Victoria, BC hates fossil fuels — so let's cut them off
Episode Stats
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Summary
The city of Victoria says it hates fossil fuels. I say, let s make their wishes come true. Ezra Levant is in Victoria, BC, Canada, and he's here to talk about it, and why you should care.
Transcript
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Tonight, the city of Victoria says it hates fossil fuels.
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It's January 22nd, and this is the Ezra Levant 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 publish it
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Have you ever been to Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia?
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If you look at the right places, it is perhaps the prettiest city in Canada.
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There is an enormous public gardens made in an old quarry called Butchert Gardens,
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just outside the city proper, and I think it's probably the most beautiful public gardens in all of Canada.
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I'm not a big flowers guy, but this place is so stunning, so perfect, and they make it so much fun.
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Obviously, the downtown of Victoria is very pretty, if you look in the right places.
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If you can afford it, go have the high tea there.
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If you can't afford it, well, there's other places in town to have fancy tea more affordably,
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The boats, the seaplanes, the tourist bars and restaurants, the hustle-bustle.
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But that beautiful Victoria of old, the city of perfect weather,
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the city they used to say was for newlyweds and nearly deads,
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as in it was a sleepy town and a great place to retire, was changed a bit.
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I was going to mention how pretty the provincial legislature is, because it is.
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When there's not a tent city of drug users and homeless people camped out front.
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So much of downtown Victoria has become like infamous East Hastings Street in Vancouver.
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Homeless people, drug users, mentally ill folks, criminals.
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And the weather is so nice, so why not hang out there?
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And social justice warriors love the blight on their city as proof of how tolerant they are.
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And it's starting to feel a bit like San Francisco.
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The statue of Canada's founder, Sir John A. MacDonald,
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that was torn down by politically correct order of the city council.
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By the way, when your city is named after Queen Victoria,
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Queen of the British Empire at its highest heights,
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it was called an empire then, not just Commonwealth,
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I mean, talk about being politically incorrect.
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The whole province is named after no one less than Christopher Columbus himself.
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British, Columbia, both of those are hate words to the modern left, aren't they?
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before all three of those words are torn down metaphorically,
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and replaced with some politically correct alternative,
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I think they should probably rename Vancouver while they're at it.
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Of course, Vancouver's named after a British Navy commander,
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but not by Brits like Captain Vancouver or Queen Victoria,
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but it's been colonized by foreign environmental groups,
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who have helped install a series of ever more radical politicians,
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I see news that one such U.S.-based group called Stand Earth,
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by demanding that the National Energy Board review
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but engage in some quasi-scientific voodoo review
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Let's just put the theory of man-made global warming on that
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will now be the test of whether anything can be built in Canada.
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We think that the oil sands have been expanded too rapidly
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without a serious plan for environmental remediation
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to decide whether there should be another route for a pipeline
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because the real alternative is not an alternative route.
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but a lot of it is an unofficial layer of crazy
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Like I say, they've been colonized by American lobby groups.
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because they're the tops in the crazy Olympics.
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City of Victoria recommends class action lawsuit
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Can I read a bit of this from the Globe and Mail?
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The city of Victoria has become the first municipality in B.C.
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help pay a portion of the costs associated with climate change
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and is hoping other municipalities follow its lead.
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Our province is in a climate emergency, emergency, emergency,
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and response from fossil fuel companies has been inadequate,
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The cost of climate change has been overwhelming
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and taxpayers shouldn't be the only ones paying for the impacts.
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I read to you the other day about Vancouver's declaration
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and they said it was an emergency because the sea level is rising.
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So, it's rising above the thickness of a dime every year.
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I showed you this Australian sea fort in Sydney, Australia.
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A photo taken 130 years ago and then one taken today.
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And that's apparently a cause because you drove to work today, people.
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Now, I know this is kooky stuff, but it's easier talking about this
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than talking about the dirty drug needles and the used condoms in the public parks,
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in fact, right in front of the legislature in Victoria there.
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I mean, Lisa Helps, the ironically named mayor of Victoria,
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she wants to get rolling with the lawsuits right away.
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Look at this beautiful propaganda website she set up.
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there's a copy of a letter that she has sent to various oil companies around the world.
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What I mentioned before, the people she wants to sue.
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As mayor and council of the city of Victoria in British Columbia,
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we are writing to secure your commitment to pay your fair share
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of the costs of climate change that face our community.
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Climate change is the direct result of pollution
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caused by the burning of fossil fuels, including from your products.
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She goes on a bit, and she sent those letters all around the world.
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Here's a list of some of the companies she wrote to.
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Now, some of them are owned by companies in the West.
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And by that, I mean they're publicly traded on stock markets.
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It wouldn't surprise me if some woke CEO actually pays her shakedown money
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doing the oil and gas equivalent of what Gillette just did to itself the other day,
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going public, saying it hates itself, and so will you love me now?
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where four large oil companies endorsed the carbon tax for Rachel Notley
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But look at some of the others on Lisa Helps' list there.
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Do you see Gazprom there, about a third of the way down?
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That's a Russian company that's controlled by Vladimir Putin,
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Do you see near the bottom there it says Saudi Aramco?
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And you see right in the middle there, National Iranian Oil Company.
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It's almost like she's amateur, juvenile or something.
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that's, of course, nationalized by the Venezuelan dictatorship.
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You know they're so poor over there because of socialism.
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That despite having the largest oil reserves in the world,
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the average Venezuelan has lost 18 or 19 pounds from malnutrition.
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But this kook, Lisa Helps, the mayor of Victoria,
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oh, excuse me, can you send us money for reparations or something?
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I mean, it's weird how much oil and gas these oil and gas protesters consume.
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You never see a PETA activist tuck into a big, thick steak or a hamburger
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and say, oh, you really got to ban meat while they're eating meat.
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They just don't do that because they're living the vegan dream.
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When they're hectoring you to give up meat, they're not eating meat.
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If Lisa helps the mayor of Victoria and the rest of BC's political leads really hate oil and gas,
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We have to help them get over their addiction to oil.
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And hey, it'll save the world's weather or something like that, however it's supposed to go.
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Maybe we shouldn't just shut down the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion proposal.
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I mean, maybe we should shut down the existing Trans Mountain Pipeline
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that supplies Vancouver with so much of its oil right now.
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I mean, there's no difference between the oil that is currently going through the Trans Mountain Pipeline
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Or the oil that would be shipped through an expansion.
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And even worse is the oil and gas used on Vancouver Island, including where Victoria is.
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Do you know how they get their oil and gas there?
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Here's a briefing note from the National Energy Board.
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Barges carry product from Vancouver to terminals on Vancouver Island and along the coast
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and from terminals in the Northwest Territories to more northern locations along the Mackenzie River.
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Edmonton refineries provide about 50 to 60 percent of the petroleum product needs in the Vancouver market.
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The rest of the Vancouver area is supplied either by the Chevron refinery in Vancouver,
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which is right near the end of the Trans Mountain, by the way,
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Okay, well, why on earth would Lisa Helps, the mayor of Victoria,
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why on earth would John Horgan, the NDP premier,
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why on earth would Sipporah Berman, the foreign-funded activist suing to stop the Trans Mountain expansion,
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how on earth can they accept oil being moved to Vancouver Island by barge?
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How on earth can they accept American and Canadian oil right now?
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We must stop them to do them a favor for their own good, to save them from global warming.
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I mean, writing a letter that will go in the shredder of every OPEC country.
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You think he's going to say, oh, maybe we've been doing it all wrong.
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That's telling the world you think that starving Venezuelans should send you cash.
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Yeah, some might say that's a little bit of white privilege showing through there, Lisa.
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But if you want to be seriously woke, if you want to actually live the creed,
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why don't we actually wean them off the oil sands right now?
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I mean, Trudeau says he wants to phase out the oil sands.
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I've said time and time again, and you're all tired of hearing me say it,
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you can't make a choice between what's good for the environment and what's good for the economy.
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We need to manage the transition off of our dependence on fossil fuels.
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Why not just shut them down now, starting with the most sensitive souls in Victoria?
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Because there's actually another environmental crisis in town that needs help,
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and I think it hasn't received the attention it needs until we solve this climate emergency.
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I showed you the fancy website designed to get Iran and Russia and Saudi Arabia and Venezuela
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That's sort of obvious from this AOL-era website.
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Today, Victoria dumps an average of 82 million liters of raw sewage daily into our world-class coastal waters.
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This pollution harms our oceans, including salmon, shellfish, otters, and orcas.
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Our community now has the opportunity to create a sewage treatment system
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that will protect human health and our environment.
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We ask you to show your support for a sewage treatment system,
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giving the gift of clean water to our children and our grandchildren.
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Yeah, I mean, tough to blame that one on the Saudis or the Venezuelans.
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It says, Victoria just dumps its raw and treated sewage around the ocean.
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Go ahead, swim, surf, fish, enjoy the best Victoria has to offer.
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Why should the ocean off Victoria be any cleaner than their needle-strewn public parks, right?
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But the thing is, the advantage of suing fossil fuel companies
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and declaring states of emergency about global warming and the rising tide
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is that you never actually have to do anything.
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You never have to have an accountability moment for why didn't you fix it.
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But if they ever acknowledge their raw sewage problem
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or if 100 Quebec towns and cities that dump their raw sewage in the river
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fighting against harmless, colorless, odorless carbon dioxide,
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well, then they might actually have to fix something.
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And that's a lot less fun than attacking Alberta or big oil, isn't it?
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Well, yesterday we told you about the high-tech lynching
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in Washington, D.C. for the annual March for Life.
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They were waiting for their buses to pick them up
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when they were racially abused by a group of extremists called black Israelites.
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Well, in response, they started doing their school cheers
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and then an aboriginal man walked right up to the face of one of them,
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mere inches away, and banged a drum in his face for five minutes.
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The kid has much more self-control than I would have had.
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He remained motionless, didn't say a word, didn't gesture at all, just smiled.
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He later said he was hoping to de-escalate the moment,
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Well, that's not what the mainstream media said.
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that's the phrase for officially approved and verified leftists on Twitter,
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had a field day at the expense of the children,
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as opposed to the actual racists who taunted them.
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But the thing about the Internet is that it is forever.
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And so many of those celebrities and others disparaging the young man,
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well, it was caught on video, or they were screenshotted.
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A journalist who put the worst of these accusations made by liberals in a story,
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Journalists and Celebs Rush to Delete Tweets Slamming MAGA Hat Kids.
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Did any of these celebrities or journalists wait to get the facts,
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we know right now who the good guy and bad guy is,
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Like, was there any due diligence or reportage there,
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he's white, he's a Trump supporter, I hate him?
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and I think that's actually a really important question,
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you know, all these people were quick to judge,
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which is why they took down their tweets later,
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or maybe regretted the way that they worded it or whatever.
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I mean, I think it's basically everybody acknowledging together
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People were upset that there were a bunch of kids wearing MAGA hats,
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like Alyssa Milano really got the fire roaring on Twitter,
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but I don't think anyone regards her as a journalist.
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This is a 16-year-old kid who did not say a word.
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I think that's far more worrying than the celebrities,
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is the journalists who said Nazi youth, racist youth,
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I mean, I think, actually, the worst ones are still up,
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The ones calling for the kids to be punched or threatened,
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like Reza Aslan and Kathy Griffin and some of the other big ones.
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Let's show some of the tweets that you captured in your report.
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that's the phrase for taking a digital photo of a tweet before it's deleted.
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Bigotry is learned from parents, teachers, society, and leaders.
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So yes, I sure as hell think Trump's racist comments
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and constant dog whistles have contributed to making ass-wipes great again.
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It is why we must condemn racism everywhere and every time we see it.
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Kathy Griffin actually called for people to reveal the home addresses.
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or is it just against Twitter's terms of service?
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It might be against Twitter's terms of service,
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but a lot of the people who have doxed the kids
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Twitter has taken down a few accounts over this situation,