Trudeau appoints convicted criminal to censor Internet freedom
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Summary
Justin Trudeau appoints a convicted criminal to censor your internet freedom. And I interview my dear friend Andrew Lawton, who s been studying Stephen Gilbeau and other attempts to regulate the Internet for years. Also, a 14-year-old boy in Spain was arrested, indeed attacked, by a policeman. Was he a criminal?
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. I got two things I'm covering in today's podcast.
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One is a crazy video of lockdown extremism in Spain.
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which is Justin Trudeau and Stephen Gilbeau coming to censor the Internet.
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Hey, when I say show you the tape, of course, you'll just hear it on the podcast.
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And to do so, you have to become a Rebel News Plus member.
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That gives you access to the video version of this podcast.
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Plus, weekly shows by David Menzies and Sheila Gunn-Reed.
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80 bucks for a whole year if you buy in advance.
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Tonight, Justin Trudeau appoints a convicted criminal to censor your Internet freedom.
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It's September 10th, and this is the As for the Vance Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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The 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.
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I'm going to tell you in a moment about how Justin Trudeau is finally making a move
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to regulate and perhaps snuff out voices he doesn't like on the Internet,
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He controls TV and radio stations in Canada through the CRTC regulator.
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He controls newspapers through the massive bailout that basically rents every journalist in the country.
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And the journalist he can't control, he tries to ban,
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like banning Rebel News and True North from the election debates in his morning scrums.
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but that last 1% is what keeps him up at night.
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And of course, as people abandon the unwatchable vanilla news that he regulates
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and flee to online content of their own choice,
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whether it's CNN or Fox News or just any website in the world that's interesting,
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well, now, no surprise, Trudeau's making a move to censor them.
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We'll see if Aaron O'Toole says a peep about it.
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If he's opposed to Trudeau's regulations of social media,
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he forgot to mention it when Trudeau introduced a raft of new measures last year
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that were warmly supported by the Conservative Party under Andrew Scheer.
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But hopefully that doesn't reflect Aaron O'Toole's view.
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And I'll interview my dear friend Andrew Lawton,
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who's been studying Stephen Gilboa, the Heritage Minister,
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and other attempts to regulate the Internet for years.
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But first, I simply have to switch gears, switch subjects.
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I'm going to show you a shocking video out of Spain,
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Apparently, it's a 14-year-old boy arrested, indeed attacked, by a policeman.
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He was wearing a mask, but not properly, you see.
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Now, there really is no proper way to wear a mask.
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you know the sort that a painter, or a sandblaster, or people in a sawmill wear,
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real people who were deadly serious about filtering out tiny particles of dust that would hurt their lungs.
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Those people are pretty serious about their masks,
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but the vast majority of masks that people around the world are being told to wear now
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are flimsy little masks that absolutely don't seal to your face.
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The air comes from the sides and the top and the bottom,
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and you know this because your glasses steam up when you wear them.
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I don't know what these flimsy masks are supposed to do.
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They're not stopping viruses that are microscopic and pass through the mask.
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Teresa Tam, who's still doing endless press conferences, can you believe it?
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So one day she came up with this doozy on what to do with masks.
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Yeah, don't foist your bizarre fetish on me, you junk science quack perv.
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That's just someone who enjoys the sound of their own voice
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and the fawning coverage of the media that's bought and paid for
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Anyways, imagine a policeman actually attacking a child for wearing such a joke mask.
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Just not wearing it properly, according to the doctor policeman.
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I heard something about knees on necks in the George Floyd case and the riots have followed.
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I was told it's very bad for a policeman to put a knee on the neck, at least for serial
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But for 14-year-old boys who are wearing a mask, just not the right mask, a knee on
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the neck is just what the doctor ordered, all in the name of public health, you see.
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Here's the daily chart of deaths from the virus in the United Kingdom.
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So it's almost double our population in Canada.
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Here's the foolish health minister of the United Kingdom.
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You're not going to believe he's a conservative, what I was going to say.
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In the entire United Kingdom, a total of six people passed away from the virus yesterday.
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Now, I'm not happy about that, but that's not a pandemic.
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Six also happens to be the new number of the maximum people who are allowed to meet together
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in the United Kingdom, even if your family is larger than that.
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Say, if you have five people in your family, so two parents and three kids, if the kids'
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Because that makes a total of seven people, it's not allowed.
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One grandparent has to wait outside in the car, or it's an illegal gathering.
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Imagine the depression and loneliness foisted on both, let alone the stupidity of the fact
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that the grandma's now going to go back to the car where grandpa's sitting.
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But listen to this health minister who calls himself a conservative, saying, yeah, that's
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I'm afraid that a family of, for a family of, say, five or six, this will bring in some
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So there's no exception, for example, so you were back to where we were with, you can
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only see one grandparent in that case, for example.
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In those circumstances, it will be, absolutely, it will bring in more restrictions.
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And so we'll be able to see one other person at a time as a whole family.
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No children can see their grandparents if the family's too large.
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Entire industries are being closed again because of the foolishness.
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How would Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist, have been any worse than this?
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He probably would have been more ashamed of himself and wouldn't have tried to do this.
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But now let me tell you what Trudeau is doing, taking advantage of the pandemic panic to get
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He's already prorogued parliament to shut down the ethics inquiries into his scandals.
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He's been self-hiding at home for six months and the media don't care.
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There are some people who want to go back to work.
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I'm just picking an industry of random almost here.
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You know, there are no movies being made in Canada.
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I mean, who would spend $100,000, let alone $10 million, making a movie when one case of
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the virus on a set, even if it's a false positive using a faulty made-in-China test,
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Who would invest millions of dollars in making movies in that kind of a world?
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So the industry, which is a big industry, stopped and they asked for some insurance framework
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to be set up by the government to let them go back to work.
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We've got to get a COVID insurance framework going.
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They haven't done anything because they don't actually understand how anything real works.
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And Gilboa was a professional protester who actually was convicted of crime for his extremist
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They know how to spend other people's money, but not how to earn it.
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He writes about culture and the creative industry and copyright and things like that.
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He writes that music industry asks for one meter social distancing rules for concerts.
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Instead, he offers digital taxes, CRTC government regulation, mandated Canadian content payments,
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You have to wear a mask until the coffee and pretzels comes around.
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Literally elbow to elbow with a stranger in a small metal tube for four hours.
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But a concert can't have one meter spacing, even if it's an outdoors concert.
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Do you know how many small businesses and independent people depend on the music industry?
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And blue collar jobs, not just the fancy entertainer.
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He cares about big government and bureaucrats and unions.
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But not private sector unions, not the theatrical or musical acts that have to hustle and work
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hard, not promoters and producers, people who set up the stage and tear it down.
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I mean, Trudeau will pose with cool musicians to get some of their cool, but he doesn't actually
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like the work part of the entertainment industry.
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But look at what Michael Geist said in his next tweet.
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Heritage Minister Stephen Gilbeau just told culture groups his upcoming bill will give
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the CRTC the power to intervene in payments by Netflix, Amazon, Prime, Spotify, Regulate
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Online, CanCon, massive internet regulation structure led by CRTC coming.
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So actual creators would like some real relief from the government regulations.
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And they're willing just to have one meter spacing, which is still sort of crazy, but they'll
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Can we have some guidance on resuming the work?
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Trudeau and Gilbeau don't know anything about that, but they know regulation and taxes.
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Canadian Heritage Minister Stephen Gilbeau says social media sites linking to news content
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I'll play the video clip of him saying that a bit later.
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Imagine a convicted criminal and liberal cabinet minister lecturing other people about morality
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It's just, they fired the only ethical people in their cabinet, Jody Wilson-Raybould and
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He's saying that Facebook linking to news sites is immoral.
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So when you post something on Facebook to your friends, when you post something on your
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friend's page, a news story, how is that immoral?
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The kooky government of Australia is pitching that same weird thing.
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Facebook says if Australia bans its ability to share news links, and by that they mean
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their users' ability to share links, they'll leave the country.
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Because just like they're not in China, they'll leave Australia.
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That shows you how radical Australia's solution is.
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And that's where Trudeau and Gilbeau want to go.
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By the way, that's just going to kill the Australian news industry, which depends on
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The impact of a mandated link license and blocking of news sharing would do more than
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69% of those surveyed said they were very or quite likely to still use Facebook and Google
00:14:02.280
If normal people have to choose between Justin Trudeau and that criminal Gilbeau telling them
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what they can or can't see versus what they like to do,
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If somehow that means Facebook isn't allowed to share Globe and Mail or CBC stories anymore,
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They already don't read much Globe and Mail or watch much CBC already.
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Of course, Trudeau and Gilbeau would never ban the Globe or the CBC.
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That's politics, not law that he's talking about.
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If Trudeau and Gilbeau are coming to fight the internet, sure, they're after Facebook's
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But at the end of the gunfight, hmm, expect that the handful of independent conservative
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media sites like ours wind up being banned and regulated out of existence.
00:15:01.500
Stay with us for more on this with Andrew Lawton.
00:15:04.220
We all are so seeing that these platforms can't regulate themselves.
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Now, there's a big difference between saying that we're going to regulate these hateful things
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and these appalling things, and we're going to put an end to free speech on the internet.
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Just like we have free speech in our society, but people can't say everything.
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We have courts that have put measures around free speech.
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And then this is something that myself, my colleague, Minister Baines, obviously, Justice
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Minister Lamedi are working on, and we will be coming up with legislation in the very near
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That is Stephen Gilbeau, the only member of Trudeau's cabinet who's actually a convicted
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criminal, saying he thinks it's about time that the internet was regulated and subjected to
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The same laws that apply to a printing press and a TV station and a radio wave also apply
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to the internet when it comes to anything like uttering a death threat or defamation.
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In fact, these days, most litigation about the content of news isn't against a TV station
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I think that Stephen Gilbeau is one of the dumber members of the cabinet, and that's
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I mean, you can't all be as bright as Justin Trudeau and Catherine McKenna.
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They explain the hard parts to Stephen Gilbeau.
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But what troubles me is that I think most of the media are letting Gilbeau get away with
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He's claiming that the internet is not now regulated.
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Well, joining us now to talk about this latest emanation from Stephen Gilbeau is our friend
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Andrew Lawton, a grand poobah over there at True North, along with our friend Candice
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Hey, I don't know if I'm the grand poobah, but I'll say I am a poobah.
00:17:32.920
You know what, as soon as I said grand poobah, I better throw in Candice, because she's the
00:17:36.440
super grand poobah, but you're one of the poobahs.
00:17:38.780
Well, if she's super grand, I can just be grand.
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We're her number one fans, and we sure like you too, Andrew.
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Anyhow, let me put that admiration society where everyone knows I'm a fan of the True
00:17:51.420
But let's get down to today's crazy subject, which is Stephen Gilbeau.
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And I was poking fun at how dopey he is, but that's not actually the first time he's sort
00:17:59.340
of muddled into a half-baked plan to censor the internet, has it?
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And in fact, this comes just less than half a year, I think, after he walked back a comment
00:18:12.400
he had made in an interview where he was talking about how he would seek to force social media
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companies to have a license or digital publishers to be a license.
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And this got a lot of people in the media to be quite critical, because it sounded like
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from how he worded it, like he could be going after the media.
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But then once he had said, oh, no, no, no, we're not actually talking about the media,
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the mainstream media really stopped covering the story, and they stopped asking any further
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questions about who would be licensed to have the right to free speech in Stephen Gilbeau's
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It seems like a decade ago, because it was before the pandemic, the fact that they're bringing
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this idea back during the pandemic suggests they'd like to pass it with a little less
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scrutiny, a little less parliamentary oversight.
00:18:58.140
Here's a flashback to that utterance that you referred to from what seems like ages ago,
00:19:05.640
Yeah, but sir, to be fair, you've got an agency that wants to enhance its scope of powers to
00:19:14.000
So the first question will be, who's to define that?
00:19:23.440
Okay, but they're recommending that, they're recommending that content providers have to
00:19:39.420
Well, I mean, one of the recommendations, so you're talking about a couple of different
00:19:43.940
things here, but as far as the licensing is concerned, is if you're a distributor of content
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in Canada, and obviously, you know, if you're a very small media organization, the requirement
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probably wouldn't be the same as if you're Facebook or Google.
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So there would have to be some proportionality embedded into this.
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But we would ask that they have a license, yes.
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Just like right now, but with the old system in Canada, distributors needed to go to the
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Andrew, so that's what he said months ago, but it looks like they're coming back, and
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he still believes the internet is not governed by laws, by civil lawsuits like defamation,
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by criminal lawsuits like prosecutions over hate crimes or uttering death threats.
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I think Stephen Gilboa, who's a lifelong environmental extremist, he was actually convicted of crimes
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for that, I don't think he's much of a scholar, or a lawyer, or a book reader, because I think
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he actually doesn't know that the internet is governed by the criminal law and the civil
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law, just like every other part of our lives is.
00:21:01.960
Yeah, this is a profound exercise in gaslighting, convincing Canadians that a problem that doesn't
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exist does, so that people will go along with whatever proposed remedy we hear about from
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the government. And may I remind your viewers, if they aren't already aware, back when I used
00:21:18.920
to work in Ottawa, for example, the heritage minister used to be all about arts and culture,
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and it was, generally speaking, a job that sure had some more contentious areas, but was
00:21:27.860
really about a lot of things that were not what it is now, which is like the chief bastion
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of censorship in the government. And ultimately, when Stephen Gilboa gets up there and he starts
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talking about licensing and regulation and all of this, this has been, for the most part,
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the only portfolio on which he has been focused since assuming the job of heritage minister.
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So you have to listen very carefully when he starts to talk about all of these things.
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He had said in that interview, quote, we can do it in the virtual world as well. Again,
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trying to convince people that the law doesn't apply on the internet. And even if certain aspects
00:22:02.540
of the heritage code don't apply, for example, the CRTC isn't regulating at this point Netflix
00:22:08.160
or crave like they are television and radio stations, that doesn't mean that these extremist
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rhetoric examples and other forms of hate speech and all of these things that are under the criminal
00:22:19.160
code right now don't extend to the internet. If it's illegal to say something on your front lawn,
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it's illegal to say it in the parking lot of a Denny's and it's illegal to say it online. So this idea
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that we have this area of the world in which the law doesn't apply is just plain wrong.
00:22:34.180
But the liberals are trying to deceive Canadians to justify putting in these sweeping things that
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would curb speech and force big tech to curb speech. Yeah. You know, I've been reading a lot
00:22:45.780
about what Stephen Gilboa says, and he always starts off with something no one could disagree with.
00:22:50.940
We have to crack down on terrorism recruitment. Okay. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And actual
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crimes. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And then he immediately switches to political mean
00:23:03.960
words. So he always leads with the stuff that even a conservative would say, yeah, let's not let
00:23:09.420
ISIS recruit online. Yeah, let's crack down as if Facebook, YouTube, Google aren't actually right
00:23:15.860
now trying their hardest to stop that. I know for a fact that they are certainly more than Justin
00:23:21.340
Trudeau, who just led them back into Canada. So he starts with the stuff we can all agree in. And then
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very cleverly, he slips his rhetoric, his vocabulary towards mean tweets, mean comments,
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untrusted news sources, disinformation. He's not talking about terrorists anymore. He's not talking
00:23:39.440
about death threats anymore. He's talking about True North, Rebel News, or any voice he doesn't agree
00:23:45.440
with. He's a slippery fish, the Stephen Gilboa. Yeah. And the context of this is it's coming at a time
00:23:51.720
well, Rebel and True North, to name two examples that you just brought up, are fighting in court for
00:23:56.460
the right to cover elections. This case from the previous election campaign is still going on
00:24:01.300
against the Leaders Debates Commission. And that's an area where, again, for all this talk about the
00:24:06.160
need to, in his words, not regulate news and media. Well, his government is doing that effectively by
00:24:13.100
barring certain media from having their constitutionally protected right to freedom of
00:24:18.160
the press and free speech. And the problem we have here with Gilboa is that he is using licensing
00:24:24.920
and regulation as kind of a catch-all for everything. So just last week or two weeks ago,
00:24:29.480
he had said he supported what the Australian government was trying to do, which was actually
00:24:34.120
forcing private social media companies to pay media for the right for people like you or I to post
00:24:42.800
links to those stories online. Something very convoluted, something that, again,
00:24:46.900
impacts the right of people using social media platforms more than it affects social media
00:24:52.380
platforms. And you look further than that, he's talked in the past about licensing digital publishers
00:24:58.100
without really explaining who is supposed to be affected by that. I was in Ottawa back in June of
00:25:04.280
2019 when there were ongoing hearings on the Heritage Committee, or sorry, on the Justice and Human Rights
00:25:09.880
Committee, about whether to bring back a supercharged version of the Section 13 provision of the Human
00:25:16.800
Rights Act that you and countless others fought tooth and nail to defeat. And that committee's report
00:25:22.060
ultimately recommended that there needs to be greater protections against what they call hate speech from
00:25:29.320
social media companies. And this report didn't go anywhere because the 2019 election happened.
00:25:34.820
The reason I bring that up is because this government has actually tried to deputize social media
00:25:40.440
companies to become the arbiters of what is hate speech and what is extremist speech and all of that.
00:25:45.900
And now that we hear it coming back in this context, this is very dangerous because now all of a sudden
00:25:51.560
you have the government threatening social media companies, but getting the social media companies
00:25:57.620
Right. You know, there's more than a dozen priorities in Stephen Gilbeau's mandate letter from Justin Trudeau.
00:26:03.720
That's basically the job description that the Prime Minister gives to the Cabinet Ministers.
00:26:07.700
And the second point, number two, is to bring in strong financial penalties to Facebook and other social media that don't quickly enough,
00:26:18.360
within 24 hours actually, take down speech that Stephen Gilbeau and Catherine McKenna and Justin Trudeau don't like.
00:26:25.000
What I'm worried about is it's bad enough if we censor through Parliament, but at least we'll see it coming.
00:26:31.340
There'll be a process. If you're the target of a censorship attack like I have been and you have been,
00:26:36.700
we'll at least have a day in court. But I'm worried that Gilbeau is doing some log rolling,
00:26:42.280
some horse trading with these companies and saying, well, we'll let you go on the tax side
00:26:46.940
if you agree to do the censorship for us. And because this isn't being debated in Parliament,
00:26:52.360
because this isn't a government law or regulation, it's just a tit for tat, quid for crow.
00:26:57.580
You guys at Facebook, if you censor our enemies, we'll go easy on you. And none of it's on the public record.
00:27:05.140
I'm deeply afraid of censorship that we can't even see. And I don't think this is paranoia.
00:27:13.060
As you may know, Andrew, I interviewed one of Facebook's hundreds and hundreds of censors
00:27:18.320
that works around the clock in Phoenix deleting Canadian posts that they're told to delete.
00:27:22.940
Yeah. And listen, I'm one of these people that believes private companies, even large multinational
00:27:29.200
tech corporations have a right to set their own standards. So I think however insidious I may find
00:27:34.400
it, Facebook and Twitter and Google have a right. And we can debate this at length. I'm sure they have
00:27:40.340
a right to decide what should or shouldn't be allowed. The problem that I have with what the
00:27:44.360
Canadian government has proposed is that let's say these companies want to follow the rules set out
00:27:49.300
by the Canadian government, which may or may not be the case, but let's say they do.
00:27:52.960
They may have a very broad brushed approach, a very broad approach to censorship because they
00:28:00.040
don't want to risk the ire of whatever penalties the government has put forward. So that means that
00:28:05.200
if you've got moderators that are going over content and stuff is on the line, they may to avoid
00:28:10.700
the hassle, just say, all right, well, this is gone. This is gone. This is gone. And you could see a lot
00:28:15.100
of problems. I know you went through this with your book, China Virus, which you and I spoke about on my
00:28:18.960
show when it came out. Imagine if that was not done because a company was being a bit cowardly
00:28:24.320
about it. But imagine if that was done because we feel like this government will go after us if we
00:28:30.620
don't do it, even if it doesn't violate our rules. So let's just get rid of it. And all of a sudden
00:28:35.620
you have mass censorship that you can't actually fight in court to protect against because it's
00:28:42.240
coming from a private company, even though it is actually because of government policy. And this is
00:28:47.420
what I mean when I talk about government deputizing big tech to really be its censors.
00:28:52.600
Yeah. What I learned from talking to the Facebook censor down in Phoenix is that more and more this is
00:28:56.480
just being done by AI, by artificial intelligence. There's not even any human decisions. The first few
00:29:02.880
million censorship actions are done by humans. And then the AI learns, oh, that word, that photo,
00:29:10.000
that combination of phrases, make America great again.
00:29:13.420
Yeah. And that bar will keep getting lower and lower if government is pushing it further and
00:29:18.100
Yeah. I want to have one last clip. And this is Gilbo talking about a, and I don't know if he's
00:29:24.480
for real here, if he really does want to regulate the internet like China does, like Australia is
00:29:29.520
threatening to do, or if this is a financial shakedown, quite likely with the liberals, or if this
00:29:34.720
is the quid pro quo I mentioned earlier, it's the threat that Facebook makes go away by conceding on
00:29:41.280
censorship. Take a look at Gilbo talking about some weird thing, as you mentioned, that Facebook
00:29:47.260
companies would have to pay to link to a news source. Just take a quick look.
00:29:52.380
On the news side of things, very similarly. I mean, some of these companies, Facebook, for example,
00:29:58.220
makes hundreds of millions of dollars based on the media content that you and other companies in
00:30:06.240
Canada, media companies in Canada develop, and you're not being fairly compensated for it. And
00:30:10.800
that's immoral to me, and it's unacceptable. And we want to change that. There are a couple of
00:30:19.660
countries in the world that are moving in that direction, France, Australia, and we're looking
00:30:25.700
closely and in fact talking with them, looking at what model they're doing and how we could go about
00:30:32.300
doing it in Canada as well. You know, again, he lied. He said that multinational media companies
00:30:39.860
working in Canada, quote, have none. When he's talking about Canadian companies have regulatory
00:30:45.920
burdens, multinationals have none. That's simply not true. He's just, maybe he thinks it's true.
00:30:52.160
Maybe he hasn't read any briefing notes. Maybe he hasn't done any homework. But of course,
00:30:56.980
they have to obey the law. And there are some countries where, for example, Twitter,
00:31:05.140
it doesn't operate in China because it refuses to follow the local law. So it just doesn't operate
00:31:10.800
there. Australia is threatening Facebook. So Facebook says, if you do those weird things,
00:31:15.300
we won't operate there. Of course, Facebook follows the law where it operates. I don't want to call
00:31:21.020
Gilbo dumb because that looks like I'm just name calling. But I can't believe he doesn't know that.
00:31:26.400
And it's quite audacious that he tells reporters things that are flat out lies and they don't call
00:31:32.160
him on it. There was something really subtle in that answer that I picked up on. And I don't know
00:31:37.680
if I'm the only one, but he was talking about it and he said, you're not being fairly compensated.
00:31:43.620
He stopped talking about the media as an it, as a they. And he started talking to the reporter who
00:31:49.680
had asked him the question as a you. And that, I think, is very revealing because that's his
00:31:54.120
audience right now. He's trying to win over the press. The media has already given been given a
00:31:58.840
huge amount of money by the Trudeau government. And now they're trying to give them even more money.
00:32:03.100
But instead of the government having to pay for it, they're trying to get Facebook and Twitter and
00:32:06.760
Google to pay them. But he was speaking to an audience of the mainstream media there. And I think
00:32:11.700
that's very important that that's what this strategy is all about.
00:32:15.280
You've cracked the code. You've done it. That's exactly what's going on.
00:32:18.900
Right. Trudeau will bail out the newspapers as he is. He's going to try and get Facebook and the
00:32:23.900
others to kick cash to the media. You know, he's complaining about links. Maybe I'm doing Rebel
00:32:30.480
News wrong. But if a major website links to Rebel News, we celebrate that because it brings a lot
00:32:37.780
more people to our website. We don't really make a lot of money off ads, but people watch our stuff.
00:32:44.160
They sign up. We love it when we get links. We try to get links. We try to get things to go viral
00:32:51.540
on Facebook. I've just never heard anyone before saying that it's a bad thing that Facebook links
00:32:57.640
to you. When it happens to us, we celebrate because we can pay our bills. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong.
00:33:05.020
But I think Rebel and True North and a lot of independent media are in a bit of a different
00:33:08.880
boat here because the mainstream media's money traditionally comes from ads and it's not
00:33:13.780
newspaper ads anymore. It has to be digital ads. And the challenge with that is that I would say
00:33:19.200
the mainstream media, which is having an ongoing decline of newspaper subscriptions, for example,
00:33:24.400
is gaining a lot more from people linking to their content on Facebook than it's losing.
00:33:29.000
So this is very much a be careful what you wish for situation, because if all of a sudden people
00:33:33.780
are no longer able to share a link to the National Post or the Toronto Star on Facebook,
00:33:38.280
well, it's going to be not that much longer before these platforms, which have massive,
00:33:43.220
massive shares of their actual clicks, are no longer getting them.
00:33:46.960
You've been very generous with your time. You're one of my favorite guests. You're a real fan favorite.
00:33:52.300
And I think you really won over people with how you managed the debate in the conservative
00:33:57.960
leadership contest. I mean, you already had everyone on your team, but
00:34:01.420
I saw a new side of you that day, I want to let you know,
00:34:05.660
that deeply, deeply impressed me. And you're one of our fan favorites. You're certainly one of my favorites.
00:34:11.300
Well, it's returned. Well, thanks. And I don't know why I just feel like gushing when you're on
00:34:15.840
the show. I'm just sort of excited. Hey, no, bring it on. I'll take it.
00:34:19.340
Well, you're a good ally. I tell you that whether it's going to the UK to report on freedom of speech
00:34:23.780
there or fighting Justin Trudeau's ban on us in the federal election debate, you're fighting the
00:34:31.160
trenches. I do have one last question for you. And that is, Stephen Gilbo trotted this out before
00:34:38.560
the pandemic. And he was sort of beaten back by a number of, I'd say the more idealistic media party
00:34:46.380
types, Evan Solomon of CTV, who I generally respect. I think he's one, he actually cares about media
00:34:51.200
freedom a little bit. He's one of my favorite media party guys, if I had to choose. And there was some
00:34:58.080
mockery of Gilbo. I haven't really seen that this time. And I'm worried that what was sort of laughed
00:35:05.700
out of parliament before the pandemic now will just be rushed through without scrutiny, without
00:35:12.280
opposition. I don't even know if Erin O'Toole is going to oppose this. Do you think this is going to
00:35:17.800
sneak through this time where it was stopped last time? I think it will, because where the mainstream
00:35:22.980
media reporters were actually, I think, frustrated in February was when it was going after them
00:35:29.220
potentially, when all of a sudden anyone who publishes a news website was the way he had worded
00:35:34.480
that initial answer going to have to be licensed and regulated. And once he made it clear after that
00:35:40.480
interview, oh, no, no, no, news won't be eligible for this. News won't have to do this. The mainstream
00:35:45.100
media backed off. And I think there was a bit of self-preservation there. So now they're not as
00:35:50.240
invested in this story because they know that they're safe. And if anything, more than safe,
00:35:54.840
as we talked about a little while ago with getting a bit of money out of the social media
00:35:59.080
company. So I don't think there is going to be that scrutiny or, as you'd say, mockery this time
00:36:03.780
around from the mainstream press. Yeah. Let me close with one last thing. I was reading on True
00:36:08.200
North today, a great little story by your cause, the colleague, Cosmin Gerja, who added up the number
00:36:14.200
of times the CBC wrote about Justin Trudeau's hair and socks, which is a very funny project.
00:36:20.240
And compared it to the CBC's coverage of various liberal scandals, like, for example,
00:36:25.720
a liberal MP who was being charged with sexual harassment, or sorry, criminal harassment,
00:36:30.740
and worse. It was a very funny comparison of what the CBC loves to talk about, how cool the liberals
00:36:38.020
are, with what the CBC hates to talk about, liberals in trouble. It's very eye-opening.
00:36:42.520
I'm going to make a prediction. You and I and other independent, non-bailout media will talk more
00:36:51.020
about this censorship gambit by Stephen Gilboa than the media party will. So it's another calculation of
00:36:57.860
where's your value? Where's your emphasis? You and I will fight harder for freedom of the press
00:37:03.880
and deregulation of the media than the media party will. That's my prediction. If you want to count the
00:37:10.220
number of stories that we're going to see in the next six months, that's my prediction.
00:37:15.060
Yeah, we'll add this into the next round of sock and hair comparisons. And I feel like it may be a
00:37:19.960
pretty small number of times that the media has covered this. So all the more reason for us to.
00:37:24.660
Andrew Lawton, great to see you. Thanks for spending so much time with us.
00:37:28.300
All right, there you have it. Andrew Lawton is over at True North. A great website. I'm sure you're familiar
00:37:35.420
with it. If not, please go check them out. They're one of the few voices fighting independently
00:37:40.760
to report in this country. Stay with us more ahead.
00:37:44.800
Hey, welcome back to my monologue about WestJet. London writes, everyone should boycott WestJet.
00:38:04.580
Well, I don't know about that. I mean, sometimes you have to travel. It's just really, really weird. I
00:38:09.720
mean, we hear about air rage and road rage. I've seen air rage with my own eyes. Sometimes I feel a
00:38:14.780
little bit of rage at the frustration of flying in this modern era. I've just never seen air rage
00:38:20.180
by the airline that literally punished the entire plane for sort of cheering for the 19-month-old girl
00:38:28.360
who didn't want to wear a mask. The staff punished the entire plane of customers by canceling the flight.
00:38:35.100
I've never seen air rage by the airline before. So, so weird. Frederick writes, call the Victoria
00:38:43.040
police from Australia. They'd happily cuff and frog march out that 19-month-old threat to society.
00:38:47.960
I believe you're right. I mean, I showed you that 14-year-old boy. Why wouldn't they go after a 19-year-old baby?
00:38:53.820
On my interview with Gordon Chang, Bruce writes, I hope people boycott the show in support of Uyghur
00:38:58.620
prisoners. Well, that's the thing. I mean, little girls who were the target market of the Mulan movie,
00:39:04.600
they don't know what the word Uyghur means. They don't really know much about China. They've never been there.
00:39:08.920
They don't follow politics. They don't really know what a concentration camp is. The target market
00:39:13.120
for the Mulan movie, I'd say, are girls between the age of 7 and 14. Not very political. I think
00:39:21.360
any remedy has to come at a higher level, putting sanctions on companies to do business in Xinjiang.
00:39:29.660
Just like you wouldn't allow Hollywood to make a movie in a gulag in North Korea,
00:39:35.520
or during the Soviet years in the gulag in Siberia, or God forbid, in the Nazi years at a
00:39:41.620
concentration camp, why should the world permit filmmaking in Xinjiang as if it's nothing?
00:39:49.000
And literally thanking the secret police there in their credits. I think that's a way. I think
00:39:54.740
you can't rely on boycotts because I'm guessing if you're watching my show, you're more likely a 50-year-old
00:40:00.500
man than a 15-year-old girl. You weren't going to watch Mulan anyways. I think the grown-ups,
00:40:05.520
you have to take on China, don't you? Well, that's the show for today. Until tomorrow,
00:40:10.020
on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night and keep fighting for freedom.