EZRA LEVANT ｜ Should we call people unclean, if they don’t get vaxxed？
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
165.60541
Summary
David Frum was a Never-Trumper before it was cool. He was a Canadian who went to the U.S. to the finest schools there, and then went on to become a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. But soon, he became disillusioned with the establishment, and joined the Democratic Party.
Transcript
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Hello, my rebels. Today, I have sort of a personal story about someone who used to be a friend of mine.
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I haven't talked to him in over a decade, so I can't say he's still a friend.
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I'm talking about David Frum, and he was sort of the original never-Trumper.
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He was a never-Republican 20 years ago before it was cool.
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But he's just been given her on Twitter, and I want to analyze a series of tweets he made.
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I don't know, maybe it's too much of a personal indulgence, but I think there's a public interest in it.
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Before I do that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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Tonight, should we call people unclean if they don't get a vaccination?
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It's December 14th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
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I have a bit of a personal story today. It's fused with the news. I don't know. You'll have to tell me if you think it's not appropriate.
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I used to be friends with David Frum. I'm talking about back in the 90s.
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He was a Canadian who went to the United States to the finest schools there, and then to follow his ambitions.
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He wrote a series of books about politics with names like Dead Right.
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I was in law school, and he was a rising star amongst conservative pundits.
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It didn't surprise me when he was hired as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush,
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and it especially didn't surprise me when he came up with the phrase,
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the axes of evil, for Bush to use to describe the enemies during the Gulf War.
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Alas, David's wife was proud of him and let the world know that he had written that iconic phrase,
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and whether or not it was related, David was soon no longer working at the White House as a speechwriter.
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I think speechwriters for politicians have to be very discreet.
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It takes away from the key man if you know that the words were written by someone else.
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It makes a politician look more like an actor reading lines written by someone else,
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which has some truth to it, except that actors are told to read their lines and are fired if they don't,
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whereas politicians can and should get help marshalling their ideas and arguments.
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But at the end of the day, it's their decision what they say and what they don't,
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So the privilege of a speechwriter is to help great men and women.
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The punishment is that you must be a ghostwriter and do it quietly.
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He soon wrote a book about George W. Bush called The Right Man, about his tenure.
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I seem to recall it was generally a friendly book towards Bush,
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but I also seem to recall in emerging that David actually only met the president once in his whole time there.
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You can say you work at the White House and you can be a speechwriter, one of many,
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and that's enough to write a book, but I don't think it was anywhere near the inner circle.
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But soon David broke with the Republican Party over health care.
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But he supported Barack Obama's government-run health care project,
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a most un-American or certainly unconservative idea.
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He was dumped by his conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute,
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and that began what's become two decades of being an anti-Republican Republican,
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sort of like the never-Trumpers under Trump, but long before Trump was a thing.
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Of course, David Frum is an anti-Trump or two, it goes without saying,
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but it sort of lacked the intended effect since he had effectively left the party decades earlier.
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There's a phrase in political journalism, strange new respect, that makes me laugh whenever I hear it.
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Preston Manning received strange new respect from the media when he was deposed as party leader
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And he had strange new respect even more once he endorsed a carbon tax.
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Yeah, that's because he was no longer an anti-Kyota protocol Western populist that the media hated.
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There's nothing the media like more than a conservative who turns against conservatives.
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It's like when a hockey player accidentally scores on their own net.
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You wouldn't really want that guy on your own team,
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but you're glad that he's putting the puck into his team's net.
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He once came to speak at my law school in Edmonton.
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When I was in charge of the visiting speakers committee, he was always very nice to me.
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I visited him once at his home in Washington, D.C.,
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where he lived in one of the most elite neighborhoods, not in neighboring Virginia or Maryland,
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but in a really lovely area, not far from embassies.
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I remember walking with him to a nearby restaurant for dinner.
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And simply in that short walk, we bumped into so many of what I call masters of the universe,
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like the bureau chief of a network or something,
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or senior political organizer with some lobby group.
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And the restaurant itself was packed with these real insiders, movers and shakers.
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And each of them stopped for a chat for a minute with David Frum.
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And I remember that at the time, I think this was around 2008, it must have been,
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Sarah Palin had just been chosen as John McCain's running mate for the Republicans.
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She didn't go to an Ivy League school like David did.
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She went to some community college in Idaho and she lived in small town Alaska.
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And she had that Western accent that the cool kids at Saturday Night Live just ate up.
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Governor Palin, would you like to respond to Senator Biden's comments about John McCain?
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But I would like to talk about being an outsider.
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You see, while Senator Biden has been in Washington all these years, I've been with regular people,
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And I'd also like to give a shout out to the third graders of Gladys Woods Elementary,
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The joke is that she's low class, blue collar, not our kind, dear.
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And here's what I observed, because David was a Republican and really the only fancy Republican
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And these establishment liberals, he was the only Republican that they knew on a friendly basis.
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And each of them had something to say about Sarah Palin.
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And they raised it with David, very friendly-like, but they also sort of hung it around his neck.
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They weren't asking him for his arm's length opinion of Sarah Palin.
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It was more like they were holding him personally accountable for her, asking him to defend her,
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associating her low class idiosyncrasies with him.
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It was a matter of taste and class and wealth and aesthetics and insiders versus outsiders.
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And I could just feel it myself, how unbearable it would be to try to live in that zip code,
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in that industry, in that high stratus of society, but to be associated with working-class schleps,
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the deplorables, people who said words like nuclear,
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which is funny because George W. Bush himself was even more like that than Sarah Palin.
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That's why I attempted an explanation for why David Frum broke with the Republican Party.
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Seriously, the guy who wrote Dead Right, warning about embracing big government,
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he embraced Obamacare, the biggest government program in history,
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not because he had an ideological epiphany, in my view, but because of peer pressure.
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You can't be a cool kid if you don't sign on to the official narrative of the establishment.
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You can be permitted a few little deviations from the liberal orthodoxy,
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if you're their House Republican, their token Republican,
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but you can't really disagree with him fundamentally.
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and I've fallen out of touch with his sister, Linda Frum,
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who was appointed to the Senate by Stephen Harper.
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She was actually a lot more politically loyal than he was.
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She was one of Stephen Harper's lieutenants in the Senate,
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and I deliberately tune out David Frum because I don't want to be mad.
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At him, I prefer to think of him as I did when I was a young kid in college,
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and he was a slightly less young man in a hurry in the big leagues.
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I block him on Twitter, not because I'm mad at him,
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and it did upset me, partly because of what it says,
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and I know he knows better, or at least he used to.
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There's something new here that I find troubling.
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Unless the U.S. moves to vastly stricter vaccine mandates,
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which I would favor, but which is plainly not going to happen,
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the U.S. will stall at present vaccination levels.
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It's not because they didn't hear about him or they forgot about him.
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Unless you force them, they're not going to do it if they haven't done it by now.
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What's surprising here is to see the guy who wrote against big government calling for people,
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you know, the anti-big government guy calling for people to be forced to have medical procedures
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That's above the biggest that big government can get.
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But like I say, he left the Republicans a long time ago.
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So the practical political choice is keep schools and businesses on the present hobbled footing
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indefinitely or return fully to normally as boosters become available to all,
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accepting the inherent risks of normal in a 30% unvaxed society.
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Ron DeSantis of Florida and Texas and South Dakota, places like that.
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He sounds more like Bill de Blasio than a Republican or maybe a Pfizer salesman.
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Listen, that's just a normal establishment pundit.
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You want to fulminate against the dumbass malignity of the anti-vaxxers and their quietly, personally
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I do it myself almost every day right here in this space.
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Mr. Harvard and Yale shows that he has a big vocabulary.
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I think he's just trying to sound hip or something.
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He said, but the malignant minority is not yielding to reason anytime soon.
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And even such seemingly basic mandates as no jab, no fly seem beyond the enforcement capability
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Put aside his call for ghettoization and segregation.
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You know, that's a word we use to describe cancer.
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It reminds me of Nazi propaganda against the Jews.
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Here is a Nazi poster from occupied France in the 40s saying that the Jews are like large
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human fleas that spread tuberculosis, syphilis, even cancer.
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He says, seems the best option is one, keep encouraging vaccines and boosters.
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Two, impose vaccine mandates where it can be done.
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Three, otherwise return to normal as fully as we can, especially the schools.
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And four, let hospitals quietly triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last.
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So he's done using the word malignant minority, but he hops straight to his prescription, his
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Now, I am not going to compare David Trump to a Nazi because that's...