Justin Trudeau's plan for a $595 million media bailout. Ezra Levant explains why it's a good idea and why it doesn't work. Plus, a look at the Canadian government's $685 billion in debt, and how it's going to pay for it.
00:00:00.000Hi, guys. I take a look through the budget yesterday, and I try to understand Justin Trudeau's plan for a media bailout.
00:00:08.320He's created this thing. Let me get this right. He calls them QCJOs, Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization.
00:00:19.260I just say Justin Trudeau for short because I'm not going to say QCJO. It's too weird.
00:00:23.980And he goes through this. Anyhow, I won't tell you that. So you just listen. Listen to the podcast ahead.
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00:01:03.580Without further to do, here is my take on Justin Trudeau's media bailout in yesterday's budget.
00:01:11.060You're listening to a Rebel Media Podcast.
00:01:13.600Tonight, Trudeau's new budget gives some bizarre details about his $595 million media bailout.
00:01:21.680It's March 20th and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
00:01:26.200Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
00:01:30.000There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
00:01:34.080The 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.
00:01:43.600Yesterday, Justin Trudeau and Bill Morneau brought in their annual budget.
00:01:50.200I think the main thing to know about it is that no Canadian government has ever spent more than Trudeau has.
00:01:56.260Canadians have never paid more taxes than we do now.
00:01:59.280And the national debt has never been higher.
00:04:25.440But it starts to put some details on the massive $595 million media bailout that Trudeau promised last fall.
00:04:31.280But as the Toronto Star described it last year, that media bailout money will only go to journalists that Trudeau says he can trust.
00:04:38.880But how do you manage to put that rule into a budget, into a law, without sounding like a corrupt SNC-Lavalin-type politician who rigs things for their friends?
00:05:45.200Can you think of any situation where government involvement would make journalism more accurate, more free, more independent, more non-partisan,
00:05:53.240more anything other than more controlled?
00:05:57.400I can't think of a single thing a government could even do hypothetically that could help.
00:06:05.220They could undo existing regulations like the various censorship provisions in Canada, including the CRTC, for example.
00:06:11.460I note that this week the Liberals served notice.
00:06:15.800It's hard to read this tweet because it's a piece of paper,
00:06:18.360but they're serving notice that they intend to revive the censorship powers of the Canadian Human Rights Commission to censor the Internet.
00:06:26.120That's what was used to prosecute Maclean's magazine and Mark Stein and provincially me and the Western Standard years ago.
00:06:32.560So, yeah, the government can practice not screwing things up,
00:06:37.760but I don't think it's even scientifically possible for them to positively help anything.
00:06:43.200But let me read a little bit more from the budget, okay?
00:06:46.420As previously announced, the government will establish an independent panel of experts from the Canadian journalism sector
00:06:52.100to assist the government in implementing these measures, including recommending eligibility criteria.
00:20:26.920And to Trudeau and the handpicked panel of experts who will come up with the list of, prove the list of QCJOs or Justin Journos or whatever.
00:21:21.580They won't have to make up some excuse for why we're not journalists, but they are, even though I meet or exceed all their standards better than they do.
00:21:57.260It's like a guild now, but instead of judging your skill, like, say, a dentist or a doctor, you're being judged on your loyalty to Trudeau.
00:22:06.600And as if that wasn't enough proof, you've just heard it from Paul Wells, king of the Justin Journos, and Andrew Potter, and Kent Driscoll and all of them.
00:22:14.800This really is about partisan politics and keeping out the ruffians like me and my ilk.
00:22:26.020Because now we at The Rebel here are the only journalists left in the country, along with Sheila Gunn-Reed, David Menzies, Kian Bexte, the rest of the Rebel team, maybe a handful of other minor independent reporters in this country, maybe five in the whole country.
00:22:41.540Like that small outfit in Ottawa called Black Locks Reporter.
00:22:45.120Maybe, you know, Spencer Fernando from Winnipeg.
00:22:48.320Maybe there's half a dozen of us in the whole country who aren't being bought and sold.
00:22:54.860Being able to say that we're the last free, independent, trustworthy journalists in all of Canada who aren't certified and inspected and funded by Trudeau.
00:23:06.600That's worth a lot more to me than my share of the $595 million trough.
00:26:08.740If we're talking about white nationalism, it's probably more marginal than ever because the backlash against white nationalism has been so severe that people don't want to be associated with anything five football fields away from it.
00:26:26.760They run away from anything that's even somewhere close to what it might be.
00:26:33.860And partly it's because of the media's hyping of the small number of white supremacists, white nationalists.
00:26:40.380They're very good at getting attention for themselves.
00:26:42.440The media inflate them also because they like tarnishing Republicans with some sort of association, even though white nationalists are not Republicans.
00:26:50.000Sometimes they're Democrats, they're opportunists because they'll do whatever it takes to make themselves more prominent than they deserve to be.
00:26:57.920But anyway, Ilhan Omar was citing statistics saying that every extremist murder in the United States or every extremist related killing in the United States in 2018 was caused by a right-wing extremist.
00:27:15.520The actual number of, quote-unquote, extremist related killings was 50.
00:27:20.280This comes from a study by the Anti-Defamation League.
00:27:22.500You'll note Ilhan Omar did not cite them directly because the Anti-Defamation League has been critical of her for her anti-Semitic remarks.
00:27:29.560So she's not going to link to them directly.
00:27:31.620The other reason she won't link to them directly is that if you look at the numbers, they don't quite work out the way she says they do.
00:27:36.440So the number of extremist related killings was 50, but that doesn't mean that people in those 50 were killed for extremist reasons.
00:27:45.060It turns out people who are extremists politically also have a lot of other problems.
00:27:51.420They may have drug and alcohol problems.
00:27:53.340So those killings, the 50 killings, may have nothing to do with extremism whatsoever.
00:27:58.680And, in fact, if you look at the ADL study, they find that the proportion of killings within those 50 that were committed for ideological reasons actually went down from the year before.
00:28:11.300So the number of ideological killings is decreasing, is falling, not rising.
00:28:17.960So the actual numbers behind that claim that she cited do not favor her argument.
00:28:24.020Moreover, if you look more closely at the ADL report, you find that there were 72 extremist related killings in 2016 and 70 in 2015, or the other way around, basically a total of 142.
00:28:37.900That's in the last two years of Barack Obama.
00:28:40.280In the first two years of Donald Trump, there were 50 extremist related killings in 2018 and 38 in 2017.
00:28:48.060So that's only 88, and that is a sharp decline from where they were under Obama, their decline of 39%.
00:28:56.780So, actually, as long as we're using the numbers that the left is now throwing out there, let's look at what the numbers say.
00:29:02.420The numbers say Donald Trump has been more successful at fighting extremism than Barack Obama.
00:29:08.560Or, to put it another way, white nationalism, since that's what they're calling this, white nationalism is decreasing, not increasing.
00:29:15.540Now, that's playing with the numbers a little bit because some of the extremist killings under Obama weren't white nationalist killings.
00:29:23.520They were Islamist killings, sometimes left-wing killings, explicitly so in the case of Black Lives Matter activists who shot police and that sort of thing.
00:29:31.780But basically, we're arguing over marginalia.
00:29:36.640They're not necessarily—I haven't done the statistical analysis of them.
00:29:40.500I highly doubt they're significant at all, even when they show a decline that's favorable to Trump.
00:29:46.240I think this is all a bunch of nonsense.
00:29:48.460They're trying to blame Trump for New Zealand, and they're trying to insulate radical Islam from criticism.
00:29:55.540There is no contradiction between criticizing radical Islam and empathizing with innocent Muslims who were killed simply because they showed up to pray.
00:30:03.740That, in fact, is the distinction between radical Islam and ordinary Islam, and you have to insist on that distinction because if you don't, you allow radical Muslims to represent the whole, which was the whole thrust of Obama's foreign policy, right?
00:30:15.660That's why he never wanted to call radical Islam radical Islam because he didn't want to get them any prominence.
00:30:20.580He didn't want people to conflate Islam with terrorism.
00:30:23.100But you're doing that if you don't allow people to condemn radical Islam and also defend innocent Muslims.
00:30:28.840So anyway, this is all part of Ilhan Omar's attempt to redirect criticism back onto the president.
00:30:36.600They see an opportunity to hurt the president by blaming him for what happened in New Zealand.
00:30:41.880The killer in New Zealand happened to cite the president in his manifesto.
00:30:46.640The media are generally only reporting one side of that.
00:30:49.220They're citing that he praised Donald Trump as a symbol of identity, but they are ignoring the fact that the killer, the terrorist, also said Donald Trump did not behave as he would have wanted him to have behaved in office.
00:31:04.180He said he didn't like Donald Trump's policies.
00:31:06.060So he likes him as a symbol, but he doesn't like him as the president.
00:31:08.980Well, what we're talking about is the president of the United States.
00:31:11.240So I don't know if we should actually give any credence at all to this terrorist and what he thought.
00:31:15.440But the media are definitely trying to establish a connection for all the usual obvious reasons.
00:31:31.200I mean, it's absurd to take that at face value.
00:31:34.520But I think, and I haven't had a chance to go deeply through the manifesto of this mass murderer yet, I think he was extremely media savvy, social media savvy, and he did things that would be called trolling if it were done just online and peacefully.
00:31:51.960I think, in fact, it may be that this entire project of mass murdering people in a mosque was a bizarre, murderous troll and done specifically to set in motion a political outcome.
00:32:08.460In fact, that was contemplated in the manifesto.
00:32:10.340He said he wanted to set society at war against itself.
00:32:13.620But let me give you just one small example.
00:32:15.640Some of our viewers know Candace Owens.
00:32:18.160She's a young woman in the States, a black woman who, on YouTube a couple years ago, said, Mom, Dad, I'm coming out.
00:33:13.840I shouldn't laugh, Joel, because those are the words of a deranged murderer.
00:33:18.180Candace Owens has never in her life called for violent means.
00:33:22.560And for this purported white supremacist to say that a young black woman was the greatest influence in his life is so obviously a troll designed to embarrass her
00:33:35.500and to cause her to be in controversy, I find it difficult to take anything in this manifesto and from this murderer seriously because I think he's, it's all tricks and it's all little buried nuggets designed to make the media go mad.
00:33:56.020And I think he's been successful at that.
00:34:01.840I thought that it was a troll, an attempt to troll the media into disparaging Candace Owens.
00:34:07.540And then I had another thought, which is that it's possible that the terrorist has a misimpression of what Candace Owens actually says.
00:34:14.980And that misimpression has been conveyed by the media.
00:34:18.700We don't hear about Candace Owens in the mainstream media.
00:34:20.900We hear about her in conservative media, on her own social media channels.
00:34:24.880I think she has a YouTube show now on PragerU.
00:34:28.240And we hear from her on social media and new media, alternative media.
00:34:32.200The mainstream media only took an interest when she was falsely accused of praising Hitler.
00:34:36.820If you actually look at what she said, she talked about the fact that there are nationalisms that are healthy and that she did not regard Hitler as a nationalist because his ideology was, in fact, racist and expansionist and interventionist.
00:34:56.540I think Hitler was a nationalist, although certainly his racism, his racial thinking of the world, trumped his nationalism.
00:35:03.760Hitler once said that if the Soviets won the war, they would have deserved to rule because it would have proven that the German nation or the German race was not, in fact, the strongest.
00:35:16.740He really believed in this idea of a competition between races to dominate.
00:35:20.560So it was really a misapplication, in a way, of Darwinism to human society, along with a lot of other bad ideas and hateful ideas.
00:35:30.740So I think that's true, although I do also think Hitler was a nationalist.
00:35:36.260But the point is she was having a discussion about how there are positive, healthy forms of nationalism that don't involve doing things that Hitler did.
00:35:45.160But our media often associates nationalism with fascism.
00:35:50.960The media reported her comments as if she were praising Hitler and saying that he would have been all right if he had just stuck to Germany.
00:35:56.920And I think the killer may have been referring to that.
00:36:00.000I think he actually may have been thinking about that interpretation of her of her remarks.
00:36:05.080And he was name checking her as a way of legitimizing his own views, basically saying if an African-American woman can see nationalism as a good thing, then my nationalism is a universal principle.
00:36:17.640And I will one day be celebrated – he actually wrote this in his manifesto – I'll be celebrated as Nelson Mandela was celebrated.
00:36:24.240Now, that's crazy, but I think he was trying to make a point, which is that he was acting in the name of universal principles.
00:36:33.420But I think that the media bear some of the blame for carrying some false ideas around the world.
00:36:40.940And they say that Trump is to blame because of his rhetoric about radical Islam and so forth.
00:36:45.820What about the media's role in convincing, perhaps, this neo-Nazi white supremacist that Trump empathized with him because they refused to report that Trump condemns neo-Nazis?
00:36:55.800They keep reporting Trump as some kind of modern-day incarnation of Hitler.
00:36:59.800Do we know who they're inspiring by that?
00:37:01.720Do we know who they are encouraging to act out?
00:37:05.040And same thing with this quote about Candace Owens.
00:37:08.660I mean, when the media misreport what she says, do they not understand that they're encouraging people to justify fascism?
00:37:16.280Because she's obviously not a fascist or a nationalist, but if she says Hitler was okay, which she didn't say, but if she's portrayed that way, then you're giving a positive spin to Hitler.
00:37:26.840The media, they act as if there's no accountability whatsoever.
00:37:30.520So I think that's a possible explanation for what he was doing.
00:37:55.920He's the Jewiest non-Jew in the White House since, I don't know, would that be Truman?
00:38:03.000But here's the scary thing I always thought is if you tell 300 million Americans that he's the new Hitler, and if only 1% of 1% of 1% believes it, well, Joel, if you or I thought that the new Hitler was on the rise, you know, you're always, you know, would we try and stop him by any means necessary?
00:38:27.400Would you or I give our lives even to stop Hitler before he came to power in 1933, before he started the Holocaust in, in, in full force several years later?
00:38:41.960I think you tell 300 million Americans that Trump is Hitler, you say it often enough, someone's going to say, oh my God, he is Hitler.
00:38:48.960I must do anything I can to stop him, including assassinating him, including using my own life to, to wipe out his because I can't let a new Hitler happen.
00:38:58.760If you actually believe the media, some people would feel morally compelled to assassinate Trump.
00:39:07.560I think that when you compare him to Hitler, you're basically saying that all the normal rules can be abandoned against this man, that it's justified to do whatever it takes to stop him.
00:39:39.720I think it's made us a more unhappy place and not because of what, what Trump is doing, but which is generally perceived as very successful.
00:39:46.720I mean, 71% in a CNN poll had a positive economic outlook, which is the highest, I think, since 2001 or 2000, basically since in 20 years.
00:39:56.320They haven't measured this sort of level of enthusiasm about the economy.
00:40:01.340They ought to be making people happier.
00:40:02.920But our media keeps telling us that things are terrible and we're being taken over by stormtroopers and so forth, all of which is nonsense, complete nonsense.
00:40:20.160In this country, too, I think just yesterday or the day before, someone in Toronto was wearing a Make America Great Again hat, went on campus to some event and was basically screamed at that he was a racist simply for wearing that hat.
00:40:35.520I myself received a bizarre email from our state broadcaster yesterday asking about our motto, Make Canada Great Again.
00:40:43.940I think it's turned the media into madmen and it's launched.
00:40:48.340I mean, the rage against that young Covington kid, Nicholas Sandman, just because he was wearing a Trump hat at the Washington, the Lincoln Memorial a few months ago.
00:40:59.440I think it has caused a derangement out there.
00:41:02.740I find it very troubling and I think you've shed a lot of light on the phenomenon.
00:41:07.220Joel, I'm grateful for your time as always.