Elon Musk bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter, sending the stock sky high. Today, the world reacts to the news, including the staff of Twitter, who have a lot to say. I ll take you through some of them, and explain who might be behind the left-wing wokeness in so many big companies.
00:01:28.580It's April 5th, and this is The Ezra LeVant Show.
00:01:33.260Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
00:01:37.000There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
00:01:41.040The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
00:01:46.940Well, Elon Musk buying a 9% share in Twitter isn't as important as, oh, I don't know, the bonfire of our civil liberties.
00:02:00.980Today, later in the show, we'll talk to Janine Younis about a mom who was fired from her job for daring to ask the mayor of New York City about the rule that kids as young as two have to wear masks.
00:02:12.140That's important stuff, the war in Ukraine with Russia.
00:02:17.600There are real important issues, inflation, the price of oil.
00:02:21.060You might think that a billionaire iconoclast, Elon Musk, buying 9% of a social media company based on narcissism and quarreling, that's really not important.
00:02:34.300But actually, it is because it's about free speech.
00:02:40.020Yesterday, it was revealed that Elon Musk bought 9.2% of Twitter, sending the stock sky high.
00:02:46.880I'll talk about that a little bit more later.
00:02:49.000But before that news was revealed, Elon Musk took to Twitter, which he uses better than most, to conduct a poll.
00:02:57.780He said, free speech is essential to a functioning democracy.
00:03:03.140Do you believe Twitter rigorously achieves, adheres to this principle?
00:03:13.180And then he said, given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.
00:03:26.420Well, he obviously had in mind what he ought to be done.
00:03:28.980Well, today, news came that far from the passive role that was originally and somewhat strangely reported yesterday, I don't know how you can be a passive investor when you're the number one investor in a company with voting shares.
00:03:41.480It was announced that, in fact, Elon Musk would have a board seat at Twitter, which means he'd be able to get deep into the details and ask questions and look through the financials and maybe take a peek at that algorithm that seems to suppress conservatives.
00:03:58.420You saw that Elon Musk framed his acquisition in terms of free speech.
00:04:04.760Well, here's how Bloomberg.com wrote it.
00:05:21.940And I saw this from an investor who was talking about political activism, not just by social media companies, but the recent quarrel between Walt Disney, Disney World, and Ron DeSantis.
00:05:36.640One of the largest employers in Florida, Ron DeSantis, the very successful governor there, who recently brought in a bill that stops teachers from teaching sexuality of any sort.
00:05:48.560There's no reference to heterosexuality or homosexuality.
00:05:52.200It's just no sexuality can be taught in Florida schools in grades kindergarten through grade three.
00:05:59.260Now, you're probably shocked and thinking, were they teaching sex in kindergarten and grades one, two, and three?
00:06:17.060It was labeled by the Democrats as don't say gay, which, of course, the word gay or homosexual or heterosexual didn't appear at all.
00:06:25.380And it's just don't talk about sexuality or gender to children of tender years.
00:06:30.640But the Democrats had a big campaign saying that Ron DeSantis was a homophobe.
00:06:35.760And for some reason, Disney, perhaps because it has big operations in Florida, the cruise ships and Disney World, Disney got more and more involved.
00:06:43.380And here's a tweet by an investor who says, Disney CEO Bob Chappick appeared to bend the knee to a small group of radical employees.
00:07:08.640And just by the way, ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance.
00:07:13.800Take a quick look at this video by Vibhik Ramaswamy.
00:07:18.580Yeah, so let me give you some insight.
00:07:20.100And this may actually even be confusing to a lot of people who see Disney doing business in countries ranging from Japan to cruise lines going to islands in the Caribbean where gay marriage is banned, where they don't say a peep.
00:07:31.660So a lot of people look at the situation and think that CEO Bob Chappick was bending the knee to 20 employees who complained about him and are confused about why he's doing it.
00:07:38.800There's a quieter undercurrent here, too, Will.
00:07:42.040If you look at who are the top shareholders of Disney, it is BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, the three largest asset managers in the United States who collectively manage over $20 trillion.
00:07:51.600By the way, that's more than the GDP of the United States, who are the shareholders, technically the bosses of the CEOs who quietly tell them that exactly these are the kinds of social agendas that they want to see them pushing.
00:08:02.740So actually, if you're a CEO in a public company today, you find yourself sandwiched not just between your progressive woke employees and people on the outside wonder why are they bending the knee to them.
00:08:12.800It's that when you look at your alleged bosses, the quote unquote shareholders, they're actually quietly whispering in your ear that they want to see you doing the same things, too.
00:08:20.640So it runs far deeper and it's far more complicated.
00:08:23.320But the problem, Will, and you know this well, is that those shareholders aren't the actual shareholders.
00:08:28.300They're actually the everyday citizens of this country who entrust those institutions with their money to manage their money.
00:08:33.300But those institutions, I think, are betraying their true clients by telling these companies, Disney, Nike, Airbnb, et cetera, that you've got to actually behave this way.
00:08:44.800That sure, you might have some Disney employee activists, but is that what's really motivating Walt Disney to go to war with Ron DeSantis, a handful of rambunctious employees?
00:09:19.300Is that the people who are pushing for radical changes in society, whether it's trans education in kindergarten or whether it's censorship in the name of wokeness, sure, it's individual employee activists, but it's these huge investors behind the scenes.
00:09:37.240Elon Musk isn't close to $20 trillion.
00:09:40.680His own personal holdings are 1% of that, but it's enough to conquer Twitter and be the top investor there.
00:09:50.980Here's Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat who's often railed against censorship.
00:10:26.000He's like an emperor for life of Facebook.
00:10:28.760And I think some Facebook investors don't mind that.
00:10:31.760But if you want to make Instagram free, you'll need more than an Elon Musk because all the money in the world can't change the fact that that's personally controlled by Mark Zuckerberg.
00:10:42.100It's funny the outrage at Elon Musk, a billionaire throwing around his money, when all the other tech oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg seem to control the shot.
00:10:50.880So she called on other billionaires to join along with Elon Musk.
00:10:56.100I'm not sure there are that many who believe in freedom.
00:10:58.380Peter Thiel, also Silicon Valley, is one of the few.
00:11:01.300But I think most billionaires these days, I'm afraid, are part of that global asset management, world economic forum point of view.
00:11:08.980There are some real individuals who are billionaires.
00:11:11.460Maybe you have to be an individual to be a billionaire.
00:11:13.600But too many of them still are chasing social acceptance.
00:11:17.280But I want to read to you from Andy Ngo, who is a great journalist who's watched the left and has been attacked by anti-FUD death threats.
00:11:27.680He said, days after inquiring his followers about free speech and the lack thereof, Elon Musk has become Twitter's largest shareholder.
00:11:37.420Many leftists are concerned about what this might mean for their stranglehold on censorship policies that favor their politics.
00:11:45.560So he's talking mainly about staff at Twitter.
00:11:51.660Cassie Nick Arumba, a data scientist at Twitter, is among the employees and contractors very upset that Elon Musk is now the largest stakeholder in Twitter.
00:12:06.100A prominent transphobe buying a large stake in Twitter is not at all funny, she says.
00:12:12.580I'm not going to go through all of them, but Andy Ngo has collected a good number of them.
00:12:17.480Gerard Taylor, a senior software engineer at Twitter, is concerned about the leftist company culture following Elon Musk becoming the largest shareholder.
00:12:27.840I'm just going to read a few more because they're amazing.
00:12:29.520Looks like I picked a good week to be off, reacts Jerry Kidd, a recruiting manager for Twitter, to the news that Elon Musk is now the largest stakeholder in the company.
00:12:42.340You know, a lot of Twitter staff are outraged.
00:12:46.240But as we heard yesterday from Alan Bokhari, maybe that's a good thing.
00:12:50.460I think it was Coinbase whose CEO got sick of all the staff politics and simply said, we're changing our policies.
00:13:02.520Well, if you insist on expressing yourself, we'll pay you a handsome severance and you can go do that elsewhere.
00:13:09.360But if you come into work at Coinbase, I think it was that was the company.
00:13:12.840This is where we will do business and no politics.
00:13:15.880And it cost him a few bucks, but he got rid of all the radicals.
00:13:20.920I don't know how many of the staff at Twitter are these radicals.
00:13:24.960Probably most of the trust and safety censors.
00:13:28.240But I think getting rid of them is sort of Elon Musk's point.
00:13:32.060And if they storm off, I think that's just doing Elon Musk a favor.
00:13:36.280The question is, how many of the people who actually make Twitter, Twitter, the engineers, the computer scientists, how many of them are extremist wokest?
00:13:44.340We saw a few people there claim to be software engineers and who are woke, maybe.
00:13:50.980But it'll be interesting to see if they will destroy and sabotage Twitter from within.
00:14:30.920He's both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service, which is exactly what we need on Twitter and in the boardroom to make us stronger in the long term.
00:15:16.600We saw Parag Agarwal, we quoted him yesterday, saying he doesn't really believe in free speech.
00:15:20.600He believes in giving attention to political views he favors.
00:15:24.520They tried to cancel Elon Musk before, but I don't know if they'll be able to.
00:15:31.900If Elon Musk succeeds and retakes Twitter for the free speech side of the thing, I think that it'll excite conservatives who have been trying to make their own alternatives.
00:15:44.740And I think it'll put to the test liberal belief in free speech.
00:15:49.800But I don't think that test is a mystery.
00:15:52.260I think from the New York Times to the ACA, to the Washington Post, to the CBC, to the entire press corps in Canada, with maybe five exceptions, liberals actually don't believe in free speech anymore.
00:16:06.780They say that hate speech ought to be banned and they define hate speech as any speech that they hate, anything they disagree with.
00:16:14.220They believe in canceling people, not debating them.
00:16:48.920Well, Quebec is the only place left in Canada where there is a mask mandate, although some schools still implement it.
00:16:58.300In the United States, New York, which was one of the most oppressive lockdownist jurisdictions, mask mandates are gone pretty much everywhere except for in New York City.
00:17:09.340Apparently, apparently the science is different there.
00:17:11.300Now, the new mayor there, Eric Adams, said that yesterday, April 4th, would be the end of the mask mandates.
00:17:17.100Well, he has caved in on that to the pro-mask lockdownists and insisted that especially young kids, almost toddlers, have to wear masks.
00:17:29.080So I think it's a form of child abuse myself.
00:17:31.620Well, so did one mom who accosted the mayor yesterday.
00:17:37.500I'll let you take a look at that and I'll let you know what happened to her afterwards.
00:17:42.500This is Daniela Jampel, a lawyer in the city.
00:17:46.580This morning, I walked into the mayor's press conference at 11 a.m. as a private citizen to ask him why he decided to renege on his promise to unmask our toddlers.
00:17:58.320Three weeks ago, some parents confronted him at a bar on St. Patrick's Day and he said, trust me, they'll be unmasked.
00:18:04.740And then 10 days ago, he announced that on April 4th, they would be unmasked.
00:18:11.240And then on Friday at the 11th hour, he told us, actually, no, they will not be.
00:18:44.920And if he thinks that the science means that these children have to be masked, then by all means, he should share that with other places because they deserve to know, too.
00:18:52.940But there is no science that requires our children aged 2 to 4 to mask.
00:18:59.040I don't know why they're doing this, but it's really unfair to our toddlers.
00:19:03.420Well, I think she makes a good case, a case that millions of moms and dads and kids around the country and the continent have made, too.
00:19:12.480She emphasized that she was there in her capacity as a private person.
00:19:16.040Indeed, I understand she's on an extended maternity leave with the blessing of her employer who granted her that extended leave just two months ago.
00:19:23.720She was there, like I say, off-duty, private person asking questions of her own mayor, except for this one wrinkle.
00:19:35.920And apparently the mayor was so enraged by being challenged by this mom that Daniela Jampel was fired by the city in less than an hour after she dared to ask His Royal Highness about the April 4th mask ban,
00:20:00.820We've talked to you before about your lawsuits on behalf of people who got COVID, recovered naturally, had natural immunity,
00:20:08.160and yet were forced by institutions to take the vaccine.
00:20:11.920So you've done a lot of civil liberties work on this issue.
00:20:14.120What do you make of the case of Daniela Jampel?
00:20:18.600Well, it's very despicable what happened to her.
00:20:21.420And actually, to clarify, the city is only requiring two- to four-year-olds to wear masks because they're the unvaccinated population.
00:20:29.760So adults and children of any other age actually don't have to wear masks.
00:20:34.740Another lawyer actually won an injunction against the toddler mask mandate on Friday, and the mayor immediately appealed that.
00:20:42.460So that day, the appellate division issued a stay.
00:20:45.220So basically what that meant is that the appeals court invalidated the lower court's decision, at least pending appeal, so the kids still have to be masked.
00:20:52.960So that's why, you know, the mayor is being confronted over this.
00:20:56.320And Daniela, you know, it is a wrinkle that she's an employee of the city, but she was confronting the mayor in her personal capacity as a mother.
00:24:02.840You know, I think she was asking questions that, frankly, what I call the media party, the legacy media, the corporate media, which is almost uniformly pro-lockdown.
00:24:16.060I think she was compelled to ask these questions because the media party doesn't.
00:24:19.920If anything, they're demanding to know why the mayor doesn't clamp down harder.
00:24:24.260I actually didn't know that New York City imposes masks on children of such tender years.
00:24:30.220I mean, it's been a while since my kids were as little as two.
00:24:33.500But I can't imagine forcing a two-year-old to have a mask on.
00:24:37.820It would just be so unnatural and uncomfortable.
00:24:41.300It's just it feels so brutal and abusive.
00:24:43.680The fact that it fell to this mum to be a citizen journalist to ask that question speaks not just to the mayor's failure as a political leader and a civil liberties guarantor, but it shows the failure of the corporate media legacy media.
00:24:58.980The fact that they stand for this in New York City alone is outrageous.
00:25:04.820And, you know, I think what happened to Daniela is part of a broader trend where a lot of people who have been on the right side of history with this, I consider myself among them, are being sort of silenced.
00:25:14.760Now that we have been proven right, the population is moving towards our side.
00:25:18.740And I actually have a lawsuit against the United States government on behalf of a few Twitter users who've had their accounts suspended for ostensible COVID misinformation.
00:25:28.800Such misinformation as saying that the vaccines don't stop transmission, natural immunity is better than the vaccines.
00:25:34.460Things that many epidemiologists and public health experts agree on.
00:25:38.280And the government, the U.S. government has been pressuring these companies to censor people like my like my clients.
00:25:45.480And I think that a lot of this is happening now because the governments know how wrong they got it and they don't want to be held accountable and they don't want people like my clients, like Daniela, like myself to be able to voice our opinions.
00:25:56.520You know, I read in the New York Post and we're grateful for their coverage on the subject that Miss Jampel, if I'm saying her name right, was fired in less than an hour.
00:26:07.740I mean, to fire anyone with with obviously no any with no process, no inquiries, no conversation, no not even a day to cool off, come in.
00:26:17.000Let's talk about this is a mom on mat leave to fire her, obviously, unilaterally without any sort of hearing or process strikes me as high handed.
00:26:26.100Now, at the end of the day, I think any employer can fire any employee other than in a collective bargaining agreement.
00:26:31.440If you're willing to pay if you're willing to pay enough severance, but to sack someone so brutally in such a clearly vengeful act, it strikes me.
00:26:42.520I mean, I don't know the nature of her employment, but if you fire if you're a government and you sack a lawyer, which is a fairly high ranking position, immediately enrage in.
00:26:54.700I mean, she's a form of a whistleblower.
00:26:57.740I mean, she's not blowing the whistle on something secretly, but what she did was in the public spirit.
00:27:19.580So, I do not know, you know, this is a, I'm not an employment lawyer, so this, that would be this, that area of law.
00:27:27.280I do know that government employees have some First Amendment protections.
00:27:30.760Given that she was speaking as a private citizen on behalf of her children, she wasn't speaking as a lawyer for the city, which, you know, would be a little bit different since she is, you know, criticizing the city's policies while working for the city.
00:27:43.700That is, that would be a different situation.
00:27:45.940At the very least, the spirit of free speech should, you know, should make us all see this as a very reprehensible act.
00:27:55.080I can't, I don't know the ins and outs of the employment law, so I'm not sure what her, what her prospects are in a lawsuit.
00:28:03.020You know, I can just imagine if Donald Trump had sacked someone who, in their private duties, private life, had criticized him, that would be news everywhere.
00:28:12.180I see the New York Post is digging in here.
00:28:13.880How has the rest of the media covered this case?
00:28:20.840I mean, I think this is an interesting case.
00:28:23.200I think it shows a thin-skinned-ness on the part of the mayor.
00:28:26.700I think it shows, I understand the mayor of New York is becoming a bit of a control freak with messaging, demanding every single department have their communications, their day-to-day press releases vetted by the center.
00:28:37.800I mean, he sounds like a bit of a control freak.
00:28:47.060And how have the lockdownist media covered it?
00:28:50.140So, I'm not actually sure about that either.
00:28:53.100To my knowledge, it hasn't yet been covered, but I expect it will.
00:28:55.800It's just, it all happened very quickly.
00:28:57.640So, I expect we'll see some articles in the next few days, and I'll be curious what they say.
00:29:01.420I mean, there's no question that if this was a Republican mayor who had done this, the city would be, you know, absolutely up in arms, that a mother was being fired from her job merely for speaking up on behalf of her children.
00:29:14.840So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
00:29:19.580Yeah, I mean, we have folks who go on maternity leave here at Rebel News, and, you know, frankly, I don't even know what the legal status of that means.
00:29:26.380I guess they are an employee, but they're just on a hiatus.
00:29:29.460I don't even know what it technically means.
00:29:31.160But if someone is on an eight-month maternity leave, and they're wearing their civilian clothes or whatever, and they're going out in their personal capacity, to sack them for a legit act of public, you know, accountability journalism just seems so, so over the top.
00:29:48.500And, like, it's not a bona fide reason.
00:29:51.260I don't, like you, I don't know New York employment law.
00:29:55.460But I want to come back to something you said that you said it in passing, but my ears perked up, when you said that you're representing clients on Twitter who said things.
00:30:05.040And I want to make sure I caught what you said.
00:30:07.440You're representing a Twitter user, am I right, that was suspended for saying things contrary to the official narrative on COVID.
00:30:15.340Can you tell us a little bit about this case?
00:30:17.080I know it's off topic from Daniela Jampel, but we're very interested about Twitter and censorship, especially with Elon Musk making news.
00:30:24.020Can you give us maybe a minute on your Twitter cases?
00:30:27.320So I'm representing actually three people.
00:30:29.580Michael Singer, whose account was permanently suspended.
00:30:32.180That means it's basically been deleted.
00:30:33.540He's never allowed to create another Twitter account again.
00:30:36.280Mark Cengizzi, a cognitive theoretical scientist who studies sort of like how social contagions, mass hysteria, this is sort of his specialty.
00:30:46.420So he's been very critical of COVID hysteria, looking at it from that angle.
00:30:50.260And then Daniel Coatsen, who's actually Jennifer Say's husband, Jennifer Say was the president of Levi's and was pushed out for her tweets on opening schools.
00:31:01.140So I'm representing all three of them.
00:31:02.900Cengizzi and Coatsen were suspended only temporarily.
00:31:05.160But our argument is that the government, the U.S. government, has been pressuring Twitter to censor people who say things that conflict with the government's messaging on COVID.
00:31:14.700And so that their suspensions and censorship were essentially a result of government action.
00:31:18.920And that makes this First Amendment violations.
00:31:20.720There's also a Fourth Amendment issue that's in the United States that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, warrantless searches and seizures.
00:31:29.780So the Surgeon General demanded that tech platforms turn over sources of misinformation, which includes the identities of people.
00:31:36.900We don't know if it might include their direct messages, emails, phone numbers by May 2nd.
00:31:43.460And he also, the other issue is that he doesn't have the authority to do this.
00:31:46.260The Surgeon General doesn't have the right to be involved in censorship on tech platforms.
00:31:52.400And all of these people, my clients, many other people, including myself, are afraid to say things on Twitter now because we don't want to lose our accounts.
00:31:59.160So this is effectively the government chilling speech.
00:32:01.280And that's a huge First Amendment issue.
00:32:13.220And I see today he's come to terms with the board, that he'll be on the board, and he'll have the right to, I don't know under what rule, to acquire even more stock.
00:33:08.680I actually think that there's enough on the record in order to win.
00:33:12.900Both the Surgeon General, various other members of the Biden administration have made statements that I think are enough to establish that the government is pressuring these tech companies.
00:33:21.140They've said it's their fault that Americans are dying, that they must be held accountable, that we're going to look into regulating them.
00:33:27.640I think the case law is pretty clear, that that puts enough pressure on these companies that it turns it into government action.
00:33:33.640Is the lawsuit itself available on the NCLA, your new Civil Liberties Alliance?
00:34:29.600And certainly, I mean, in the United States, at least the case law is clear that the government can't commandeer private companies to accomplish what it wants.
00:34:39.660I'm just delighted with the work that the NCLA is doing.
00:34:42.800I love saying it, the new Civil Liberties Alliance, if I got that right, because the old Civil Liberties Alliance I don't think has lived up to its name and its promise during the Civil Liberties Bonfire the last two years.
00:34:55.180The ACLU in your country, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association up here, they've really been hibernating or even occasionally taking the wrong side of things.
00:35:03.920So I'm glad that the NCLA has stepped up.
00:35:07.540And you, in particular, Janine, I love following you on Twitter as well.
00:35:13.060Please let us know how that Twitter lawsuit goes.
00:35:15.600Of course, I'm interested in the lockdown stuff and the mass stuff and Daniela Jampel.
00:35:19.820But your lawsuit regarding Twitter, I think, is the strategic long-term one, because if they can stop us from talking about things, if they can take away our freedom of speech, then we'll lose our other freedoms even faster.
00:35:33.360And, you know, I sort of identified this as the underlying issue.
00:35:35.940I mean, that's what went wrong with the whole COVID thing.
00:35:38.580I mean, was censorship, whether sort of formal or informal, just shaming people for questioning the overarching idea that lockdowns and mask mandates were the right thing to do.
00:35:48.580So I think censorship is really at the root of a lot of what's happened here.
00:35:52.040And that's why this is sort of the next frontier as the mask and vaccine mandates fall away.
00:35:57.800I was going to let you go, but you just made another question.
00:35:59.600Here in Canada, when I think of the institutions that failed, and all of them failed, we don't have a Rhonda Sanis, we don't have a freedom wing.
00:36:09.620Every government party and every opposition party were unified in every federal and provincial jurisdiction.
00:36:15.120Imagine not just every government, Janine, but every opposition, too.
00:36:19.420In fact, sometimes egging the government on even more.
00:36:21.560Every police force, every media outlet, every court.
00:36:26.180We did not have a single substantial court case rolling back any lockdown.
00:36:31.260In fact, our Supreme Court hasn't even yet bothered to weigh in on any cases, if you can believe it, two years in.
00:36:37.480But to me, the greatest failure of all, perhaps, was the colleges of physicians and surgeons, the doctor regulators,
00:36:45.200who, if any doctor dared to, God forbid, provide an exemption letter, God forbid, prescribe a medicine, you can't even say Invermectin, let alone prescribe it,
00:37:00.260or tweet, those doctors were investigated and suspended by their regulatory bodies.
00:37:06.980And to put that fear into doctors and then say, hey, everybody, it's unanimous.
00:37:12.360Yeah, because you're prosecuting the dissidents.
00:37:14.960I think of all the failed institutions, police departments, prosecutors, the College of Physicians and Surgeons will go down in history as the worst of them all in Canada.
00:37:26.120How have they been in the United States?
00:41:10.700And it'll be interesting, very interesting to see if Donald Trump is allowed back on Twitter.
00:41:16.920That will be the ultimate test of who's boss, because there's nothing the left hates more than Twitter.
00:41:24.640Will Elon Musk allow him back on the platform?
00:41:28.340If he does, then we'll certainly be in the new territory, won't we?
00:41:33.880Rich Bills says we can only hope that Musk will have an impact.
00:41:38.460I think he will have to have a bigger stake to have any meaningful impact.
00:41:42.520At 25 percent, he could theoretically control the company.
00:41:44.500Well, I mean, if he has the CEO bending to his will, he could control the company with what he has now.
00:41:55.280It'll be interesting to see what the other investors say.
00:41:58.040And maybe, frankly, they want to sell their shares to Elon Musk at a premium.
00:42:02.960Stephen Kruse says if Elon finishes what he started and improves free speech on Twitter, I will consider buying that Tesla, but not before.
00:42:11.160Well, I mean, Elon Musk is quite an interesting character.
00:42:15.160There's no one else like him, is there?
00:43:32.660And it also inspired me on a different front was to see that those people were ignored and insulted, and I had an issue with that.
00:43:40.540And so one of the things I wanted to talk about, and that has come up throughout some of the Freedom Convoy stuff, there's some obvious parallels with sort of the Terry Fox story.
00:43:51.160Did his story inspire you in any way to take on this action?
00:43:55.460It did, but I cannot in any way compare myself to Terry Fox.
00:44:00.860So what it did do, because I live close to Vancouver, well, relatively speaking, an hour and a half away, the Terry Fox Memorial.
00:44:09.980It was a place outside of British Columbia, a place where I could use as a kind of a landmark.
00:44:16.200But in a way, pay my respect to the man for something I was going to do in a similar vein.
00:44:23.020And it has personal meaning to me because Terry Fox was doing the business when I was a little kid, right?
00:44:28.220So he was out there making that attempt to make a change in a constructive, meaningful way.
00:44:33.660And I want to say I take inspiration from that, but in no way, shape or form can I compare myself to Terry Fox.
00:44:40.260Do you feel that your sort of calling to join the armed forces, to stand up for freedoms, speaks to your character in a certain extent?
00:44:49.760And it is the same sort of calling that has called you to do this?
00:44:53.540To be perfectly honest, I will say that as a young person joining the armed forces, I didn't particularly pursue any higher form or any higher calling.
00:45:03.940I just I was a young guy looking for adventure, looking to travel.
00:45:06.780I would say that it wasn't until later on and probably within the last three or four months where I really realized what I was doing as a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, as a public servant.
00:45:17.960What is my role in the federal government?
00:45:20.500What was I doing in the Canadian Armed Forces for 28 years?
00:45:23.620When you look at the role of the Canadian Armed Forces is defend the security of the nation.
00:45:27.160And you have to ask yourself why, because we want the people there to have secure, successful and happy lives.
00:45:33.380Now, one of the things that we've seen throughout all of this, whether it be peaceful protests, peaceful freedom convoys, we've seen the vilification of people standing up for freedoms.
00:45:46.420Well, to say that I have gotten some negative feedback on the route, it has happened.
00:45:52.640I'm mystified by it because I can't understand why our national flag is now looked down on and is something that disgusts a certain segment of the population.
00:46:47.300That's coming from somebody who's not typically emotional to have, you know, senior citizens like tell me how they believe in what I'm doing,
00:46:58.620like little kids making drawings for me and stuff like that.
00:47:01.220And mementos offered along the way, folks opening their houses to us so that we can sleep at night.
00:47:11.320It's not something I ever saw myself doing.
00:47:13.520And it's probably the most amazing experience I've ever had in my life.
00:47:18.060And probably one of the reasons why I'm so shocked, because I'm experiencing something that is the opposite of depression that we've been experiencing for the last three years.
00:47:26.060And how for those who aren't familiar, how long have you been on the road and how much longer do you expect your journey to take?
00:47:32.720Well, I'm going to be I've been on the road for 41 days, actually 42 days as of today.
00:48:05.720For most of us out there, it's impossible to imagine even walking from Calgary to Edmonton, let alone across the country.
00:48:10.860Finally, where can people follow your story?
00:48:12.880Where can people keep apprised as to where you are?
00:48:15.420Yeah, I have what we have made a website for what we're doing.
00:48:19.520It's called Canada Marches, one word, canadamarches.ca.
00:48:22.620And in there you can find links to a number of social media platforms.
00:48:26.660On the actual website itself, there is a GPS, a live GPS tracker because we were donated a spot tracker and the technology to kind of link our location real time.
00:48:39.300So you can go to canadamarches.ca, click the link, and you'll see exactly what my location is.
00:48:47.280And I typically march from 8 to about 6 p.m. in the evening.