Is Chrystia Freeland even worse than Justin Trudeau? Ezra Levenant explains why, and why he thinks she is. Plus, a good conversation with Joel Pollack about what's going on in Israel, are they on the brink of civil war, and is George Soros involved in it all?
00:01:08.720We focus on Justin Trudeau because he's the boss, because he's the incarnation of the woke globalist male feminist narcissist.
00:01:23.700I mean, he's world famous that way, in a bad way. He's routinely mocked overseas.
00:01:28.800The first time Trudeau showed up at international events, his gimmicks worked just because they were funny.
00:01:34.400He showed his fancy socks. He hugged people in that really personal space-violating way.
00:01:40.320But after that, world leaders, by which I mean the serious men and women of the world, they realized there wasn't really anything behind Trudeau's vacuous exterior.
00:01:49.360He's not a thinker. He's not a doer. He's a mascot.
00:01:53.080That's the best word for him, I think.
00:01:54.500That's why there are so many videos of him walking aimlessly through these international meetings.
00:02:01.420No one has anything important to say to Trudeau, and he has nothing important to say to them.
00:02:08.140Even at his favorite hangout, the World Economic Forum, when he's given the floor, when the world's movers and shakers, people in his vein, the globalists, the progressives, when he has their attention, he gives some cloying, self-promotional speech about how he's teaching his boys to be feminists.
00:02:25.960And a big part of these conversations have to be men. We have to do it.
00:02:32.000I was pleased when, you know, President Biden was standing up for women's rights in the Canadian Parliament.
00:02:38.620Guys, men have to have conversations with their boys.
00:02:42.000I have a 15-year-old son who spends too much time on the Internet, and I know the kinds of things that are out there, the sneaky misogynism that sort of slips through in workout videos and bro videos.
00:02:54.100Having those conversations are way more difficult for me than having just the basic birds and the bees conversations.
00:03:03.180Does anyone talk about birds and bees anymore in this era of too much information on the Internet?
00:03:09.480But having those difficult conversations now about women's rights, about equality, about these things that are core to how boys are raised,
00:03:20.740this is something that men have to be better allies on and part of, and that is something that we will continue to be pushing in Canada and everywhere around the world.
00:03:29.580I mean, you've got billionaire investors, you've got world leaders, you've got the masters of the universe there,
00:03:34.200but Trudeau has nothing to talk about other than his socks and how he tells his boys to be feminists.
00:03:40.240You know, like he is, inappropriately grabbing any woman he works with and firing women who disagree with him, like Jody Wilson-Raybould, that kind of feminist.
00:03:49.720I've been reflecting very carefully on what I remember from that incident almost 20 years ago.
00:03:57.160And again, I am, I feel, I am confident that I did not act inappropriately.
00:04:07.660But part of this awakening that we're having as a society, a long-awaited realization,
00:04:14.880is that it's not just one side of the story that matters, that the same interactions could be experienced very differently from one person to the next.
00:04:30.280And I am not going to speak for the woman in question, I would never presume to speak for her.
00:04:36.620But I know that there is an awful lot of reflection to be had as we move forward as a society on how people perceive different interactions.
00:04:47.560Like I said, I do not feel that I acted inappropriately in any way.
00:04:53.840But I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently.
00:04:59.120So yeah, I think the only person in the world who was surprised when Justin Trudeau didn't win a seat on the Security Council of the United Nations,
00:05:06.720which is voted on by all the countries,
00:05:09.560I think the only person who was surprised that he didn't get one of those temporary seats was him.
00:11:34.760I mean, I guess we all pull our pants out of our bums sometimes, but it just seems like she's doing it all the time.
00:11:41.380Most of the time, she just talks blather in the most condescending way imaginable, and that's enough to bore journalists into moving on.
00:11:48.720That's a great skill for a politician, by the way.
00:11:50.940It's just to be a fog machine that blunts any questions.
00:11:54.200George Orwell, in his book, 1984, called that duck speaking.
00:11:58.440But I'd like to show you a few of her recent comments, because I think that if you put aside your visceral contempt for Trudeau, the sneaky effort, and if you persevere through Freeland's duck-speak fog machine, if you actually ever listen to her, I think you might agree that she's worse in some ways than Trudeau.
00:12:16.780Here, listen to this question to her, and I know this was from a couple days ago, but I've been turning it over in my mind for a bit.
00:12:23.200Look at this question about the carbon tax going up in Prince Edward Island and the Atlantic provinces.
00:12:27.180I just want to play the full version of this, her whole answer, not just the goofy ending part, because I want you to hear the fog machine, the duck speaking, in her condescending tone of voice before her clangor of an ending.
00:13:04.100I really understand the challenges, and I do believe that the challenges are different in small towns, in places with less public transit than they are in big cities.
00:13:22.880You know, I, right now, am an MP for downtown Toronto.
00:13:28.240A fact that still shocks my dad is, I don't actually own a car, because I live in downtown Toronto.
00:13:35.500I'm like, I don't know, 300 meters from the nearest subway.
00:13:41.260I walk, I take the subway, I make my kids walk and ride their bikes and take the subway.
00:13:46.740It's actually healthier for our family.
00:13:50.380I wanted you to hear the first part of that, too, because of the non-answers, the condescending tone, the disrespect of not answering a plain question plainly, like you're a child.
00:14:01.640It's how Kamala Harris talks, meaningless word salad while smiling at you and nodding.
00:14:30.580Except, of course, she does have a car paid for by the taxpayers.
00:14:34.560She has a limo and a chauffeur, courtesy of you, the taxpayer.
00:14:39.320And as Sheila Gunn-Reed has shown, and as Blackbox, excuse me, has recently republished, Chrystia Freeland's limo driver actually drives hundreds of kilometers in any given day.
00:17:21.660Catherine McKenna, another Trudeau-style liar who Trudeau has disposed of, used to say that no one would buy Alberta oil and gas if Alberta doesn't bring in a carbon tax.
00:17:43.760Russia, dictatorships like Iran, Saudi Arabia.
00:17:46.480Not a single customer in the history of the world has ever said, no, sorry, we're not going to buy your oil because you don't have a carbon tax.
00:17:54.400They're literally buying oil from genocidal regimes, from terrorist regimes, from warmonger regimes, from regimes that hang gays and stone adulterous women.
00:18:03.940And imagine saying people won't buy Alberta oil and gas if we don't impose a carbon tax on ourselves.
00:18:09.200The only thing's stupider than that is to say that about PEI tourism.
00:18:13.000Of course not a single journalist challenged such a stupid idea.
00:18:17.180Now maybe they were just stunned and stoned and hypnotized by her condescending tone of voice.
00:18:22.260But just stop for a second and imagine that being a fact that your Toronto politician had to tell you when visiting PEI, just that fact with her limo driver,
00:18:34.780that if you don't have your carbon tax, you're not going to get tourism.
00:18:37.580Her message is basically, stop complaining about the carbon tax.
00:22:35.220Sheila Gunn-Reed, David Menzies, Avi Yamini, Drea Humphreys.
00:22:39.020It's going to be a great team of rebels, and hopefully you, for more details, go to rebelvacations.com.
00:22:44.980We are interested in Israel, whether or not the tour was happening, because such incredible things are going on in that country, and we'll see them firsthand.
00:22:54.560It looks to me like a political division in the country that is more shocking than anything I've seen, even in the United States.
00:23:03.300The United States, where Democrats and Republicans despise each other, where there's talk about a national divorce or even a civil war.
00:23:11.160I think it's just talk in America, but it feels like it actually is on the precipice of a genuine civil war in Israel.
00:23:19.320I know that sounds crazy, but to help us figure out what's really going on, we go to our friend Joel Pollack,
00:23:25.220the senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com, who's been covering this story for them.
00:25:09.980There is a panic on the left that is partly about the loss of political power,
00:25:15.120partly about intolerance toward any election or any governing majority that isn't them or that they didn't win.
00:25:23.400And I think it's also fueled by social media.
00:25:26.520I think there's a level of unreality to it.
00:25:28.580I'm not trying to dismiss the idea that there really are divisions that are important.
00:25:33.420But when I talk to people on the left in Israel, including some of my own relatives,
00:25:37.640or I listen to what people on the left are saying, serious people, intellectual people,
00:25:42.600they almost never address the issue of judicial reform.
00:25:46.480They are not really upset about the particular reforms being pushed.
00:25:51.840They are really expressing a kind of anxiety about their own place in Israel's future at a time when demographically the balance is shifting in favor of more religious Jews
00:26:02.820and in favor of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, what are called in Israel Mizrahi Jews,
00:26:08.760who tend to be browner, who tend to be a little bit less educated sometimes.
00:26:13.100They come from more impoverished backgrounds, but they're still very much part of the fabric of Israeli life.
00:26:17.280The old secular Ashkenazi Eastern European elite, which was predominantly socialist and which was responsible in large part for the founding of the State of Israel,
00:26:27.620is feeling its power slip away because it is largely confined to the urban coastal environment.
00:26:34.060It is very heavily represented in the media and in the tech sector and at the universities, but it doesn't represent the population as a whole.
00:26:40.960And ever since the end of the peace process in the early 2000s, it has lost its, if you will, grip on Israeli political discourse.
00:26:52.160It had already lost the majority in the late 70s to the Likud party led by Menachem Begin,
00:26:56.800who was the first to bring the opposition to power in Israel.
00:26:59.800But the left stopped being able to set the agenda, except through the courts,
00:27:03.840where the powerful Israeli judiciary took more and more powers for itself over time,
00:27:10.820declaring a constitutional revolution and the right to review legislation,
00:27:15.400which is part of many other democracies, but was never explicitly guaranteed by any constitution in Israel and not by any legislation.
00:27:24.620So the left hung out through the judiciary and eventually conservative voters got tired of it.
00:27:29.440And they're trying to pare back the judiciary, not to make it dependent or to take away its judicial independence,
00:27:37.120but to keep the branches in balance so that when people vote for a government and it carries out a policy,
00:27:43.300it actually can do that without being overturned almost automatically by the courts.
00:27:47.740You know, I'm so glad you said everything you said there, because I have not been in Israel in a while.
00:27:53.100And I do listen to social media from Anglo-oriented Ashkenazi Jews as opposed to the Sephardi Jews or Russian Jews or working class Jews.
00:30:53.000This is not establishing reasonableness as a standard of behavior.
00:30:58.140So when you have a tort case, for example, you often measure someone's culpability by what a reasonable person would have done.
00:31:05.180Or we talk about whether there's a reasonable doubt in a criminal case.
00:31:09.080This is simply saying we don't think this policy is reasonable.
00:31:12.740Not that it didn't go through the right administrative hoops or that the government didn't apply its mind to it or whatever,
00:31:17.460but just that the court decides that such and such is unreasonable and therefore we're going to reject it.
00:31:22.420No left-wing activist or Democratic Party voter or liberal voter would ever accept that a conservative court could tell a Democratic Party or Liberal Party government
00:31:33.760that its policies are simply unreasonable to those conservative justices.
00:31:37.800But that's how the Israeli system works.
00:31:39.980And the reason it worked that way, as I alluded to earlier, was that in the 1990s, the chief justice at the time, Aharon Barak,
00:31:47.640began taking more and more power for the courts and declaring that the courts had power to review certain legislation
00:31:54.880and that the courts had the power to intervene in government decisions.
00:31:58.720And this power went largely unchallenged, but it began to interfere, not just in things conservative governments wanted to do.
00:32:06.740It began to interfere even in agreements that the left and the right had come to.
00:32:11.480For example, about six years ago, there was an agreement between the left and the right on how to resolve the thorny question of religious students participating in the military.
00:32:20.920And they actually came to an agreement.
00:32:22.260But the court, which is dominated by the left, said, no, this agreement is invalid.
00:32:25.560It's unreasonable and we're going to reject it.
00:32:27.320And so it's actually been a force for the left, but not a force for compromise in the Israeli political system.
00:32:33.700It has tended to be a backstop, sort of last-ditch maneuver or weapon, really, for the left to defeat not just conservative policies, but compromises,
00:32:44.500so that conservatives know when they negotiate with the left, they're not really negotiating with elected leaders.
00:32:49.420They're also negotiating with the courts.
00:32:51.920I heard there was also, there was one ruling, you tell me if this is right,
00:32:55.480that the current members of the Supreme Court wanted the right to veto any new appointments to the court.
00:33:04.440Well, they have a veto because Israel selects its judges through a judicial commission.
00:33:10.660And although there are a few elected members of the Knesset on this commission, the majority of the seats are composed of judges and lawyers or members of the bar.
00:33:22.640So the judges can say, no, no, we don't like who you pick.
00:33:28.600And the lawyers don't contradict the judges.
00:33:30.620So effectively, the judiciary has a veto over judicial selection.
00:33:35.020There are occasionally conservative judges who are simply so brilliant that it's hard to turn them down with a straight face.
00:33:41.040But most of the people who are selected are on the left and learn through their careers and on their way to that point to appease the worldview of the largely secular, largely Eastern European judges who are running the system.
00:33:54.660So, yes, Netanyahu wants to broaden that.
00:33:57.260And when Americans say, like the Biden administration has said, I mean, most Americans actually aren't too familiar with the ins and outs of this.
00:34:03.780But when the Biden administration says that these reforms are radical and they're a threat to Israeli democracy, you look at how we select judges in the United States.
00:34:35.380So I want to talk about the power of the legislature relative to the judiciary or the power of the electorate.
00:34:42.400And we have an independent judiciary in the United States, but it's not as independent as the Israeli judiciary.
00:34:47.120And it will still be more independent than the Israeli judiciary if most of these reforms are passed.
00:34:51.360There is one reform that I've objected to, which would allow the Knesset to overrule court decisions, Supreme Court decisions by a majority vote.
00:35:00.040Now, I don't think that is consistent necessarily with judicial independence.
00:35:07.660We in the United States also allow Congress to overrule the Supreme Court, but they have to pass a constitutional amendment, which is much more difficult, much higher bar.
00:35:15.600And, of course, three-fourths of the states have to approve of the amendment for it to go through.
00:35:21.140It still exists, that kind of mechanism, but it's just much more difficult.
00:35:24.120So I think that having a simple majority of the Knesset is too low a bar.
00:35:28.200I've brought this up with proponents of the reforms in Israel, and one of them told me, well, you can't get a majority of the Knesset to do anything.
00:35:34.760But I think they've started to realize that that one reform they've proposed is problematic, and they've signaled the willingness to drop it or to compromise on it.
00:35:43.160The point is there can be a dialogue about this, and most Israelis, including some on the left, agree that the powers of the court are simply too great.
00:35:50.800What they object to is that Netanyahu is in power, that he is directing this process of reform, and that he has, in a sense, the ultimate say on which reforms come to the floor for a vote.
00:36:01.520The opposition has walked out of negotiations.
00:36:04.360They have rejected talks with Netanyahu.
00:36:08.800They have, in a sense, created their own internal opposition because the hundreds of thousands of protesters on the streets are now living in tent cities in places like Gan Sacher, the Sacher Garden in Jerusalem.
00:36:20.280Interestingly, these tents are top of the line.
00:36:24.140There's a lot of funding coming into this opposition movement.
00:36:26.220But when you've got those kinds of numbers on the ground, it's very hard for the elected opposition leaders to come back to their supporters in the streets and say, you know what, we decided to compromise after all.
00:36:35.660So they've talked themselves into a corner by using phrases like civil war or regime or coup and using it not rhetorically but in a real sense.
00:36:49.360All the tents are the same at first rate.
00:36:52.140We know that the United States medals in other countries.
00:36:55.540I was in Hungary recently, and I learned of $25 million being poured into that country to set up opposition media, which would be like three-quarters of a billion dollars that Hungary puts into America for anti-regime media.
00:37:10.220And George Soros himself and other Democrat activists have been against Netanyahu viscerally.
00:37:18.520I think that—I use the phrase color revolution.
00:37:21.840I think that this is exactly what America would look like if Trump were, quote, restored.
00:37:28.100Because remember, Netanyahu was voted out.
00:37:43.420And so all the forces, many of them in America, many of them in Europe, who want to topple Netanyahu because they have a personal hatred for him and because they don't want him to make these democratic reforms to alter the balance of power in that country.
00:37:57.020I actually think this is—there's a lot of foreign meddling.
00:38:00.500And it's—the Supreme Court is something they care about, but they just really are going to try and stop Netanyahu at all costs.
00:38:35.100It's still a major problem because it is anti-democratic.
00:38:38.940It's an attempt to use military pressure to change a policy, right?
00:38:42.460If you're going to say we are going to prevent the military from functioning to get our way because we didn't win at the ballot box last November, that is the opposite of standing up for democracy.
00:38:54.080The military, it's a coup of its own in a way.
00:38:57.900But I think that there won't be a civil war in Israel because Israelis don't want to kill each other.
00:39:04.460There's a lot of animosity between some groups of Jewish Israelis.
00:39:09.480There are also fault lines between Jews and Arabs in Israel.
00:39:12.480We saw that explode two years ago, shortly after Joe Biden was elected, when Hamas went to war against Israel.
00:39:19.900And there were riots in which Arab Israelis attacked Jews.
00:39:24.780And there were some revenge attacks, reprisal attacks as well.
00:39:27.800So there are some tensions, but nothing to approach the scale of a civil war.
00:39:32.780There have been military divisions among the Jewish residents of Israel before.
00:39:39.040Prior to the State of Israel being formed in the last few years, there was a military confrontation, really, between the forces that lined up behind David Ben-Burion, who became the first prime minister, and the forces in the paramilitary organization that was led by Menachem Begin, who later became the prime minister in 1977, as I mentioned.
00:39:59.680These were forces that were opposed to one another, and Begin's forces decided to attack British police installations and to attack infrastructure in what was a campaign of sabotage, and we could even call it a campaign of terror, against the British occupying forces.
00:40:14.520They bombed the King David Hotel and so forth.
00:40:16.960Ben-Gurion's forces in the Haganah, which later became the Israel Defense Forces, they worked with the British to suppress Begin's forces.
00:40:24.920And that left a lot of bad blood that Begin, to his credit, set aside when the State of Israel was founded.
00:40:33.140But there has been that sort of low-level conflict in history, not recent history, but we're talking 80 years ago, when there were real divisions among the different Jewish military organizations about what tactics to use to win independence from the British.
00:40:50.000But I don't think anything like that is possible now, and I think, you know, you'll tell us when you return how it feels.
00:40:57.500I think when I talk to my relatives, I have Israeli relatives on the left, some of whom have been at these demonstrations.
00:41:03.820They're very passionate, and they fear that their lives are going to be taken over by religious authorities who are represented in the Netanyahu government.
00:41:12.140I don't think that's a rational fear, but I think they fear it.
00:41:14.880I think the role, by the way, of social media in spreading some of these fears has to be looked at.
00:41:18.880When I talk to my few conservative relatives in Israel, they may or may not agree with judicial reforms, but they take the attitude of live and let live, that we can get past this, and people have to let go a little bit, and nobody should be seeking the blood of anybody else.
00:41:37.980It's just not necessary, and it's not what we're about, and I tend to think that that's a widespread sentiment in the general Israeli population.
00:41:46.580What you see in Tel Aviv is just like what you see in major cities in the United States.
00:41:50.340You have liberal organizations, liberal activists who are living in close quarters.
00:41:54.320It's easy for them to get into the street.
00:41:55.780It's easy for them to get media attention.
00:41:58.780So they drive a lot of the narrative, and the Biden administration is playing into this.
00:42:02.240It has supported the opposition protests.
00:42:04.380It has given the opposition leaders a false sense, I think, that Netanyahu is going to be on his way out soon, that he can be defeated.
00:42:11.500I think one of the reasons the opposition doesn't negotiate with Netanyahu is that they believe they have the backing of the Biden administration, and that's all that matters.
00:42:45.220We'll be meeting with experts on all sides of these various divides, and you will be there right with us as we learn what's going on in the country.