EZRA LEVANT ｜ How do you feel about a movie calling for eco-terrorism against oil companies？
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
157.94214
Summary
Did you know there's a new movie in Canadian theaters called "How to Blow Up a Pipeline"? And no, that's not code for anything. It's an eco-terrorist movie, and I haven't heard a word against it.
Transcript
00:00:00.300
Hello, my friends. Did you know that there's a new movie in Canadian theaters called How to Blow Up a Pipeline?
00:00:06.280
And no, that's not code for anything. It is about how to blow up a pipeline.
00:00:10.800
It's an eco-terrorist movie, and I haven't heard a word against it. I'll take you through it.
00:00:16.600
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
00:00:19.340
That's the video version of this podcast, and in today's episode, you really benefit from it
00:00:23.920
because I want you to see this movie. I'll play the full two-minute trailer of this movie,
00:00:29.220
and I want you to see it. I mean, you'll hear it on the podcast, and you'll get a lot from that,
00:00:33.300
but I want you to see what this movie is promoting at your local Cineplex.
00:00:37.580
To get the video version, we call that Rebel News Plus.
00:00:40.300
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe. It's $8 a month.
00:00:43.980
You get the video stuff, and, you know, we rely on that $8 a month
00:00:47.980
because we don't get money from YouTube, we don't get money from Trudeau,
00:00:51.000
not that we would ever take it. We rely on you.
00:00:53.920
Please go to rebelnewsplus.com. All right, here's today's podcast.
00:00:59.220
Tonight, how do you feel about a movie playing in Canadian theaters right now
00:01:16.780
calling for eco-terrorism against oil companies?
00:01:20.080
It's April 25th, and this is The Ezra LeVant Show.
00:01:38.300
Here's a thought experiment. How would you feel about a movie playing in theaters in Canada
00:01:47.020
Or what about How to Shoot Up a Church, which, by the way, just happened a few weeks ago in Nashville, Tennessee?
00:01:56.180
What about a movie called How to Blow Up a Mosque?
00:01:59.680
I'm guessing you're not too comfortable with any of those, even if you are a free speech absolutist.
00:02:05.760
But right now, in theaters across Canada, there really is a movie called How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
00:02:14.980
Here's Cineplex's website. As you can see, it's being marketed to teenagers.
00:02:20.120
There's ads for it everywhere, on TikTok in particular.
00:02:26.220
So teenagers can go to the movie by themselves if they're 14 or older.
00:02:32.280
Here, watch the movie's trailer for two minutes yourself.
00:02:42.120
Today, teaching myself to make a homemade blasting cap.
00:02:45.580
If this works, it'll be step one in making our own improvised explosive.
00:03:04.960
Trying to stop the pipeline from being built on my property.
00:03:17.760
We have to show how vulnerable the oil industry is by hitting something big.
00:03:27.560
Michael, what do you think the odds are we blow ourselves up?
00:04:00.440
American empire calls us terrorists and we're doing something right.
00:04:03.740
If you're seeing this, let those who profit from mass death know their properties will be trashed.
00:04:15.840
They will defame us and claim this was violence.
00:04:33.740
Obviously, there's no scientific basis to the underlying thesis here.
00:04:40.020
Pipelines do not poison the air, despite what they said.
00:04:43.940
They're by far the safest way to move oil or natural gas around.
00:04:47.800
The eco-terrorists here are obviously hypocrites, just like Al Gore or John Kerry or David Suzuki or Leonardo DiCaprio.
00:04:54.400
And the rest of them, they use oil and gas themselves for everything.
00:04:57.700
They use things made from oil and gas and coal, plastic, steel, pretty much everything in modern life.
00:05:05.900
It's an emotional movie, motivating people to blow up a pipeline.
00:05:09.080
This movie is targeted at teenagers and 20-somethings.
00:05:24.380
That YouTube trailer I just showed you has 1.5 million views alone.
00:05:30.360
And I saw little clips of it everywhere on social media.
00:05:34.080
I'm not sure how many people actually are going to go see the movie in a theater.
00:05:37.860
But just the two-minute ad and all the social media clips, they pretty much do the job right there, don't they?
00:05:45.440
The movie is playing across Canada, including, I checked, for example, in the heart of Calgary, in Cineflex theaters there, in the oil patch.
00:05:54.180
Oh, and just glowing reviews from movie critics.
00:05:59.600
According to the movie review website Rotten Tomatoes, 95% of critics love this movie.
00:06:05.220
Now, only 73% of moviegoers do, which is still a lot.
00:06:10.120
But it shows you the ideology of the Hollywood industry, doesn't it?
00:06:15.000
Now, the movie was based on a book by this guy, Andreas Malm, who looks exactly like what you'd imagine he'd look like.
00:06:30.660
It's capital city, Stockholm, is one of the most northern capital cities in the world.
00:06:38.960
For comparison, Whitehorse is 60 degrees latitude.
00:06:47.400
It's 45 degrees north latitude, and we like to think it's a northern city.
00:06:51.900
My point is, Andreas Malm and his whole country would freeze without fossil fuel.
00:06:59.300
You cannot power Sweden through the dark winter with solar power.
00:07:05.240
But he published a book called How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and now it's a movie.
00:07:10.460
And funny enough, it's set in the United States.
00:07:15.540
He's like his fellow Swedish propagandist, Greta Thunberg.
00:07:22.140
No one in America is going to pay to see a movie about Swedish teens blowing up something in Sweden.
00:07:27.500
And the regime media couldn't be more excited about it.
00:07:31.520
Here's the Globe and Mail, owned by Canada's richest oligarch.
00:07:36.420
Their headline is electric and gripping eco-thriller.
00:07:40.780
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a fast and tight cinematic provocation.
00:07:47.080
You know, the Globe and Mail actually called it a courageous movie.
00:07:49.960
And they even complain that it's too politically soft.
00:07:53.360
They say, you'll be a better person for watching it.
00:07:59.180
Is it controversial, even dangerous, to make a movie unambiguously urging illegal action?
00:08:05.900
No more so than the thousands of films that squeal over wholesale murder or whose politics
00:08:14.040
I'm not sure what the murder part he's referring to there.
00:08:18.840
There are a lot of people killed in Hollywood movies, but I'm not sure if squealing about
00:08:23.260
murder is the same as encouraging it or the same as a two-hour propaganda course literally
00:08:33.020
And you can oppose the agendas of the American military, which would be new for the Globe and
00:08:39.300
They have been an unambiguous cheerleader for escalating war in Ukraine.
00:08:44.740
But at the end of the day, the U.S. military, like Canada's military, is a lawful organization
00:08:50.260
directed by democratically elected civilian politicians.
00:08:54.080
So you can agree or disagree with foreign policy, and I disagree with a lot of foreign policy
00:09:03.000
Again, I just have never seen that before from the Globe and Mail.
00:09:06.200
But that's different from encouraging young people to engage in violent terrorism in their
00:09:16.440
I say again, would the Globe and Mail rejoice about a movie called How to Blow Up a Church?
00:09:25.420
They could condemn the agendas of the Christian church.
00:09:30.680
Especially with regards to residential schools.
00:09:32.660
I haven't seen any opprobrium in the Globe and Mail when more than 50 churches were torched
00:09:42.360
And really, as I mentioned in a monologue a couple of weeks ago, Canada really does have
00:09:47.240
people trying to blow up pipelines, gas pipelines, not oil pipelines.
00:09:57.360
They obviously support the terrorists, but even the CBC points out that many of them
00:10:01.260
are foreign terrorists of fortunes coming up to B.C., either from out of province or
00:10:06.920
even out of the country, hijacking the local Indian bands.
00:10:10.560
So, yeah, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised if the government, the RCMP, the public safety
00:10:17.600
minister, the prime minister, and the media are all fine with blowing up a gas pipeline.
00:10:22.520
Why shouldn't Hollywood cash in, too, and Cineplex, and why shouldn't they be able to make a few
00:10:30.060
I mean, we have a country where the environment minister, Stephen Gilbeau, literally participated
00:10:35.620
in an eco-terrorist home invasion himself, storing the home property of the former premier
00:10:43.360
of Alberta, Ralph Klein, when only his wife, Colleen, was at home by herself.
00:10:46.820
They literally came onto the property, climbed onto her roof, and terrorized her.
00:10:54.360
Why would a mere movie upset anyone if that doesn't?
00:11:00.400
Now, Trudeau and the censors talk about violent online extremism and radicalization, and they
00:11:11.980
They mean people like you and me who clap back at leftist journalists and leftist politicians.
00:11:18.740
They didn't put the country under martial law after 9-11 or after an al-Qaeda terrorist
00:11:27.300
They put the whole country under martial law when some truckers parked illegally and honked
00:11:33.940
They don't mean what they say about violence and extremism.
00:11:38.700
They're the ones who support violence against their enemies, against churches, against oil
00:11:47.220
But if you're a peaceful protester, they'll say you engage in hate speech and extremism,
00:11:54.220
Interestingly, the one critic I've seen about this movie, or actually about the book that
00:12:00.160
inspired him, was a Marxist who I've met a few times.
00:12:08.820
Here's what he wrote about the book, and it's in the left-wing magazine Canadian Dimension.
00:12:14.340
How to Blow Up a Movement, Andreas Malm's new book, Dreams of Sabotage, but Ignores Consequences.
00:12:23.980
I find it odd quoting a communist, but he had an interesting take on things.
00:12:29.180
He's talking about the book's author, Andreas Malm, and he says this.
00:12:33.100
Malm specifically advocates for the destruction of luxury commodities like SUVs and superyachts,
00:12:38.840
along with fossil fuel infrastructure like gas stations, petroleum refineries, and pipelines.
00:12:46.320
Those really aren't two things that go together.
00:12:48.880
SUVs are driven by families, by moms taking their kids to school or to the hockey rink after
00:12:55.760
They're not as cheap as regular cars, I guess, but they're really not luxury.
00:13:00.760
You can get a luxury SUV, but if you're attacking an SUV, odds are you're attacking your neighbor,
00:13:09.680
which bizarrely is something that mom himself claims to have done.
00:13:17.240
They're in elite places like the Mediterranean.
00:13:20.880
Anyone who calls for an attack on SUVs and superyachts is really just calling for attacks
00:13:24.980
on SUVs or really his neighbors and families in his neighborhood.
00:13:30.120
How gross and classist in a way, which is what my communist buddy James Wilt points out.
00:13:36.600
Mom is a scholar, not a cop, but this book veers awfully close to entrapment.
00:13:42.280
Could be, but look, like Greta Thunberg, he just loves the publicity.
00:13:46.560
Other people can pay the price for actually living out his ideas.
00:13:50.520
I mean, you don't think that these leftists are actually going to give up fossil fuels in
00:14:01.440
Mom's claims to authority on the subject are twofold.
00:14:04.400
A lengthy involvement in the climate movement, dating back to Cop 1 in 1995, and more recent
00:14:09.520
experience with relatively minor property destruction.
00:14:12.680
In 2007, Mom participated in deflating tires of luxury SUVs in a wealthy Swedish community
00:14:20.440
as part of a group called Indians of the Concrete Jungle, an appallingly offensive name that
00:14:26.540
he continues invoking throughout the course of the book, following a half apology.
00:14:30.860
More recently, in 2016, Mom was part of rogue Endegalande faction that tore down a few fences
00:14:37.900
and sprayed a slogan at a coal mine before police forces arrived and chased us away with
00:14:47.000
Which you could, I suppose, cause someone to be killed if they got in a car accident.
00:14:56.640
To encourage other people, especially teenagers, to go around and commit violent crimes or dangerous
00:15:02.400
crimes or blow up pipelines when the most you've done is deflate someone's tires and then run
00:15:10.200
He says, these examples supposedly point to a key argument in the text.
00:15:14.380
This property destruction should be strategically targeted and part of a much broader struggle
00:15:20.080
Mom derides actions like extinction rebellions blockading of a London subway in 2019 and tens
00:15:25.800
of thousands of sabotages between 1973 and 2010 by Earth First, Earth Liberation Front and
00:15:31.200
Aminimal Liberation Front as insufficiently strategic due to obstructing working class mobility and
00:15:37.920
failing to engage in a broader mass movement, respectively.
00:15:40.460
Let me just read to you one last story from James Wilt.
00:15:44.680
He talks about when he himself was a protester, a peaceful protester, who was trespassing on
00:15:55.240
The encampment led by indigenous land defenders stood up to increasingly escalating tactics by
00:16:01.040
the owner that included setting up floodlights to inhibit sleep, 24-7 security, and private
00:16:07.340
investigators following people from the property.
00:16:09.340
The developer eventually won an injunction, and the encampment fell under threat of police
00:16:16.140
Soon after, we received notice that close to 50 of us were being sued by the developer
00:16:20.480
for millions or tens of millions of dollars in alleged damages.
00:16:24.760
We scrambled to find legal representation and funds for a retainer.
00:16:28.180
Many lawyers turned us down given the scope and nature of the case, but we struck lucky with
00:16:34.260
It took us years of legal proceedings and scraping together money and resources before a settlement
00:16:41.500
We paid out tens of thousands in legal fees and tens of thousands more to the developer.
00:16:46.580
In the process, many members of the group experienced severe mental health distress during
00:16:53.640
All momentum and militancy behind the action was neutralized as intended by the lawsuit.
00:17:07.960
If pipelines and petrol stations start to explode across Canada, as Malm is calling for, October
00:17:14.760
crisis-inspired martial law will be introduced within weeks.
00:17:19.240
All right, well, you see, that's where I disagree with James Wilt.
00:17:22.280
And this is where I say the eco-terrorists actually have the upper hand.
00:17:28.780
Petrol stations, gas stations haven't exploded across Canada, but churches have.
00:17:38.040
Pipelines haven't been blown up, but they've been deeply vandalized by other means.
00:17:47.900
Not a word from Brenda Luckey, Trudeau's woman at the RCMP.
00:17:54.160
Other than his sorry example of being sued, absolutely nothing has happened to actual eco-terrorists
00:18:02.120
in Canada, other than one of them became Trudeau's environment minister.
00:18:12.140
And all the censors in the world, they love it.
00:18:20.120
Well, you might not notice the difference, but 155,000 public service employees are on strike.
00:18:39.080
The reason I say I might not know the difference is that when they were working, were they really working?
00:18:43.880
An enormous number of government workers still work from home, even though the rest of the world has moved on from the pandemic.
00:18:51.920
If you had a passport that needed renewed, there was a period of time when you had to wait half a year for that.
00:18:59.980
And I hear from my friends in the industry, it's going to be even more of a mess.
00:19:04.380
All of these things were things that Justin Trudeau's federal government were in charge of.
00:19:11.340
Well, they've been on strike for a few days now.
00:19:14.320
And sometimes their comments are just, you know, they're their own worst enemy.
00:19:44.680
We're not shutting down airports or borders yet.
00:19:56.020
We're not inconveniencing the public by being on Parliament Hill.
00:20:02.080
We have strategic picket lines right across the country.
00:20:04.880
And as I said, we haven't, you know, set up picket lines at airports or borders or anything like that to inconvenience the public.
00:20:12.760
But the longer we're out, the public are going to see more and more inconvenience.
00:20:19.980
It's up to this government how long this strike lasts.
00:20:27.840
It felt like those videos by the Twitter employees before Elon Musk bought the place where they would talk about,
00:20:35.260
they went to the coffee shop at Twitter and then the spa at Twitter.
00:20:39.080
And they got to work at the crack of 10 and they left at four.
00:20:42.600
Tell me this video by a PSAC worker, a government worker, doesn't feel exactly like the bloated staff Twitter selfie videos before Elon Musk fired 80% of that company.
00:20:58.060
We proved ourselves that we can work efficiently and more productively from home.
00:21:02.420
And the fact that they're mandating us going back to work two days a week just doesn't make sense.
00:21:07.400
Um, I believe that there, we made the transition, um, in during the pandemic to, uh, work from home.
00:21:22.080
I feel like working at home, you are still completing your day-to-day tasks.
00:21:26.400
So I think as public servants, we should have the option to choose.
00:21:30.340
Well, listen, obviously there are some good people who work for the government.
00:21:33.080
I'm not saying they're all bad, but the chutzpah in demanding that they get a raise and work from home is just too much.
00:21:42.980
Let's talk to a guy who crunches the numbers for a living and who is an advocate for all taxpayers.
00:21:53.000
Franco Teresano joins me live from Ottawa via Skype.
00:22:03.620
Privileged federal bureaucrats who took pay raises during the pandemic, who never had to worry about losing their job.
00:22:10.180
And now they want to take billions more from taxpayers who are worried about their mortgage payments going up, who are worried about the price of gasoline, the price of ground beef.
00:22:20.200
So the word that comes to mind to me, Ezra, is privilege.
00:22:25.220
And I've probably watched 20 interviews with strikers and there's no rage.
00:22:31.560
There's no sense that they've been wronged or harmed.
00:22:37.380
They're just, oh, well, well, you know, I don't really want to come back to work or, oh, well, I'd like to get more.
00:22:41.960
In fact, a lot of them have this strange talking point.
00:22:44.660
If I get a raise, that's actually good for everyone else because their employees will have to give them raises, too, because that's how it works.
00:22:54.020
Like, it's it's I have never heard of a more pathetic excuse for a strike in my life.
00:23:03.720
And J.J. McCullough, the cheeky YouTuber from out west, he points out the flag of PESAC, these big industrial gears, as if most of these workers are toiling in some factory in dangerous conditions.
00:23:17.800
They're they're paper pushers and and they've had a two or three year staycation during the lockdowns.
00:23:26.520
I know I'm generalizing, but my God, is there any public sympathy for these strikers?
00:23:35.140
Because outside of the bubble of Ottawa, outside of those golden government, golden gates of government, people have been struggling.
00:23:40.780
Now, Ezra, I'm talking fast because you fired me up with that statement that they made saying it's going to benefit all workers.
00:23:48.520
Where do they think they're going to be getting that extra money?
00:23:51.220
Yeah, they're going to be taking it from the pockets of their neighbors.
00:23:54.280
Those who work for a business, those who work for themselves, those who hire employees in their own business.
00:24:01.000
Because they're going to have to take that money from taxpayers.
00:24:03.360
And here's what's so crazy is the demands coming from these union negotiators in Ottawa who are pushing for up to a 47 percent compensation increase over three years, up to 47 percent compensation increase over three years.
00:24:17.180
Now, let's talk about that private sector worker, because those demands would cost taxpayers nine point three billion dollars.
00:24:28.180
You know, you're exactly right to say it's privilege, peace act privilege.
00:24:32.240
The privilege of never having to worry about making a budget because the government just runs a deficit.
00:24:39.020
The privilege of knowing the only government, the government only gets bigger, never smaller.
00:24:45.600
I mean, you were telling us the other day, what's the average income of these folks?
00:24:53.360
These are these are the one percenters that they told us about.
00:24:57.340
What what's the average pay of a peace act privilege worker?
00:25:00.180
The average compensation for the privileged peace act workers who don't deserve a penny more from taxpayers.
00:25:07.140
Now, I don't have peace act specifically, but we have the entire federal bureaucracy.
00:25:12.960
Let's remember peace act is representing the largest union.
00:25:16.280
We have about one hundred fifty thousand people on strike.
00:25:18.280
So the average compensation of all the federal bureaucrats is one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars.
00:25:24.680
Let me give you some more numbers, and this is why people should be so fired up, OK, because during the pandemic years since 2020, over the last three years, the federal government has handed out more than eight hundred thousand raises.
00:25:37.460
Listen to that, folks. Over the last three years, the government has handed out over eight hundred thousand raises.
00:25:44.680
We've already know that more than 90 percent of all federal employees took at least one pay raise during the pandemic.
00:25:50.640
The Fed's handed out five hundred and fifty nine million dollars in bonuses since 2020.
00:25:55.640
The Fed's hired more than thirty one thousand new bureaucrats over the last two years.
00:26:02.360
Taxpayers paid for hundreds of thousands of pay raises, hundreds of millions in bonuses and for tens of thousands of new employees.
00:26:09.160
And now these privileged bureaucrats are going on strike, demanding to take billions more from their struggling neighbors across Canada.
00:26:16.860
You know, I'm thinking that one guy who said, I mean, a lot of them say this.
00:26:20.420
Well, if I get a raise, that'll have a domino effect for everyone else.
00:26:26.200
I mean, I think of the guy a block or two away from my house who opened a restaurant that was shut down by the pandemic.
00:26:36.760
I mean, he lost everything, by the way, because of the government.
00:26:40.360
And you open a restaurant. Who do you get a raise from?
00:26:42.860
Who do you ask for a raise and say, hey, P.S.A.C. got a raise.
00:26:46.740
Can I get a raise? You're like it just it shows the strange bubble they're in.
00:26:52.280
Well, you're getting me revved up in turn, Franco.
00:26:55.440
People can learn more at taxpayer.com. Am I right?
00:26:59.120
Yes. Well, thank you for having me on. Please go to taxpayer.com.
00:27:02.160
One last comment I want to leave your list, your viewers with, Ezra, is, hey, pay raises are for when you do a good job.
00:27:08.920
But has this federal government really been doing a good job?
00:27:11.300
Why do they think that they deserve a raise with your money?
00:27:18.140
You know, people talk about white privilege or male privilege.
00:27:21.860
There is a government privilege when it comes to salaries.
00:27:49.300
Diane Sanger says, Tucker always lets us know when he's expressing his own opinion and always tries to find common ground.
00:27:55.540
Democracy cannot function without debate and coming to an agreed settlement so that society can move forward.
00:28:02.160
Yeah. You know, if someone is saying things that challenge you, I think better that they be said and hashed out than silenced or hidden.
00:28:12.400
I mean, news is trickling out, but it's really rumors.
00:28:15.480
Why did they fire Tucker and how does firing him solve the problem for Fox?
00:28:21.640
But that's less important to me than hoping that he has a journalistic future.
00:28:29.420
The Holistic Surrogate says, so what happens to Tucker's documentary O Canada now?
00:28:36.640
Think it had anything to do with his release, Ezra?
00:28:39.380
No, I don't think that the O Canada documentary was the turning point.
00:28:44.340
I think it was other things, either his monologues on the deep state or the Ukraine war, January 6th, or who knows if there were legal matters.
00:28:54.740
Fox News just signed a huge settlement with Dominion Voting.
00:29:01.260
I'm really sad we were one week away from seeing that O Canada documentary.
00:29:07.380
Ray Fraser says, Canada needs the CBC once they become neutral and represent the views of all Canadians, which was their original mandate.
00:29:14.320
Why does Canada need that outlet any more than it needed the Sun News Network, which I was a part of a decade ago, or CTV or Global or CNN or Fox?
00:29:28.860
That's certainly not what Canadians seem to say in terms of voting with their remote control, voting with their web browser.
00:29:37.760
CBC's viewership is falling, even though Canada's population is growing and CBC's budget is growing.
00:29:52.640
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.