EZRA LEVANT | Is the destruction of our civil liberties a blip or a trend?
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
166.44806
Summary
Is this a blip or a trend? Ezra LeVant makes the case for why the Trudeau government is eroding our civil liberties. And he uses a Hitler analogy to make the point. Is this a temporary blip, or the beginning of a new trend?
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, my rebels. Today, I have a question for you. It's hard to know when you're in the middle
00:00:06.100
of something if it's the beginning, middle, or the end. I mean, think of it like a stock on the
00:00:12.240
stock market or a cryptocurrency. If it's going up, is it a blip about to come back down, or is
00:00:18.800
it just the beginning of a trend? You really never know until it's over. So is our diminution
00:00:26.980
of civil liberties? Is that a blip or a trend? And I'll give you a historical analogy with
00:00:34.540
Hitler's slow rise to power. I know that sounds dramatic, but I'll make the case for you.
00:00:39.920
That's today's podcast. I'd like to invite you to get the video version of it at rebelnewsplus.com,
00:00:45.900
eight bucks a month. That's half the price of Netflix. Every day I do a TV version of this
00:00:50.100
podcast, plus weekly shows by David Menzies, Sheila Gunn-Reed, and Andrew Chapados. Most
00:00:56.240
importantly, the eight bucks helps us stay alive. We don't take a dime from Trudeau,
00:01:00.580
which is why we can speak freely. All right, here's today's show.
00:01:15.240
Tonight, is the destruction of our civil liberties a blip or a trend? It's October 7th,
00:01:30.220
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
00:01:34.020
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
00:01:38.120
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my
00:01:43.960
Yesterday, Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland announced a terrible series of new discriminations
00:01:57.740
But the mandatory vaccination that's in place immediately for federal employees will look
00:02:03.320
like. The bottom line, proof of vaccination will be required by no later than the end of
00:02:09.580
this month for all federal employees. And by mid-November, enforcement measures in place
00:02:20.120
The same goes for the second commitment we made, mandatory vaccination on travel.
00:02:26.780
By the end of October, everyone 12 or older on a plane or train within Canada should be fully
00:02:35.080
Literally millions of innocent people will be affected, and Trudeau says he wants to make
00:02:39.860
it as onerous as possible for people to get an exemption, even if you have a medical reason.
00:02:45.820
The right thing and gotten vaccinated, you deserve the freedom to be safe from COVID-19, to have
00:02:53.540
your kids safe from COVID, to get back to the things you love. And if you haven't gotten
00:02:59.880
your shots yet, but want to travel this winter, let's be clear. There will only be a few extremely
00:03:07.120
narrow exceptions, like a valid medical condition. For the vast, vast majority of people, the rules
00:03:14.680
are very simple. To travel, you've got to be vaccinated. These travel measures, along with
00:03:21.780
mandatory vaccination for federal employees, are some of the strongest in the world.
00:03:26.900
We're there to foot the bill for provinces and territories that roll out proof of vaccination
00:03:30.980
programs, and we'll introduce legislation to make it a criminal offense to threaten or harass
00:03:39.160
Trudeau really doesn't believe in human rights. He never did.
00:03:43.100
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China, because their basic dictatorship
00:03:53.940
is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.
00:03:58.420
He announced this discrimination based on medical condition, or more precisely, the personal health
00:04:04.940
decision of millions of Canadians that they do not want to undergo a particular medical procedure.
00:04:09.500
It was only just invented a few months ago, namely the injection of a vaccine that's still
00:04:16.400
undergoing clinical trials and has been ordered to undergo clinical trials until 2027, to combat
00:04:22.840
an illness, COVID-19, which millions of Canadians have already contracted and recovered from, and
00:04:28.360
are hence naturally immune to, and because millions of Canadians have chosen not to be part of that
00:04:33.420
great experiment, at least not yet, and because of that, they're being denied vast categories
00:04:39.420
of their civil liberties. In the latest iteration of this, they're being banned from flying on planes,
00:04:44.260
taking trains or ships, working for the civil service. This is on top of existing provincial
00:04:49.380
vaccine mandates, and those of many workplaces and universities and even hospitals.
00:04:54.000
It is, I just find it stunning that in the middle of a purported pandemic, Canadian provincial
00:05:00.340
governments are set to fire more than a hundred thousand nurses, doctors, and other hospital
00:05:04.940
staff. They were all heroes, we were told. Many of them got sick and recovered. They surely
00:05:10.660
know the virus and its risks, and the vaccine and its risks, more than anyone. Certainly more
00:05:16.900
than a childish surfer pothead who doesn't even read his briefing notes. I mean, this guy.
00:05:22.460
Never apologize for standing up for an LGDP, LGT, LGT, LGT, LGBTQ2 plus.
00:05:34.020
Millions of people, seriously, right now the number is close to 10 million Canadians, have
00:05:38.800
suddenly been denormalized, deplatformed, cancelled, banned, kept out, put as an unclean underclass.
00:05:47.580
Many will be fired, which is a disaster for many people. Many people just a paycheck away from
00:05:52.360
losing their mortgage. And why? Aren't we at 80% injections? Isn't that herd immunity that we
00:05:59.980
were promised? And aren't those people protected now? Why would they even care? If they're safe,
00:06:05.100
which is the promise. Look at this. It's the death rate for the virus across Canada. Extremely
00:06:13.100
low now in Canada. Isn't that what we were worried about? The anomaly is Alberta, but I no longer
00:06:19.120
trust Alberta's reported statistics. Not since their chief health officer said she's now counting
00:06:24.920
illnesses as COVID, even if they have not been diagnosed as COVID.
00:06:30.960
If individuals choose to not get tested for COVID, but are home with an illness,
00:06:36.160
they're now counted in the list as being part of that outbreak.
00:06:41.140
Yeah, sorry, that's literally fake news and cooked statistics. I don't trust her anymore.
00:06:46.760
Not that I really ever did. Look at the two biggest provinces, Ontario and Quebec, death rates
00:06:51.360
are approaching zero. Right as the extreme measures are being introduced, why hasn't the problem been
00:06:57.720
solved? Why are government policies more extreme than ever, even though people are more vaxxed than ever,
00:07:05.540
safer than ever, even though the pandemic is, by all legitimate measurements, over,
00:07:09.940
at least as an emergency. One theory is that so there is no control group. Do you know what I mean
00:07:16.240
by that? If half the population took the vaccines and the other half did not, over time, you could
00:07:21.660
compare health outcomes for those two big groups over the long term. Were there new cases of cancer?
00:07:27.480
Were there genetic problems? Were there problems with pregnancies? Problems like heart disease?
00:07:32.180
If you have one group that took the vaccines and another group that didn't, you could compare them
00:07:36.780
and isolate for that one variable, the vaccines. But if you get rid of the control group, the group
00:07:42.320
that's normal, the default group, the group didn't take the vaccine, you can no longer isolate the vaccine
00:07:46.960
as the variable that caused an illness. Is that why they're trying to get every single person vaxxed?
00:07:53.560
I don't know. I can't think of a more plausible reason.
00:07:58.260
Started out with a trickle. Two weeks to flatten the curve. That was then extended. Then masking rules.
00:08:03.500
And social distancing. Even though the FDA's former commissioner admits social distancing was just
00:08:09.080
made up. Well, it's literally the law now. He admits it was made up. We went from two weeks to
00:08:14.580
flatten the curve to firing thousands of people and demonizing them. I had lunch with a friend
00:08:19.300
yesterday who, when she left, said she couldn't tell her family where she was. Now, I thought
00:08:23.020
it was a political insult, but no. She said it was because she, who is double vaxxed,
00:08:28.920
if she told her family, who are all double vaxxed, that she had consorted with someone
00:08:34.460
who was unvaxxed, they wouldn't visit with her. Can you imagine that? That is a mania.
00:08:38.960
That's not science. It's superstition. But that's where we are now as a culture.
00:08:44.360
And taking advantage of that chaos and mania is Justin Trudeau. Never want to miss an opportunity
00:08:49.080
to consolidate power. The greatest civil liberties violation in Canadian history in a sweep of a pen.
00:08:54.780
A far larger scale, 10 million people than Japanese internment or Indian residential schools.
00:09:00.900
An instant apartheid. Dividing an unclean class. Unclean not in a real sense. They're not infected
00:09:08.020
or anything. They're just unclean in a political sense. Political hygiene. They don't have government
00:09:12.400
approval. They don't have Pfizer approval. They're not sick. They just didn't take your medicine.
00:09:18.480
And all this, especially the mass disenfranchisement, made me think of something terrible and personal
00:09:23.360
and permit me to share it with you. You may know I'm Jewish and I grew up in Calgary and I went to a
00:09:29.260
Jewish grade school there. And this was in the 1970s and 80s. And as it happened, the principal
00:09:33.560
of the little school and the Yiddish language teacher, they were married, Ida and Aaron Achler,
00:09:39.020
and they had met in a concentration camp in Europe and they were survivors. And the school taught us
00:09:43.660
about the Holocaust. About the concentration camps. Pictures like these. The Jewish ghetto.
00:09:48.660
But Anne Frank. It was shocking and sobering to learn about this stuff in grade school.
00:09:53.500
So we learned about Adolf Hitler and we learned about how he took power
00:09:56.300
in stages and consolidated it. I mean, in 1923,
00:10:01.160
he tries a little coup. You know, the Munich Beer Hall Putsch.
00:10:04.320
It didn't work. And he goes to jail and he writes Mein Kampf. And it took him 10 years
00:10:08.740
to win an election, to be appointed chancellor. And then step by step,
00:10:12.720
he destroyed democracy. In 1935, he passed the Nuremberg Laws that banned Jews from various
00:10:19.620
civil rights. A few years later, the Kristallnacht Riots. And the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
00:10:25.920
And then finally, full-scale war in 1939. And even then, I don't know if you know this,
00:10:30.780
the Holocaust didn't really ramp up for another year or two. And in some parts of Europe,
00:10:35.820
like Hungary, it wasn't even really until 1944 that the Holocaust was prosecuted in full.
00:10:42.160
So it was really more than 10 years, this whole thing. And I remember as a kid,
00:10:47.400
I remember learning about this, 1933, 35, 39. And I remember thinking as a kid,
00:10:54.320
why didn't the Jews leave? Why didn't they flee? I mean, couldn't they see it coming?
00:11:00.840
Now, one answer is there weren't a lot of places to flee to. There weren't a lot of places welcoming
00:11:06.240
Jews as refugees. Even Canada famously turned away a ship of refugees called the St.
00:11:12.120
Louis that went from port to port with only 1,000 Jews on it, trying to find some place
00:11:16.980
that would take them. Cuba said no. Canada said no. So that's a real fact. But look,
00:11:22.720
that was already in 1939. What about in 1935, where Jewish civil rights were swept away in
00:11:28.860
one sweep? You couldn't marry a Gentile. You couldn't work in certain places. How about
00:11:33.580
leaving then, 35? Not in a desperate flight as refugees in 1939, but how about calmly leaving
00:11:39.620
in 1935? Calmly settle your affairs. Calmly sell your house, move your job. Like, not flee,
00:11:45.640
but walk, don't run. I was reading a historical study that showed 15% of all doctors in Germany
00:11:53.380
in 1933 were Jews. That's a lot. And in some fields, like pediatrics, it was actually half
00:11:59.420
of the doctors were Jews. Half. So just like we're firing 100,000 Canadian doctors and nurses
00:12:05.820
for discriminatory reasons, there were some hospitals in Germany, especially in Berlin,
00:12:11.600
that literally lost half their staff overnight when they banned Jews. I mean, that was 1935.
00:12:18.800
That was a Nuremberg Laws. Wasn't that the time to go? That's what I thought as a child.
00:12:26.860
It's like when you watch a horror movie and a character goes to open a door or enter a room,
00:12:33.220
and there's this dramatic music that you hear, and obviously the character doesn't hear it,
00:12:39.240
and you want to shout out, don't open that door, don't go in that room. But of course he does
00:12:42.620
to his doom. That's why it's a horror movie. But the thing is, you know how the movie is going
00:12:47.080
to go. You know what's behind the door. You can guess. You know you're watching a horror movie.
00:12:52.120
And if you didn't figure it out, the soundtrack would coach you to panic, and so you do. But the
00:12:57.620
character doesn't know he's in a horror movie. He doesn't hear the soundtrack. That's the whole
00:13:02.260
point. He doesn't know. Is it a blip or is it a trend? And in 1933, they didn't know what 1935
00:13:09.480
would bring in. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of their civil rights and their right to
00:13:14.080
marry non-Jews and things like that. They didn't know about 1938 yet and the Kristallnacht riots.
00:13:18.860
And in 1938, they didn't yet know about Auschwitz, which wouldn't become a massive death camp,
00:13:23.680
until the early 40s. We see it now as a progression, a trend inevitable. It's so obvious to us now
00:13:29.680
in retrospect because that's how it's ended, and we know how it ended. But in 1933, when it was
00:13:35.520
beginning, who knows? Maybe making Hitler chancellor would calm him down, what with the responsibilities of
00:13:41.300
governing now. He's not just a speechmaker. He has to run the place. Maybe in 1935, the Nuremberg
00:13:46.700
Laws would be the worst of it. No death camps for the Jews, just second-class status. Maybe Germans
00:13:53.120
being good people, liberal people, educated people, modern people would push back. Maybe, maybe, but it
00:13:58.800
never actually happened. I'm not saying we're on the road to concentration camps, but then again,
00:14:03.900
we've already shown that we'll passively, passively abide COVID jails where Canadians are detained
00:14:11.440
for days at the airport. Even if you're healthy, we've seen larger camps in Australia. We've already
00:14:17.520
shown that we'll be jabbed en masse. We've shown that we'll rat out our neighbors. Every government
00:14:23.980
has a snitch line. We've shown that the police have no compunction going after peaceful protesters
00:14:29.380
and the media who cover them. We see that our police have no compunction, arresting and
00:14:35.560
jailing Christian pastors. We've seen that our courts won't stop any of it. In fact, they'll
00:14:40.840
enforce it. We've seen that our hospitals will fire doctors who speak out with a different
00:14:44.980
opinion. In fact, the College of Physicians and Surgeons will ban those doctors. So yesterday,
00:14:51.740
this massive destruction of our civil rights for a whole class of people, that's just a blip
00:14:57.320
are we going to go back to normal? Or is that a continuing trend that's just going to get
00:15:02.180
worse? I'm not comparing Trudeau to Hitler, even though Trudeau is an authoritarian and a
00:15:08.920
bit of a sociopath too, we've learned. Our media is compliant. All our institutions are. Nothing
00:15:15.080
has pushed back at all. No countervailing force of any kind. So why wouldn't we keep going on
00:15:22.040
a trend, not an anomalous blip? Why would things stop here? Why wouldn't, for example,
00:15:27.680
our police become like Australia's police? That's just one notch further. And just full
00:15:34.660
out declare war against the people. I'm told all of this is very popular in the polls. So
00:15:40.420
was Hitler. Not that they really had polls back then, but he certainly could fill stadiums.
00:15:44.860
And who's going to stop him? Aaron O'Toole? He didn't have a word to say about yesterday.
00:15:51.720
Not one word. He had a tweet about how much he likes beer. That was his message of the day
00:15:58.000
yesterday. So I ask you, yesterday's civil liberties disaster. Silence, by the way, from
00:16:06.400
the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Silence from every provincial premier. Every one
00:16:11.180
of them. Silence from the so-called conservative parties. Silence from the courts. Thousands,
00:16:17.800
hundreds of thousands of people are about to be fired. Many of them put into poverty. Distress
00:16:22.380
because of a mad plan. A merger, really, between corporate giants and political giants. Big pharma
00:16:28.400
and big government and big tech and big media. So it was yesterday just a temporary anomaly.
00:16:35.760
Are we really going to return to normal soon? Or is this a trend that will only continue
00:16:41.140
and only get worse? What do you think? Stay with us for more.
00:17:00.640
Welcome back. Well, there's so much going on in Canada. We just had our federal election. And
00:17:05.380
one of the issues that wasn't talked about much during the campaign, but was resolved somewhat
00:17:10.680
short days after the campaign, was the illegal detention, I would say hostage taking, of two
00:17:17.440
Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, for more than a thousand days by China in a brazen
00:17:24.360
reaction or punishment to Canada for arresting the CFO and founder of, daughter of the founder of Huawei,
00:17:34.280
Meng Wanzhou. Even after the two Michaels would return to Canada, Justin Trudeau simply cannot muster
00:17:42.520
any criticism of that country. And diplomacy continues as normal. But China is not acting
00:17:49.640
normally. It's continuing to show aggression, including this past week towards Taiwan in
00:17:55.840
unprecedented ways. In the past week, about 150 Chinese aircraft from the People's Liberation
00:18:04.580
Army Air Force have penetrated Taiwan's airspace, testing and probing Taiwan's response. And more
00:18:12.240
importantly, testing the resolve of the West, especially U.S. President Joe Biden, who perhaps
00:18:20.040
tempted China by showing tremendous weakness in the fall of Afghanistan. Let me show you a tweet from
00:18:26.680
Hu Xijin in Global Times, an English-language Chinese Communist Party propaganda outfit.
00:18:34.760
They say PLA, People's Liberation Army, already has the ability now to liberate Taiwan at one stroke.
00:18:45.480
Why has to wait until 2025? That the mainland hasn't taken the action is a goodwill of Beijing to
00:18:52.640
treasure Cross Straits peace. I worry that the goodwill could be abused by Taiwan and the war is
00:18:58.800
triggered suddenly. Just shocking comments from the Communist Party trying to normalize and in fact
00:19:06.940
make inevitable the idea of a Chinese invasion. And what does Joe Biden's press secretary have to
00:19:13.920
say about the matter? Well, here's a quick clip of that. What is the White House's interpretation of
00:19:18.800
what China is doing and what can be done to kind of ratchet down their tensions? Well, we remain
00:19:23.680
concerned by the People's Republic of China's provocative military activity near Taiwan, which is
00:19:28.460
destabilizing, risks miscalculations, and undermines a regional peace and stability. We urge Beijing to
00:19:35.260
seize its military, diplomatic, and economic pressure and coercion against Taiwan. And we have an abiding
00:19:40.460
interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. That's why we will continue to assist Taiwan in
00:19:45.620
maintaining a sufficient self-defense capability. We maintain our commitments as outlined in the three
00:19:50.340
communiques, Taiwan Relations Act and the six assurances. Our commitment to Taiwan is rock solid and
00:19:56.140
contributes to the maintenance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and within the region. We
00:20:00.940
have been clear privately and publicly about our concern about the PRC's pressure and coercion
00:20:05.740
toward Taiwan. And we will continue to watch the situation very closely. Well, I suppose that's better
00:20:11.420
than nothing, but it's not much. And it's by a spokesman, not by the president himself. What does this all
00:20:17.020
mean? Is an invasion of Taiwan inevitable? If those 150 or so probes turn into an actual attack,
00:20:23.820
what would America do? Joining us now via Skype is our friend Gordon Chang, the author of The Coming
00:20:29.420
Collapse of China. You can follow him on Twitter at Gordon G. Chang. Gordon, great to see you again.
00:20:35.820
I am nervous about this. They are ramping up their testing and probing, not just of Taiwan's air defenses,
00:20:42.220
but of the West's reaction. What do you make of both? Yeah, I agree with you, Ezra. Well, you know,
00:20:48.220
right now there are these unprecedented incursions into Taiwan's air defense identification zone.
00:20:54.860
And although, you know, people talk about invasion, I worry about an accident, you know,
00:20:59.980
something where, you know, two planes come together as they did on April 1st, 2001,
00:21:04.700
when a Chinese jet clipped the wing of a unarmed U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane, the EP-3.
00:21:10.300
There's a couple things going on right now. One of them is that in Beijing, there is political turmoil.
00:21:18.780
We don't know the full extent of it, but clearly Xi Jinping is under attack. And I think that really
00:21:24.940
makes him decide to basically try it on Taiwan, to sort of unify the political system and the Chinese
00:21:32.540
people behind him. But there's that other aspect to it, which you mentioned, and that is the Chinese
00:21:37.900
elite does not think very much of Joe Biden. And we know this because of the fall of Kabul.
00:21:44.140
Chinese propaganda had two narratives. One of them was that because the U.S. couldn't deal with the
00:21:48.780
Taliban, it certainly couldn't counter China. And also Beijing said that when it invaded Taiwan,
00:21:55.260
that Taiwan would fall within a couple of days and the U.S. wouldn't come to help. Now,
00:22:00.140
I'm not saying that their perception is right, but it doesn't matter what I think. What matters is what
00:22:05.340
they think. And right now they're thinking some pretty dangerous thoughts.
00:22:10.140
Yeah. And you know, it's credible. Taiwan is so far from the United States. It's even far from
00:22:16.460
Hawaii. It's even far from other U.S. bases in the Pacific. And it's so close to China. And it's
00:22:23.420
geographically a fairly small country. So the idea that it could fall before America could actually
00:22:30.700
muster a strong force in the region. It strikes me as reasonable, as terrifying and as horrific,
00:22:39.100
but that it's pragmatically possible. I do see this flicker of, I don't know, interest. I see American
00:22:46.460
F-35 jets. Those are one of the most modern jets in the American military taking off and landing from a
00:22:54.380
Japanese aircraft carrier. That's something that you don't see every day. That's an interesting
00:23:01.740
show of cooperation. It shows that Japan is very much engaged in defense. Should we ascribe meaning
00:23:07.500
to that? Are there other American aircraft carriers in the region? What could America and Japan and
00:23:15.420
others and Taiwan itself deploy against the PLA, the People's Liberation Army?
00:23:21.420
Yeah, that's an important development that you highlight. And that is, at the moment,
00:23:26.220
there are four big decks, as they say. There's two U.S. aircraft carriers, the Ronald Reagan and
00:23:32.060
the Carl Vincent. There is the U.K.'s only aircraft carrier, the Queen Elizabeth. And then there's a
00:23:37.820
Japanese ship that you mentioned, the Ida. And they are now in probably the South China Sea. They were in
00:23:45.660
the Philippine Sea a day or so ago. And this means it's a show of resolve on the part of the West.
00:23:52.380
And this is more important than the words from Jen Psaki, or even the statement from the State
00:23:57.740
Department on Sunday, which they said they were, quote unquote, very concerned. What we really need
00:24:03.980
to see is the President of the United States actually talk about defending Taiwan. That did not occur.
00:24:11.100
On Tuesday, he said that he spoke to Xi Jinping and that they both agreed to abide by the Taiwan
00:24:16.060
agreement, quote unquote, which no one really knows what Biden means, because that's not a term that's
00:24:21.900
used in official U.S. discourse on Taiwan. So, you know, right now, I think Beijing believes that it
00:24:28.300
can do pretty much what it wants. So we've got to be watching this day by day, especially October 10th,
00:24:34.780
which is Taiwan's national day. Yeah, well, that's coming up very close. I see that Taiwan's
00:24:41.180
foreign minister has publicly reached out to Australia. I find that interesting because you
00:24:47.020
mentioned the UK has an aircraft carrier nearby. Japan is doing joint operations or exercises with
00:24:54.860
America. Australia is another, you know, it's a fair sized military. It's certainly not as big as China's,
00:25:01.500
but it's not just the military might. It's the fact that there's forming a defensive alliance
00:25:08.300
of countries. That's interesting to me. These are countries who have been in their own way,
00:25:13.020
bullied either economically or diplomatically. It sounds like maybe some good things are happening,
00:25:19.580
even if President Biden himself is inattentive, that maybe other countries together are starting
00:25:26.060
to realize that there's a problem here and that they better defend Taiwan or the rest of them
00:25:30.860
will be gobbled up. Japan, for instance, has made a number of statements over the last couple of
00:25:36.460
months about how Taiwan is integral to the defense of Japan, which it is because Japan and Taiwan are
00:25:42.380
part of the same island chain. With Australia, there was the announcement of AUKUS, which is Australia,
00:25:50.380
the UK and the US, a security pact. Biden gets an A, I suppose, for strategic decision making. But he also
00:26:00.860
gets an F for implementation because that was rushed into announcement. And because of that, we have a
00:26:09.260
rupture in relations with France, our oldest ally. Right. And really, this means that the United States
00:26:15.900
has made itself less safe by angering our traditional friends in Europe. Yeah, that's very interesting,
00:26:22.460
too. I know they felt left out and cut out of the deal. How about other countries like South Korea and
00:26:30.540
even Vietnam? Are they taking sides? I mean, they're perhaps not as militarily powerful. Is there a growing
00:26:40.300
regional counterweight? Like I think of how Iran forced a number of other small Gulf states and even
00:26:47.980
Israel into some sort of anti-Iran counterweight? Is that happening with littler countries, too,
00:26:55.580
like Vietnam and Korea? Well, South Korea has taken sides, but they're taking China's side.
00:27:00.860
Really? South Korea has a President Moon Jae-in who is, he might as well be a North Korean communist.
00:27:07.740
Really? Because he certainly governs like one. He's very much closer to Beijing than he is to
00:27:13.260
Washington. Fortunately, the South Korean people don't agree with him on these issues. But as long
00:27:18.300
as Moon is President, and that's through the spring of next year, we've got an issue. Vietnam is
00:27:23.660
interesting because they, of course, next to China, they fought a war with China in 1979, which,
00:27:29.900
by the way, they won. And Vietnam has been trying to maintain good relations with both sides,
00:27:36.860
but it has also firm ties with India and Japan. And so Vietnam is very much moving in our direction.
00:27:45.420
You know, Ezra, there's the quad. That's the tie up of India, Australia, Japan, and the United States.
00:27:52.940
And that is an important grouping. But Biden's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has really made Indian
00:28:00.620
policy makers rethink their move towards the U.S. And that is going to be damage that's going to take
00:28:06.460
a long time for the United States to repair, perhaps a decade.
00:28:10.140
Wow. Listen, I've learned so much from you and I always do. And I just want to say to my viewers,
00:28:15.980
if you're not following Gordon on Twitter, please remedy that. He's at Gordon G. Chang. And you'll learn
00:28:22.140
so much and you'll learn it before you read it in the mainstream media. Can I ask you just one last
00:28:27.020
question? And I really don't know much about this, but you mentioned there's turmoil in China. And I
00:28:31.500
keep seeing this word Evergrande, which I take it as a company. And it feels like it may be,
00:28:37.740
I hear it may be their Lehman Brothers or something. I don't understand it. Can you give me and our
00:28:42.540
viewers one minute on what is Evergrande and why is it a crisis for China? Evergrande is China's now
00:28:49.260
second largest property developer. It has $305 billion in debts. It defaulted on its foreign
00:28:58.300
currency loans at the end of last year, although the lenders have yet to declare a default.
00:29:03.580
This could trigger defaults of other property companies. And indeed, one has already defaulted,
00:29:09.260
Fantasia Holdings. Right now, China is sitting on the edge of a debt crisis. And I don't think it can
00:29:16.380
solve it because there's just simply too much debt. They can defer the reckoning, but not for very much
00:29:22.140
longer. So this is an existential crisis for Beijing. Wow. Well, as you said right at the top of our
00:29:28.620
interview, that could be one reason why the dictators want to distract and misdirect. Great to catch up
00:29:36.540
with you. Thank you so much. Again, we're talking with our friend Gordon G. Chang. Follow him on Twitter
00:29:40.540
and read his book, The Coming Collapse of China. Take care, my friend. Thanks for your time.
00:29:46.380
Right on. There you have it. Stay with us. Moran.
00:30:02.060
Hey, welcome back to Some Letters on last night's show. Someone with the name Tyrannosaurus says,
00:30:07.580
all these mandates are illegal. If there are any lawyers willing to fight this injustice,
00:30:11.820
please form up and do it. I can't do my job if I'm imprisoned here by a criminal mandate from our evil
00:30:17.740
PM. Well, that's the thing about laws is they sort of are the definition of legal. That's what legal
00:30:26.300
means. Now, are they unconstitutional? That's a different thing. Because our constitution doesn't
00:30:32.540
ban laws that are stupid or mean or cruel. The constitution only limits the government when their
00:30:39.260
laws are unconstitutional, not when they violate our freedoms, but when they violate our freedoms
00:30:45.740
without a good excuse. That's how our constitution is set up. We have this list of fundamental freedoms,
00:30:50.860
freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of mobility, but they're not absolute.
00:30:55.500
Every one of them is subject to section one of the constitution, which allows the government to infringe
00:31:00.540
them if there is a pressing and substantial concern that's rationally connected to the problem they're
00:31:07.980
trying to solve. By that, I mean, when you declare a state of emergency and every doctor in the country says,
00:31:14.060
oh my God, this is the worst thing ever. Judges are going to say, no, I'm not going to overturn the laws.
00:31:20.620
So you may think they're illegal and I might also, and I might think they're unconstitutional and
00:31:25.100
immoral, but I got to tell you, in a year and a half, there's not been a single judge in Canada
00:31:31.820
who agrees with you. And I know that's very pessimistic and very hopeless to say that. And we're not
00:31:39.020
hopeless. We're still going to sue. We've started fightvaccinepassports.com in concert with the
00:31:44.780
democracy fund. We are going to sue. But I'm afraid we are on this path.
00:31:51.660
Someone with the name Foxfam says, remember when they didn't block travel into Canada because it
00:31:56.060
was racist? But now he's created a full-out medical apartheid in Canada. I've never felt so hated or
00:32:01.820
endangered by my government. Yeah, that's what's so incredible is that this has just disenfranchised in
00:32:08.220
the most literal sense. Millions of Canadians who have done nothing wrong their entire lives,
00:32:14.300
who were successes in their field from the highest to the lowest. If you simply refuse to get jabbed in
00:32:21.580
some experimental medicine to an overhyped pandemic, you won't just be fired. You'll be forced to live
00:32:29.500
as a pariah. Fox 202 says, I have no idea how he convinced the public that it's okay to go this
00:32:36.620
far with it, when regardless of being vaccinated or not, you can still get spreading carry COVID.
00:32:41.580
There's clearly way more to this than a virus, yet so many people can't see it. So sad to see that
00:32:46.300
people can be tricked so easily into believing something that makes absolutely no sense. The
00:32:50.940
only thing getting flattened is people's wallets and the economy. Well, I don't know if they were
00:32:55.900
tricked, but the problem is we don't have any opposition. As I said in my monologue today,
00:33:00.940
the leader of the opposition not only didn't say a word against forced vaccines during the whole
00:33:04.940
campaign, but he didn't say anything even yesterday when they were enacted. He had a tweet about enjoying
00:33:12.220
beer. And what media, other than alternative independent media like us, are squawking about it?
00:33:19.820
So that's why. I mean, Maxime Bernier, give the guy credit, but he didn't even have a seat himself.
00:33:25.740
Either before or after the election. We're in dark days, my friends. We'll keep fighting. It's all we
00:33:29.900
know how to do. I like to end these days by showing you a video. If you want to see
00:33:36.380
the time machine, look a few months or years into our future.
00:33:41.580
Look to Australia. Here's our Australia correspondent, Avi Amini, who is being stopped by police and harassed
00:33:48.460
for his papers. The only thing missing is the German accent and the German uniforms. We really are on that
00:33:54.700
road, aren't we? I'll let you go with that video. It's a great video. But before I do, let me thank
00:34:00.700
you for watching. And on behalf of all of us here to you at home, good night and keep fighting for
00:34:05.580
freedom. Well, I'm here to discuss your right to be here. I appreciate that you're reporting on behalf
00:34:11.340
of the media, but there is criteria that has to be met for people to be in the city today.
00:34:15.340
Yep. Do you have a worker's permit? Absolutely, mate. Third time's a charm. How many times are you guys
00:34:20.540
going to... Can you send a message out once I show you it that I've showed it three times and we're good?
00:34:32.860
We're just going to record them. Obviously, it's what we do. You've got to record my details, mate.
00:34:35.820
You and I both know my details. You probably know my details better than I know my details.
00:34:45.980
Yeah, these guys are all right. You should keep them.
00:34:54.460
When they come up respectfully and check your papers like they did in Nazi Germany,
00:35:02.060
we're cool with that. It's just when they unlawfully arrest and assault
00:35:08.620
us and our staff, that's when there's a problem.
00:35:11.580
Can I just take a look at yours again, Arby? Sorry.
00:35:13.980
We just need to have a look. This one seems to be expired.
00:35:21.020
I thought it went 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, is my understanding.
00:35:26.700
So just ask and call the security company, tell them to send you a new one now?
00:35:29.740
Yeah, I can easily just get a new one sent out, but I thought it was...
00:35:35.340
But yours doesn't have a roster or schedule of workers, does it?
00:35:43.420
Do you want me to tick it? It's me that signs it.
00:35:47.900
That's just masks rules, just in case, because I've noticed some of your officers need the education.
00:35:54.300
I reckon I should be giving classes at VicPol Academy. I'm willing to donate my time.
00:36:04.620
All weeks, he said, I've got to just tick that box, but it's all weeks those times.
00:36:09.580
So I've just got to... Have you got a pen? I'm the one that filled that for him.
00:36:16.380
Listen, these paperwork, it gets very confusing.
00:36:21.660
No, it isn't. These days it's also arresting, unarmed.
00:36:27.100
I'm good to see... I'm happy to see you guys without any rubber bullet gun today.
00:36:30.300
I'll take your pens out, I'm going to charge with theft.
00:36:37.900
This is the ludicrousy of it all. They know exactly why I'm here.
00:36:44.060
What they're checking out is if there's a technicality on the paperwork, can it be fixed?
00:36:52.540
Anyways, I'll call the lawyer because we might as well get that sorted now.
00:36:57.740
Well, you know, you guys are funny, so I need a lawyer 24-7 with you guys.
00:37:03.820
They like to play those old tricks, finding those technicalities.
00:37:09.900
The police here are so surprised that they'll have a lawyer on standby on a Saturday.
00:37:15.740
My lawyer's on the phone, she just wants to know what's the issue with that one.
00:37:18.620
We just need to confirm that they're all valid.
00:37:22.220
So we're just getting someone down here who's aware of these and how they need to be filled in to check them out.
00:37:26.300
And then once that's done, we'll just confirm it to your lawyer.
00:37:28.700
So you're saying to me, you're so confused by these permits that you don't know how it works.
00:37:39.100
She advises that basically, if you believe it's legit and there's a problem with the way we filled it out,
00:37:54.940
It was, it's, I think the academy needs some training on these papers.
00:38:17.740
I'm happy to tick that box and then it's complete.
00:38:23.500
Look, they've called in a specialist in their specialist vehicle,
00:38:27.180
unmarked police vehicle, to make sure that our paperwork is kosher.
00:38:35.660
The science says that if your permit isn't ticked in the right box, things can get deadly.
00:38:43.100
They're really trying hard to invalidate those permits.
00:38:48.860
So they're satisfied with that, so that's fine.
00:38:53.020
So who, just so I know from my own reference, who, who, which specialist division made sure
00:38:59.180
So I can, I can speak to the next person who stops me.
00:39:03.500
Oh, the legal, oh, they know me well, we're on first name basis.
00:39:06.060
So you got your worker's permit, um, you're free to go, that's fine.
00:39:09.340
Um, obviously you know not to get in our way if things do get in.
00:39:15.180
So that took 20 minutes for the police to verify and validate that our worker's permit
00:39:19.420
are legit, even though they knew it, know exactly what we're doing here.
00:39:22.300
They have to call the specialist legal department of Victoria Police to confirm it.
00:39:26.780
I have a feeling it was really just to hold us up so we can't get to doing our job.
00:39:31.820
Maybe that's, maybe we should charge them with hindering a journalist.