Today, I talk about the new rule allowing hate speech as long as it's directed at certain Russians, and then we have an interesting interview with Gordon Chang about China! Subscribe to Rebel News Plus to get immediate access to all my newest shows and listen to them wherever you get your news.
00:05:39.520Scott Gottlieb, who works for Pfizer now, who is a former FDA commissioner, he says that nobody actually knows where the whole six foot social distancing rule came from.
00:05:51.540Someone said it, and everyone else just repeated it, and it literally became the law.
00:05:59.980A rumor became a law, but if you dare to challenge it, Facebook and Instagram would ban you, even though no one knows where it came from.
00:06:06.760And that's just for the wrong opinion.
00:07:14.360I don't even think that's censorship, really.
00:07:17.500But stopping death threats, those are actual crimes.
00:07:19.520If it's a real, credible, imminent, believable death threat, I think that should be banned.
00:07:26.660And I'm not talking about, you know, speaking metaphorically or making a joke or being dramatic.
00:07:32.900But if you actually call for violence in a way that is actionable, that's probably the crime of inciting violence or uttering a death threat that's illegal in real life.
00:07:45.580If you say it in person, if you scrawl it in a banknote and hand it to the bank teller.
00:07:51.460So it should be illegal on Facebook, too.
00:07:53.800It's probably a good rule to ban that.
00:07:57.080But yesterday, Reuters reported that Facebook and Instagram, which are both owned by Mark Zuckerberg's company called Meta,
00:08:05.220Facebook and Instagram made a change to their policy.
00:08:08.340You can now absolutely call for violence against someone, as long as that someone is Russian.
00:08:21.900They said Facebook allows war posts urging violence against Russian invaders.
00:08:28.820Meta platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion,
00:08:40.940according to internal emails sent by Reuters or seen by Reuters on Thursday in a temporary change of its hate speech policy.
00:08:51.040The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko,
00:09:05.040according to internal emails to its content moderators.
00:09:09.880As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression
00:09:17.620that would normally violate our rules, like violent speech such as death to the Russian invaders.
00:09:26.580We still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians, a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
00:10:20.320Russia responded by naming Facebook and Instagram, their parent company, Meta, extremist organizations.
00:10:27.640Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook.
00:10:34.880Russia opened a criminal case against Facebook's parent Meta platforms on Friday after the social network changed its hate speech rules to allow users to call for death of the Russian invaders in the context of the war with Ukraine.
00:10:50.920Russian prosecutors asked a court to designate the U.S. tech giant as an extremist organization, and the communications regulator said it was restricting access to Meta's Instagram.
00:11:04.240A criminal case has been initiated in connection with legal, illegal calls for murder and violence against citizens of the Russian Federation by employees of the American company Meta, which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram.
00:11:45.980If one of the largest companies in the world with two billion users now okays calls for violence, I mean, if you have two billion users and only one in a million people takes your call to violence seriously, well, and if only one hundred, one in a hundred of those, so one in a million and then one of a hundred of those are in a position to actually act on it, that's still 20 murders.
00:12:11.760And who could deny that Facebook specifically, thoughtfully, carefully decided, yeah, that's fine by them.
00:12:21.640I mean, if you allow calls for violence, you are accepting that it could happen.
00:12:56.860There are people with Russian-sounding names.
00:12:59.440Even Ukrainians with Russian-sounding names, by the way.
00:13:02.060There are Russian restaurants and Russian stores with signs in Cyrillic.
00:13:08.300It's just not every day that you see this normalization of something as abnormal as wishing violence on not just someone, but a group of people for their ethnicity or their nationality.
00:13:20.280The left used to call that hate speech, you know, but now it's just what we do.
00:13:24.620So, is Facebook even a company anymore?
00:13:30.660Or is it a bit of a company and a bit of a country in its own right?
00:13:34.840I mean, it certainly acts like a country.
00:13:36.860It's got a foreign policy, apparently.
00:13:53.460Even though he lives in London, and for years his primary identity, I think, his primary mission has been as the owner of a famous soccer club there they call the Chelsea Football Club.
00:14:05.400That's what they call soccer in the UK.
00:14:08.160I always thought he moved to London and bought a fancy football club in London as a way of putting some distance between himself and Vladimir Putin.
00:14:17.200That's just what I thought it was about.
00:14:18.920And by that I mean so that Putin didn't consider him a threat or a rival.
00:14:24.780Abramovich was too busy living the high life in London to be a competitor to him back in Russia.
00:14:31.160But I guess that didn't work because, you know, Chelsea is one of the most successful football teams in the UK.
00:14:39.700It would be really like owning the New York Yankees.
00:16:16.460My theory is that if you have amassed billions or even tens of billions of dollars in Russia, which was communist and then sort of anarchist.
00:16:28.300And now I think it could be properly called fascist.
00:16:32.520If you manage to make billions or tens of billions of dollars there, you probably have some business skills, but you probably your main skill set is how to survive crime and how to perpetrate it on your rivals.
00:16:47.300There are too many oligarchs playing too many tricky games in both Russia and Ukraine.
00:16:54.720It's how they operate in that part of the world.
00:16:56.920And by the way, I don't want to besmirch the sainted Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who is the hero of our story.
00:17:07.140But he has accepted millions of dollars in secret payments to an offshore bank account from the oligarchs.
00:17:14.160And that was big news a few months ago before the war, before the narrative took hold that he was a sinless saint.
00:17:21.700I'm just saying oligarchs run Russia, but they also run Ukraine.
00:17:26.580But here's my real point about the sanctions and about seizing yachts and my real point about Facebook and Instagram acting like countries, really.
00:17:37.520I mean, really, they're declaring war against Putin and the Russian army, I think.
00:17:45.040Is that in the world of international relations or, you know, I think that what comes around goes around sometimes.
00:24:23.620But I can tell you, just here in Toronto alone, you see UnionPay all over the place.
00:24:29.220Many people in the Chinese diaspora use it.
00:24:32.140So is China benefiting economically from the West, removing itself from Russia?
00:24:39.860And more importantly, what are the lessons China might learn from the Ukraine crisis and apply it to its own sphere of influence, including Taiwan?
00:24:49.820Well, there's only one person I trust to answer these questions.
00:24:54.640He's a China expert who's been studying the subject for decades.
00:24:58.780His name is Gordon Chang, and he joins us now via Skype.
00:25:29.240First of all, Russia needs to sell oil, gas, wheat, coal, and it's going to be selling this stuff to China.
00:25:37.200And China, knowing the situation, is going to get these commodities at very low prices.
00:25:43.460So Beijing is looking forward to a continuing flow of essential items at bargain basement rates.
00:25:50.880The other thing, though, as you point out, as the West disconnects Russia from the dollar and euro-based financial systems, China is rushing in.
00:26:04.820SIPs is the cross-border interbank payment system, which is the Chinese version of SWIFT.
00:26:11.700And as we know, Russia is being disconnected from that international bank messaging system that is run by Europe.
00:26:20.420So all of this is ending up where China is actually taking over the Russian economy and making Russia sort of like a very dependent junior partner, more junior than it has been in the past.
00:26:45.280And I recall that when there were Western sanctions on Iran and Iranian oil, that China reportedly was buying that oil at an incredible discount to world prices.
00:26:58.980So if the world price of oil would have been 80 bucks, maybe China was getting it for 40 bucks because Iran was simply not allowed to sell it on the lawful market.
00:27:11.700I get the feeling that China is probably going in at fire sale prices.
00:27:17.440I mean, if you have Western companies divesting themselves in a hurry, there's no way they're getting proper market value for what they're leaving behind.
00:27:26.700I mean, this really is, as the old investors said, you know, the time to buy is when there's blood running in the streets.
00:27:34.180China is getting a deep discount on Russia, isn't it?
00:27:36.840Yes, and to put forward another quote, you know, Karl Marx said, history repeats.
00:27:44.020And China does take advantage of countries that are under sanctions that do sell commodities.
00:27:49.620So we're going to see this big time with Russia.
00:27:53.080You know, in the short term, we're going to see China get a lot of advantage out of this relationship with Russia.
00:27:59.100But long term, though, Russia is going to be a crippled country.
00:28:04.840And essentially, it'll become an albatross for China, because China, for various reasons, is going to have to support Moscow.
00:28:14.080So at least long term, this is going to be advantageous for the West.
00:28:19.740But in the short term, China is reaping a lot of advantages, as you point out.
00:28:23.700I want to talk about the lessons that China is learning from how NATO and America in particular are responding to an incursion, an invasion, an annexation.
00:28:37.940I mean, it's basically been a slow motion war between Russia and Ukraine for the better part of a decade.
00:28:43.980Putin has already annexed parts of Ukraine, the Crimea.
00:28:49.180And that really sounds analogous to how China talks about Taiwan, that it's a province of China, that it was split off, that it needs to be reunited.
00:28:59.820I mean, that's the same kind of language and rhetoric and sort of myth-making about a greater Russian empire or the greater Chinese empire.
00:29:07.980What do you think the lessons are of the last month or so that China is learning about how Biden makes military decisions and how, I guess, other NATO countries would, too?
00:29:22.140The most important thing that China learned is that although the United States and Europe are overwhelmingly more powerful than Russia, that deterrence completely failed.
00:29:32.260You know, the United States, the 27 nations of the EU and Britain have an economy that is more than 25 times larger than Russia's.
00:29:41.720And that was the numbers for last year.
00:29:44.060But yet, we're not able to stop Russia from invading Ukraine.
00:29:48.580And so China looks at that and says, well, in its situation, although the United States is more powerful than China, when you look at the metrics, this is a failure of leadership.
00:29:59.140I think they see the imposition of sanctions as really crippling Russia.
00:30:06.420So that does give China some second thoughts about what's going on.
00:30:10.560But they can see that these sanctions are not being imposed all at once.
00:30:14.600They're being dribbled out, which is, I think, another bad example that we're giving China, that Russia is not going to be punished or that we're reluctant to punish Russia.
00:30:26.320And this whole debacle over the supply of MiGs from Poland to Ukraine, that is just, you know, that must make military planners in China really happy.
00:30:38.760Because it just shows the complete incompetence of the Biden administration.
00:30:45.760So those are the things that – but I guess there's one other thing, and that, of course, is the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people.
00:30:52.460And I think that China might – well, certainly was surprised by that and certainly is going to start thinking about what will the Taiwan people do to resist an invasion from China.
00:31:04.120I want to ask you about how boycotting – like, I would almost say it's verging on Russophobia.
00:31:11.940I mean, you see people completely unrelated to Putin or the government.
00:31:16.920You know, artists like, you know, opera singers or musicians in the West, if they're Russian, they're being canceled.
00:31:24.140Even in Vancouver, there was a musician who was canceled just because he was Russian.
00:31:28.660And he – it's got nothing to do with politics.
00:31:34.500Some of them are comedic, you know, people changing the name of a white Russian drink or like changing the name of a drink on a menu to get the word Russian.
00:31:43.040I look at that and I contrast that with the absolute lack of any form of boycott or sanction on Chinese products, Chinese – and Chinese events like Beijing, from Beijing where the Paralympics were still happening, were happening until very recently.
00:32:01.240The Olympics are making an announcement boycotting Russia.
00:32:07.560So they're in Beijing, in that country, while they're condemning Russia for human rights abuses.
00:32:14.480And that just – so here's my question for you.
00:32:18.380The kind of total Russophobic sanctions – and I'm not sticking up for Putin here.
00:32:24.580I'm just saying it's astonishing how anti-Russian groupthink has set in.
00:32:31.960That's a long way from where we are with China where every big American business is deeply rooted there, whether it's Disney or the NBA or every factory that supplies America.
00:32:44.540I just have trouble seeing sanctions being applied to China.
00:32:48.560I just – I have trouble imagining it.
00:32:50.580Yes, and China actually has made itself a combatant on the side of Russia.
00:33:19.920You know, with regard to your first point about the way the world has reacted to this invasion, it is actually quite stunning.
00:33:27.680And I think that this is just an indication of the way the world is these days.
00:33:34.020That, you know, we were not serious as a world about all sorts of issues, including Ukraine, but others as well.
00:33:42.200And then Putin has been able to crystallize thinking, not only in Europe, which is directly threatened, but also elsewhere around the world.
00:33:52.160And so I think we're looking at these issues now in a much more realistic light.
00:33:59.040We're still a long way from going after the big partner in this axis.
00:34:05.180Yeah, I remember, I mean, in Canada, there was a while when the phrase soft power was being used all the time.
00:34:12.080Oh, it's moral authority and we'll cajole them.
00:34:14.720I think we've seen that soft power doesn't do well when it's faced with hard power.
00:34:19.580But let me just ask you one last set of questions that I'm really grateful for your time.
00:34:22.980I know that Ukraine really wanted to, there's some people in Ukraine, including the President Zelensky, who really want to be part of NATO.
00:34:29.620And I think Putin, with perhaps some justification, was worried about having another NATO country right abutting its borders.
00:34:48.140And you can see that the refusal of America to do that transfer of military jets from Poland to Ukraine, it seems to me, Gordon, that America and NATO are trying not to give a trip wire that would make this battle expand and, God forbid, nuclear.
00:35:09.360But if NATO positively sent in fighter jets to Ukraine, it seems like NATO knows that would be an escalation.
00:35:19.960Do, but, and my point is that Ukraine is not in NATO now and the Allies don't want to make it like it's in NATO.
00:35:27.340What is the treaty situation with Taiwan?
00:35:30.700Because I know it's quite often there's a U.S. carrier there.
00:35:33.920There's actually Americans as that kind of a trip wire.
00:35:37.560I don't think the West has that same obligation in a treaty with Ukraine.
00:35:43.800But what is the legal or treaty relationship between the United States and Taiwan?
00:35:50.080Would there be a trip wire that if China moved on Taiwan, it would legally and practically provoke an American response that has not come to Ukraine?
00:36:00.720The United States has the Taiwan Relations Act, which requires American governments to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself.
00:36:10.240But there no longer is a mutual defense treaty.
00:36:13.420That was terminated when the United States switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
00:36:19.200There is in the U.S. a one-China policy, the six assurances, the three communiques, and essentially the United States does not recognize China's jurisdiction or sovereignty over Taiwan.
00:36:35.000We say that the matter is unresolved and that when it is resolved, it must be done through peaceful means.
00:36:41.960With regard to Ukraine, because you did raise that in your question, there is the Budapest Memorandum of December 1994 where the United States, Great Britain, and Russia agreed to respect the sovereignty of Ukraine.
00:36:55.440Obviously, the Russians have violated that.
00:36:57.500Now, we don't have a formal obligation to defend Ukraine, but when the Budapest Memorandum was inked, the United States did give private assurances that we would protect Ukrainian sovereignty.
00:37:10.160And obviously, we haven't really fulfilled that obligation.
00:37:13.820And the reason why we gave those assurances is because we wanted Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, which at the time it had the third largest arsenal in the world, which it inherited on the breakup of the Soviet Union.
00:37:25.280Yeah. Well, and that's the incredible thing is that Ukraine gave up actual hard power nukes for a promise.
00:37:33.100And I think the UK was a signature. I think even Russia signed the thing at the time.
00:37:37.240And I think that that ought to send a chill through Taiwan and United Arab Emirates and Israel and other countries thinking, all right, well, if I get into a tussle with my neighborhood bully, whether that's China or Iran, maybe I can't count on any written piece of paper.
00:37:57.200Or maybe I got to count on myself only. And Israel, you know, Israel has nukes. Israel has a pretty strong military.
00:38:05.340I don't know if Taiwan's is in the same class. I mean, I don't think Taiwan has nukes.
00:38:12.400It has there been any change domestically in Taiwan? Have Taiwanese legislators has to think has the mood in Taiwan change so that they have decided, well, we had better beef up now because it's only a matter of time.
00:38:26.200Has the have their hearts hardened in Taipei?
00:38:29.960Yes, they have. And they're starting to get serious about their own defense, which is about time.
00:38:36.260And, you know, going to your broader point, we could see we have the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which is something like one hundred and ninety five countries around the world.
00:38:47.200We could see that fall apart and countries race to get the bomb because they don't trust the United States.
00:38:54.120They don't trust other countries to defend them. And this could be a much more dangerous world.
00:38:59.180Instead of just having eight or nine nuclear powers, you know, we could have 80 or 90.
00:39:05.020And that's a much more dangerous world, Ezra.
00:39:08.380Yeah. Well, these are terrifying times. We learn so much from you every time, Gordon.
00:39:12.020Thanks so much for stopping by, folks. Again, that Twitter account, which is really my number one source for news and views on China, is Gordon G. Chang on Twitter.
00:39:21.380You've got to follow him. Great to see you. We'll look forward to catching up with you sometime soon.
00:42:44.140I asked her a few questions about civil liberties and about French, but we'll have time to talk to her more about things in the months ahead.
00:42:51.360I don't think the vote is until September, so we'll have some time.
00:43:03.780And let me leave you with another video of the day, also from Alexa, talking to a convoy organizer who recounts the repercussions of Trudeau's crackdown and his Emergencies Act.
00:43:18.240Alexa, for Rebel News and the video you are about to see was filmed two weeks after the peaceful trucker convoy to Ottawa, protest against lockdown restrictions, who was dismantled by the government.
00:43:33.460Trudeau invoked the emergency hack, which gave police extraordinary power to off-search, arrest and seizure of bank accounts and property in an attempt to send thousands of Canadian protesters home or to jail.
00:43:49.080One woman, an organizer, Tamara Leach, was held for nearly three weeks for the minor crime of counseling to commit mischief.
00:44:01.160Today, you will see an interview with Tom Marazzo, one of the organizers of the convoy targeted by law enforcement for his story.
00:44:10.460So, I want to know a little bit what happened on the last few days of the convoy and how the organizers have handled the situation that was happening, not only with the police, but as well with the government.
00:44:45.040We talked to different factions within the truck convoy.
00:44:50.460And we could see very, very plainly that the federal government was trying to set the conditions for what eventually happened at the end.
00:44:59.840And on top of that, I was getting signals through the OPP and through the Ottawa police that, hey, you know, your days here in the city are numbered.
00:45:12.060And so, we all knew that we were sort of marching towards the edge of this cliff.
00:45:18.420And unfortunately, the federal government decided to take everybody over that cliff with them.
00:45:24.940So, you know, it was a buildup that everybody saw coming.
00:45:31.280But in my conversations and meetings that I had with the city, what I had with the law enforcement, what I was trying to have with the federal government, but they chose to ignore us.
00:45:43.640We actually had a strategy to try to avoid all of that from happening, with the exception of we weren't just going to outright leave because we were getting signals from the police that they were going to attack.
00:45:57.740So, there was a lot going on, including we did some media events and stuff like that to try to reach out to the federal government.
00:46:06.320And I was trying to back channel with the federal government to absolutely no avail at all.
00:46:12.080And so, what, you know, the rest is history, as they say, because the law enforcement did actually attack and, you know, broke up the convoy and destroyed or damaged thousands and thousands of dollars worth of damage to trucks needlessly.
00:46:30.140Uh, and there's people in jail currently, uh, you know, for what, because of parking violations, ultimately, you know, the situation with us in Ottawa was about parking violations.
00:46:46.320Because if you look at the, the conditions inside the emergency order, none of that applied to what was happening actually in Ottawa, none of it.
00:46:55.300But they still chose to use the emergency act to physically attack us.
00:47:00.920So, my other question is because we saw many organizers had been arrested.
00:47:07.420So, Tamara Lynch says she's still in jail right now.