weapons,
00:23:31.740as Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the UK has done, is it possible that Russia, which is led by Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent who learned his ways during the Cold War,
00:23:45.060is it just possible that these industrial accidents are not accidents, but rather sabotage, a tit for tat, an answer to the explosion of the Kerch Bridge or the detonation of the Nord Stream 2?
00:25:28.560Now, I know that was a work of fiction, but I also know it's a fact that there were spies in the West and they didn't all go away when the Cold War ended.
00:25:39.400I think that Vladimir Putin has the means, the method and the opportunity,
00:25:45.940the motivation, the method and the opportunity to commit sabotage against the West.
00:26:31.760But do you think that these Western prime ministers and foreign ministers and defense ministers truly understand who they're fighting with?
00:26:45.380In the case of the brutal Vladimir Putin, I don't know if these are attacks on the West or just random industrial accidents, but I don't think that party girl Sanna Marin or that paternity leave Pete Buttigieg know or care.
00:27:04.480Or if they did, I don't think they'd know what to do other than, I don't know if it was Marin, just get drunk and party.
00:27:14.000And if it was Mayor Pete, just, I don't know, accuse the train derailment or the nuclear fire of being racist.
00:27:22.480Yeah, I don't think we know what we're getting into.
00:27:44.160Well, as I've told you on a number of occasions, if you measure Justin Trudeau's interest in something by the number of bills he has introduced or proposed to introduce to parliament, then the number one thing in his heart, more than Ukraine, more than carbon taxes, more than anything, certainly more than our economy or cost of living, is his desire to regulate the internet.
00:28:08.120Bill C-11, Bill C-18, the bill formerly known as Bill C-36, and the yet introduced bill called the Online Harms Act, that's four pieces of legislation Justin Trudeau has proposed or is planning to introduce to regulate what you see and hear and say online.
00:28:28.160And he's obsessed with controlling it.
00:28:31.520Some of you might have seen my email and my video over the Christmas break about how Bill C-11 allows Trudeau to adjust the algorithm in private companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, to force them to boost news sources that he likes and to de-boost those that he doesn't.
00:28:53.120He calls it discoverability. That is, he will determine what shows up when you type in news story or Justin Trudeau. Type that into the internet right now and you're subject to Google's algorithm and they might have some political views themselves.
00:29:09.720They'll boost this or that. But under C-11, they will be able to dictate what political stripe those companies show.
00:29:16.260Well, that's C-11. C-18 has some unintended consequences or maybe they're intended consequences as well.
00:29:24.980The idea there is to take money from these tech giants and spread it around Justin Trudeau's friends in the media.
00:29:33.120Joining us more now to talk more about it is our friend Spencer Fernando from SpencerFernando.com.
00:29:40.480It's hard to keep track of all these bills, C-11, C-18, but what you're focused on in your story today, and we'll put it on our screen here,
00:29:49.120is some Canadians already facing restricted access to online news due to Liberal Bill C-18.
00:29:56.580The Liberal government was warned this could happen.
00:29:58.480They ignored the warnings and pushed ahead with an ideological centralizing agenda.
00:30:04.500Why don't you tell our viewers what's happening?
00:30:05.920Yeah, well, so basically C-18 will make companies like Google, possibly Twitter, Facebook, pay for links.
00:30:14.840And, you know, as you think about that, you're thinking, well, that kind of sounds like a stupid idea because if I post something on Twitter or, you know, it gets, you know, spread on Google, I'm benefiting.
00:30:24.520It's my content and people are seeing, you know, I don't control Google, I don't control Twitter.
00:30:28.620And that's a platform I wouldn't have access to unless they provided it, right?
00:30:32.220So the idea that they should be paying people to be able to post their links on there obviously makes no sense.
00:30:40.720It's something you see a lot from governments, especially centralizing governments where they could never create a business.
00:30:46.980They could never be innovative enough to, you know, create Google or Twitter or anything like that.
00:30:50.860But they somehow still feel entitled to control it and to decide, you know, where, you know, what the company should do, you know, what it's allowed to, you know, how it's allowed to function, how it has to be run.
00:31:01.620And so what Google is kind of saying is, look, you know, you're saying that we either have to pay for links or, you know, we're not allowed to provide our service.
00:31:09.240So we're not going to provide our service.
00:31:10.840You know, you can't make us provide a service to people in Canada.
00:31:15.780So they're testing out, I think it's about 4% of the population is having restricted access to Canadian news on Google.
00:31:23.220You know, I've seen some journalists saying that they went on to Google, they searched up certain news stories and just nothing came up.
00:31:28.980And so they had to go search elsewhere.
00:31:30.280And that's because Google's testing out what they will probably roll out at a much bigger scale if the Liberals go ahead with C-18 as there's every indication they're going to.
00:31:39.860Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you're in the same position that we are.
00:31:55.800You hope that some big page links to your stuff on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, whatever.
00:32:03.500And it's a happy day when that happens because people follow the link to your website and they maybe click on an ad or maybe buy something or at least get to know you, maybe subscribe.
00:32:17.220It is a happy day for a publisher when someone links to you in fact publishers typically pay for that in an ad.
00:32:25.900The idea that Google or other big companies would pay Rebel News, would pay SpencerFernando.com, would pay the CBC for the privilege of sending traffic to them is so opposite of the strategic concept of the Internet.
00:32:43.640The concept of the Internet is that you can link to anyone.
00:34:07.740It's the trend of what the liberals are doing, upping CBC's budget, the $650 million media bailout, just all their legislation, C-11, obviously.
00:34:16.020It's that they don't like the fact that they're losing control over the narrative on many different issues, and they don't like the fact that they're not able to get it back easily.
00:34:25.200Because, I mean, look, if you're the liberals and you feel that the establishment media, traditional outlets are turning against you, there's a lot of things you can do.
00:34:32.860There's government regulations you can apply to them.
00:34:34.900There's money, as the liberals have already done, that you can give to them to make them more dependent.
00:34:38.860It's far tougher to control every individual Canadian who can share their viewpoint on the Internet.
00:34:42.800So what do you do about that if you're a government that is upset that you're losing centralized control over certain issues?
00:34:50.460And one of the ways you do that, of course, is to either push services to compensate people, which what it really means is they want to direct even more money to establish a media outlet.
00:35:00.240And then if the liberals, I don't think they'll be too upset if Google actually stops showing as much Canadian news online, because that'll mean that they can just direct more people to try to follow establishing media outlets.
00:35:10.780They'd be glad to see a constrained number of places where Canadians can freely get news.
00:35:16.780And so it's just the trend with them, right?
00:35:18.860And so I think you see some liberal MPs who on certain other issues have been concerned about unintended, supposedly, consequences of what Trudeau is doing.
00:35:27.740And we'll see if people speak out about this one, because it's just a drip, drip, drip, right?
00:35:31.160You never just wake up and say, oh, well, we lost all our freedoms.
00:35:34.380Oh, we can't speak freely on the Internet.
00:35:35.820The Internet's super restrictive in Canada.
00:35:37.340It happens bit by bit by bit by bit, and people don't notice one change to the other.
00:35:42.200And so I think the liberals hope that they're just going to get away with it by people, you know, just not noticing each individual change.
00:35:47.540And that's why it's important to fight against it now, because at some point it will be too late.
00:35:51.860I see it as all of those things, but I see it as another piece, too.
00:35:55.440Right now, about a third of the money in most Canadian media outlets comes from Trudeau himself, through his bailouts, through his, through a number of, it varies from company to company.
00:36:07.980But this allows Trudeau to access huge pots of money from Facebook, Google, YouTube, and add that to what he's going to gift to these same media companies.
00:36:20.740But again, only qualified Canadian journalism organizations.
00:36:26.000That's a term of art under the CRA, QCJO.
00:36:45.060I'm going to scoop up 100 million bucks a year or whatever from Google and YouTube and Facebook, and then I'm going to disperse it along with my money.
00:36:56.760And soon, big government and big tech will literally be a majority of the money that Canadian media get.
00:37:03.820It'll only go to Trudeau qualified media companies, so none of that money will ever come to Rebel News.
00:37:09.680And he gets to promote and pump up his friends in the media, and of course, it sounds like Google's against it.
00:37:19.100I think Facebook actually agrees with all this, because if you're taking money from Facebook, are you going to be criticizing Facebook?
00:37:26.240I think this is the merger between big media and big government, sort of like in the 90s when those tobacco companies did their master settlement agreement.
00:37:35.180They said to all the states, if you stop suing us, we'll pay you a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next 30 years or whatever.
00:38:03.900I think it's also – the liberals are often very foolish about human nature when it comes to protecting Canada or building up the military.
00:38:10.700But one way they do understand it is that if someone – if you pay somebody's bills, that person works for you, right?
00:38:16.220So what they're doing is they're getting more and more of the media to be completely dependent on government money.
00:38:21.360And they also – the media also knows, of course, that the conservatives are much less likely to give them that money, whereas the liberals are likely to give even more the longer they stay in power.
00:38:29.440So you create an incentive for people within the media ecosystem to want the liberals to stay in power.
00:38:34.400And that, of course, it's a feedback loop, right?
00:38:36.300The more money the liberals give to the media, the more the media wants them to stay in power, which makes it easier for the liberals to stay in power, and they give them more money.
00:38:43.040And so that's a real obstacle in many ways for the conservatives because, of course, if they gave in to all of this, then their own base would be upset with them and rightfully so.
00:38:52.100So they're going to have to really face down not just a media that already has – just often due to the types of people on average who get into the media in the first place, they're going to face not just that ideological opposition but also the real financial self-interest of much of the press who are going to say,
00:39:07.040look, if we want to keep getting all this government money, well, we better make sure Poliev loses and Trudeau wins.
00:39:14.560And it's funny to see all these Canadians who are so concerned supposedly about the conservatives being right-wing and super right-wing, and you see them saying fascist all over the place.
00:39:25.020But the merger of corporate media and the government, that's generally considered pretty fascist, or Trudeau maybe sees it more as communist.
00:39:33.160That's more the direction he leans in, but either way, we built Western societies on the foundation of freedom of speech, freedom of the press.
00:39:41.580The press is supposed to be antagonistic towards the government.
00:39:44.520The government is extremely powerful, even in a relatively free country.
00:39:47.620And so without people who can hold it accountable and speak out against it, people are in real danger of having their rights taken away.
00:39:53.140So to see the press in Canada increasingly co-opted by the government is something that not just people on the right should be concerned about,
00:40:00.260but people across the whole political spectrum, because no party is going to stay in power forever.
00:40:04.320And if you build a huge apparatus that lets the government control the media to a great extent,
00:40:08.840that's going to be used against people who you agree with and people who you disagree with.
00:40:13.100And at some point, it's going to hit you.
00:41:50.180Like he's a traitor, a disloyal pirate, which is true.
00:41:54.320Well, they're both true, depending on whose side you're on.
00:41:57.880I'm obviously desperately glad that the United States broke free and became the country that it is today.
00:42:03.000But as a Canadian, I also understand that was a mutiny against the British Empire, of which Canada was then a part.
00:42:08.740So which side was the disinformation side there?
00:42:13.860Well, I think it's up to everyone to decide for themselves.
00:42:17.000There's certain things that I think are true, no matter who disputes them.
00:42:21.100But I don't think the arbiter of truth can ever be the government.
00:42:26.320In fact, the whole point of a democracy is that there are two points of view.
00:42:30.840That's why we have an institution called the official opposition.
00:42:34.340And every once in a while, there ought to be an opportunity to throw an entire group of people out.
00:42:38.480And that's why we have an election with a campaign.
00:42:41.500In fact, if you look at the root of the word campaign, it comes from a military analogy.
00:42:46.320We're fighting these desperate battles, but instead of using guns, we're using ballots, not bullets.
00:42:52.840My show today was in large part about the government saying what you can and can't know, can and can't talk about, and can and can't ask about.
00:43:02.980Ron Ross says, reveals that the deep state is part of the lies.
00:43:06.320I think your letter there is in reaction to Bruce Party's interview with us.
00:43:11.380But frankly, Ron, that letter could be in reaction to half the stories we talk about.
00:43:24.860But I'm guessing that the Russians, ever since Vladimir Putin was just a young KGB agent in St. Petersburg, I'm guessing that the Russians have had their eyes on that Oak Ridge National Laboratory for decades.
00:43:40.580On my interview with Franco Teresano, Delta Mail says, less viewers, more staffers.