Juno News - Ep. 15 ｜ Ezra Levant ｜ The most controversial man in Canadian media

00:00:00.200 Freedom of speech and press freedom are sacrosanct in a free and democratic society.

00:00:06.300 In Canada, these rights are so vital that they're outlined in Section 1 of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

00:00:13.140 And yet, it constantly feels like these ancient freedoms are under attack.

00:00:17.400 My guest on today's episode of the True North Speaker Series is Canada's foremost free speech champion.

00:00:22.600 And he has often single-handedly led the charge and fought back against overzealous government intrusions on our liberties.

00:00:31.540 Ezra Levant made headlines all the way back in 2006 as the editor of the Western Standard magazine

00:00:37.160 for being the only Canadian journalist brave enough to publish the infamous Mohammed cartoons.

00:00:43.540 For the crime of committing journalism, he was hauled in front of a human rights kangaroo court and questioned by a state official.

00:00:50.800 Fortunately, he recorded his closed-door hearing just so the world could see how far Canada had slid

00:00:57.560 in respect to upholding the basic freedoms we once enjoyed.

00:01:01.560 We published those cartoons for the intention and purpose of exercising our inalienable rights

00:01:12.060 as free-born Albertans to publish whatever the hell we want, no matter what the hell you think.

00:01:17.800 I think I've probably given 200 interviews with people other than the state

00:01:24.480 where I give a very thoughtful and nuanced expression of my intent.

00:01:28.800 But the only thing I have to say to the government about why I published it

00:01:32.720 is because it's my bloody right to do so.

00:01:35.380 In our conversation today, Ezra and I discuss the changing media landscape,

00:01:39.940 comparing free speech battles from the 1990s and early 2000s to those today.

00:01:44.700 We talk about the difference between big government censorship and that which comes from big tech,

00:01:49.840 and we discuss some of his biggest battles, including True North and the Rebels' successful lawsuit

00:01:55.240 against the Trudeau government during the last federal election.

00:01:59.200 Ezra is a fearless champion of freedom, a highly astute political commentator,

00:02:03.560 and perhaps the man most hated by the mainstream media, liberals, and leftists alike.

00:02:08.760 He's also a successful entrepreneur who has built one of the largest media companies in Canada.

00:02:13.560 We talk about the best and worst moments at the Rebel,

00:02:16.960 get into the details of what really happened with Faith Goldie in Charlottesville,

00:02:20.820 and we discuss the media's smear campaign against him and the Rebel.

00:02:25.540 Love him or hate him, Ezra continues to be a happy warrior,

00:02:28.820 speaking his mind and fighting for freedom with their tremendous army of online followers, fans, and supporters.

00:02:34.400 I hope you enjoy our conversation.

00:02:37.160 Let me know what you think in the comments section,

00:02:38.860 and please share this video with like-minded friends and family.

00:02:41.900 Don't forget to subscribe to True North,

00:02:43.960 and if you'd like to support this podcast, please visit tnc.news slash donate.

00:02:49.000 Well, Ezra is thinking about it.

00:03:00.340 I think throughout the course of my career, you've interviewed me dozens of times,

00:03:04.080 maybe 50 times going back to the Sun News Network,

00:03:06.400 but this is the first time I've ever had the pleasure of interviewing you,

00:03:09.180 so thank you so much for sitting down with me in the flesh,

00:03:12.760 you know, despite all the crazy coronavirus stuff that's going on around us.

00:03:15.920 Yeah, no problem. Well, you have so many interesting things to say,

00:03:20.020 and we're always delighted to have you on Rebel News, so I'm an open book for you.

00:03:24.400 Well, great. I think that there's so many people out there

00:03:27.060 who have been following your career for such a long time.

00:03:29.440 I know for me, the moment that I really first remember seeing you

00:03:32.660 was the Human Rights Tribunals in Alberta.

00:03:35.140 You were the only journalist, one of the only journalists,

00:03:37.460 brave enough to publish those Muhammad cartoons back in the early 2000s, I believe,

00:03:41.700 and it was a big controversy that, you know,

00:03:43.800 students were learning about in law school and stuff like that.

00:03:45.920 And so you have always been a champion, a hero of free speech in Canada,

00:03:50.200 and you continue to be to this day.

00:03:52.300 So I wanted to just first ask you about those sort of early days in your career.

00:03:56.200 So you're a trained lawyer, and you sort of transitioned from being a lawyer

00:04:00.860 to being a journalist and writing in the mainstream media.

00:04:03.520 Tell us a little bit about that transition and what led you there.

00:04:06.900 Sure. I was part of an early wave of young Reform Party youth, I guess.

00:04:11.680 Rob Anders was part of that.

00:04:14.880 Jason Kenney joined a little later, Raheem Jaffer.

00:04:17.500 And I went to law school while everyone else went to parliaments.

00:04:21.320 And I always sort of thought, well, maybe I'll run for office, maybe I'll run for office,

00:04:25.060 but other things intervened.

00:04:26.960 And I quickly abandoned the law, went to Ottawa with Preston Manning and whatnot.

00:04:31.460 But I don't know, I felt like I always had one foot in politics, one foot in law,

00:04:36.020 and one foot in journalism, even since I was a kid.

00:04:38.400 I think they were all related.

00:04:40.280 And with that human rights battle, I mean, I was always a bit of a troublemaker, let's be honest.

00:04:46.820 But I did not know then that that would shape so much of my life to come.

00:04:51.920 I'll be really candid.

00:04:53.200 The Western Standard was a fortnightly magazine.

00:04:55.520 That's when people, the Internet was growing, but it was still a paper magazine era.

00:05:00.320 And I thought, geez, we're fortnightly.

00:05:02.580 That means every two weeks.

00:05:03.940 By the time we covered this story, I said to our editor, Kevin Levin,

00:05:08.280 the Sun is going to cover it in their trademark tabloid style.

00:05:12.800 National Post is going to cover it, and they're not afraid of radical Islam.

00:05:16.480 And everyone else is going to cover it.

00:05:19.260 So we can't cover it in the same, here's the news or the cartoons.

00:05:22.460 We've got to be more reflective.

00:05:23.480 And so we were.

00:05:25.400 We didn't put it on the cover.

00:05:26.720 We thought, oh, everyone's going to see these cartoons by then.

00:05:29.180 And it wasn't a hot news story.

00:05:30.900 It's, you know, a media analysis of what happens.

00:05:34.640 It was almost written in a boring way.

00:05:37.680 And we hid, not that we hid them, we just thought it wouldn't be news anymore.

00:05:41.760 But between when we finished it and it went to the presses and then it goes to the post office,

00:05:47.380 things took so long back then, it wasn't like the Internet,

00:05:49.940 we realized, oh, my God, no one else is doing it.

00:05:53.740 Not even the spicy Toronto sun.

00:05:56.000 Not even Ken White's, I think Ken White was still running the National Post,

00:05:59.040 so he was afraid of nothing.

00:06:00.220 Or McLean's magazine was still rambunctious.

00:06:02.740 So it dawned on us, as the thing was working its way through the printing presses and the mailhouse,

00:06:08.200 we are going to be the first and only people of any size publishing them.

00:06:13.860 And we just sort of panicked.

00:06:15.440 Not in a bad way.

00:06:16.520 Just thought, oh, what do we do?

00:06:17.240 What do we do?

00:06:17.680 Okay, let's get some security for the front door.

00:06:19.380 Let's do this and that.

00:06:20.640 And it was a hit.

00:06:23.520 And we started getting phone calls, tons of phone calls about it.

00:06:28.340 And I remember we had a little team of people answering the phone.

00:06:30.860 And they would say, well, here's all these different people signing up for subscriptions.

00:06:34.480 And I looked at the names, and they were Muslim names.

00:06:37.460 I said, this isn't right.

00:06:38.620 What are you talking about?

00:06:39.780 And they weren't calling to complain.

00:06:42.060 They were calling to subscribe, to show loyalty and support.

00:06:47.780 Because to this day, it's almost 15 years later, but I remember a letter to the editor we published

00:06:54.080 by someone named Rawah Khaled.

00:06:56.000 I still remember her name.

00:06:57.400 And I'll paraphrase.

00:06:58.180 She said, I didn't sail halfway across the world to have Sharia law follow me.

00:07:05.680 And I thought, oh, my God.

00:07:06.680 And I would not have guessed that we would have been flooded by phone calls from Canadian

00:07:12.200 Muslims who were happy to have someone not bend the knee to Sharia censorship.

00:07:17.180 And so it was very exciting, and nothing bad happened to us.

00:07:21.460 But then the shoe dropped, and then the Alberta Human Rights Commission, a government organization,

00:07:27.260 really prosecuted kind of a blasphemy prosecution, investigating, grilling me.

00:07:33.560 Well, I turned the tables.

00:07:34.640 We recorded the grilling.

00:07:35.640 Again, no one would ever believe in the year 2008 it was.

00:07:40.700 Cartoons were in 2006.

00:07:42.040 It took them two years for the Alberta Human Rights Commission to get around to interviewing me.

00:07:47.280 I just knew that if I didn't record it, no one would believe me.

00:07:50.340 Right.

00:07:50.600 So was that a legal recording?

00:07:52.600 Did they know that they were being recorded?

00:07:54.060 They did know.

00:07:54.480 In fact, we spent about six months negotiating with the Human Rights Commission the terms of

00:07:58.820 that interview.

00:07:59.500 Okay.

00:07:59.760 And I insisted that we be able to keep a record of it.

00:08:04.000 Well, what does that mean?

00:08:04.880 So we arranged it so it was at my lawyer's office, and I got there early, and we set

00:08:09.820 up the tripod very openly on the table.

00:08:12.220 And I got there early, and my lawyer got there early, and it was on our safe turf.

00:08:15.620 So the investigator walked in.

00:08:17.440 It was a Friday, and she just wanted to go home for the weekend.

00:08:20.400 She walked in.

00:08:21.520 She looked at the camera.

00:08:22.380 And again, this was 2008.

00:08:23.400 This was before the era of smartphones.

00:08:25.600 So to have a fairly ostentatious home movie camera there, it's not really normal.

00:08:31.220 But she looked at it.

00:08:32.240 I could see she paused for a second.

00:08:34.220 And then she said, oh, whatever.

00:08:35.740 I got to get out of here.

00:08:36.980 We spent six months arranging it.

00:08:38.680 So it was not a secret camera at all.

00:08:41.540 And for the course of the next hour, she asked questions, and I had really thought about

00:08:46.040 one question only.

00:08:47.940 Because, remember, this has been two years since the complaint was filed.

00:08:51.580 Human Rights Commission has moved so slowly.

00:08:53.560 I had been asked a hundred times the most obvious question.

00:08:57.900 Why did you publish cartoons?

00:08:59.640 That's a pretty good question.

00:09:01.280 And I would, well, it's a central artifact of the news story, and we're a magazine.

00:09:05.720 We can show pictures.

00:09:06.620 If you're in the radio, you have to paint a picture with words.

00:09:09.340 It's the center of the news.

00:09:10.960 They're actually very boring cartoons.

00:09:13.240 That's an important part of the story, to know how hypersensitive this is.

00:09:16.180 These weren't obscene.

00:09:17.840 It's a statement of freedom.

00:09:18.940 There's a lot of good reasons.

00:09:20.700 And I practiced my answer maybe a hundred times with real journalists.

00:09:25.260 But I made a moral decision before that interrogation.

00:09:28.620 I thought, and Muslim students would write to me, I'm doing a thesis on this.

00:09:34.980 Can you talk to me?

00:09:35.760 And they thought I would be standoffish.

00:09:38.100 I engaged.

00:09:41.240 But when the government asks you, why did you publish those cartoons?

00:09:46.940 I don't think you can give the same answer.

00:09:49.080 My answer was not a secret.

00:09:50.240 I gave it to anyone who would ask.

00:09:51.980 Friendly or unfriendly.

00:09:53.860 But when the government asks you, they're asking for a reason.

00:09:56.300 What's the reason?

00:09:57.400 If your answer does not please them, there's a penalty.

00:10:00.580 There's a fine.

00:10:01.860 There's some other order.

00:10:03.040 So I would talk to almost anyone and I would try to be so reasonable, hey, please see it

00:10:09.000 my way.

00:10:09.520 And can I convince you I'm right?

00:10:11.200 And I understand why you're sensitive to this because it might be blasphemy.

00:10:14.700 But try and see it my way.

00:10:16.640 I would sort of plead with them to take my persuasion.

00:10:19.760 Sometimes it will work.

00:10:20.520 Sometimes it wouldn't.

00:10:21.220 But when an agent of the state says, why did you publish this?

00:10:25.180 You cannot say, oh, please, sir, let me show you how reasonable I am.

00:10:30.080 Please let me show you my intricate philosophy for why.

00:10:33.360 No, no, no, no, no.

00:10:35.480 Because the reason that question is being asked in a government interrogation is because your

00:10:40.040 freedom turns on it.

00:10:41.640 Your fortune turns on it.

00:10:43.500 Your legal status turns on it.

00:10:45.360 And so to give a reasonable answer is to sort of submit.

00:10:49.420 It's to abide and agree with their right to ask you on pain of penalty.

00:10:53.800 If I met that interrogator on the street, hey, how are you?

00:10:56.360 Hey, how are you?

00:10:57.180 Here's my, I would have a conversation like a normal human.

00:10:59.900 But when it's a government interrogator, even though she was dressed in casual clothes

00:11:03.160 and it was very casual Friday.

00:11:04.960 And she seemed sort of bumbling and she seemed sort of caught off guard.

00:11:07.820 Like, I don't know why he's being, you know, aggressive with me or whatever.

00:11:11.260 But my freedom and fortune turned on my answers.

00:11:15.400 And so I made a moral decision to say, I, the only reason I'm going to tell you is because

00:11:21.640 it's my right to do so.

00:11:22.440 I think I said it's my bloody right to do so.

00:11:25.380 And instead of trying to sneak through, oh, I'm just a tiny mouse.

00:11:29.700 Please let me go by.

00:11:30.880 No, no, no.

00:11:31.760 Whatever reason is most offensive to you, government investigator, I invoke that reason.

00:11:36.260 I plead guilty, in effect, because there's no way I'm going to try and win my innocence

00:11:41.380 because I don't, I think this whole thing's a sham.

00:11:44.160 And in fact, that very morning I republished the cartoons on our Western Standard website.

00:11:50.120 And I told her that.

00:11:51.200 I said, this morning I've republished them.

00:11:53.300 That's what I think of you.

00:11:54.700 And I went home that day and my heart was pumping and I was sort of mad and I had been

00:12:00.040 mad.

00:12:00.560 And I went home and I had never uploaded anything to YouTube before in my life.

00:12:04.020 YouTube was still brand new.

00:12:05.380 Was it part of Google back then?

00:12:06.860 No, I don't think so.

00:12:08.060 And PayPal was super new and blogs were still sort of new.

00:12:12.120 And I had never done any of these things before.

00:12:14.760 And I managed to edit the video into little clips and upload them.

00:12:18.940 And I thought, well, I'm going to send this to my friends and maybe 100 people, maybe a

00:12:22.780 few thousand people will watch.

00:12:24.020 Well, those videos went super viral.

00:12:27.160 Hundreds of thousands of years.

00:12:28.520 And this was in 2008.

00:12:29.860 And because, like I say, no one would have believed that it would have had, if I would

00:12:35.940 have said I was just interrogated by the government of Alberta about publishing cartoons, no, you

00:12:40.660 weren't interrogated.

00:12:42.080 Well, I was.

00:12:43.100 And they asked me why I did it.

00:12:44.480 And they asked me about my religious thoughts or my political, no, no, they didn't.

00:12:48.340 Well, the video didn't lie.

00:12:51.560 And within weeks, that interrogator quit the case because she was getting so many calls

00:12:55.860 from the public.

00:12:57.420 And within months, the Human Rights Commission dropped the whole case without a hearing.

00:13:01.340 Wow.

00:13:02.300 The Vancouver Sun had an editorial a little bit later saying the Vancouver, the Human Rights

00:13:08.920 Tribunal murdered its own reputation.

00:13:10.740 That was in relation to a similar case against Mark Stein.

00:13:14.400 The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal murdered its own reputation.

00:13:19.400 So that was 2008, 2009.

00:13:23.060 I was being prosecuted.

00:13:24.420 Mark Stein was being prosecuted for something McLean's magazine did.

00:13:26.880 That's where Ken White was at the time.

00:13:28.300 He was at McLean's.

00:13:31.160 And there was a public change of the mood that we have gone too far down the path of political

00:13:36.260 correctness.

00:13:37.580 And so the conservative government under Stephen Harper passed a bill to repeal the federal

00:13:43.180 censorship provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act.

00:13:46.160 In Alberta, where I had been investigated, the not-so-sympathetic provincial PCs also

00:13:52.500 made changes.

00:13:54.200 And a last little factoid I want to bring to your attention is that a survey was done by

00:13:58.420 Compass, which was a little pollster back then, interviewing dozens of working journalists.

00:14:04.460 So it wasn't a statistically valid poll of the general public.

00:14:08.940 It was phone calls to working journalists.

00:14:11.240 What do you think should have been done about the cartoons?

00:14:14.380 And 70% of working journalists surveyed in 2008 said, not only should Ezra have been allowed

00:14:20.640 to publish them, but our media should have published them also.

00:14:24.100 70% of working journalists in the year 2008 said, we should have all done it out of solidarity,

00:14:31.480 out of newsworthiness, out of freedom.

00:14:34.160 Well, now we're in the year 2020.

00:14:36.080 And I promise you, Candace, that if you were to do that same survey today, you would be lucky

00:14:42.340 to have 30%.

00:14:43.500 You'd be lucky to have 10% who said, yeah, we should publish something like that.

00:14:48.400 People would say, oh, it's racist, it's systemic discrimination, it's hate speech, de-platform

00:14:54.540 you, prosecute you, hate crime.

00:14:58.700 In a dozen years, the entire temperature has changed, worst of all, in the media class.

00:15:06.540 I put it to you that severely normal Canadians still love freedom of speech.

00:15:09.940 And I bet you Raul Khaled and other refugees from strict Islamism still believe in free

00:15:15.560 speech.

00:15:15.880 But our intellectual class, our cultural class, our professors, they've gone silent at best.

00:15:24.400 They're actually part of the woke mob.

00:15:26.800 And I think things are worse now than they were before.

00:15:31.280 Well, it's interesting because, you know, there's so much free speech on the internet

00:15:34.660 now.

00:15:34.980 And I think that's part of the thing that the tech companies are now scrambling, like,

00:15:38.260 what are we going to do?

00:15:38.920 Because you can put any, anyone can put pictures up on Twitter, anyone can kind of publicize

00:15:43.560 their own thing.

00:15:44.340 So to me, it's almost shocking that so many media companies were afraid to publish the

00:15:48.560 cartoons in the first place.

00:15:50.260 And you can kind of say, okay, well, there was a lot of retaliation against the artists

00:15:53.700 and people in Denmark.

00:15:55.340 Maybe they were afraid for their own safety.

00:15:56.760 But, you know, that 70% number of working journalists, I'd be really curious to see what it is now.

00:16:03.300 Because in some ways, you know, political correctness has gotten much, much worse.

00:16:07.160 But in other ways, I do feel that there are so many outlets and there are so many people

00:16:10.540 who want to get the truth and know the truth that they can find it because there are, you

00:16:14.760 know, independent outlets like the ones that you've created or we've created here at True

00:16:18.480 North.

00:16:18.740 I'm going to politely disagree with you on that.

00:16:21.100 And I'm going to give you two proof points.

00:16:23.320 One is a recent instance of Rex Murphy at the National Post.

00:16:27.240 He's their star columnist.

00:16:28.300 I think he's probably their most read guy.

00:16:30.000 He's a character.

00:16:30.760 He's a Canadian icon.

00:16:32.340 And he's a very good arguer.

00:16:35.120 And he wrote a piece saying, you know, Canada has its problems, but we're not inherently systemically

00:16:40.040 racist.

00:16:40.800 I think that's right.

00:16:41.860 But even if you disagree with him, all right, disagree with him.

00:16:45.020 But 30 of his colleagues, usually young millennial hires at the National Post, I read the list

00:16:51.620 of names and I Googled them all.

00:16:52.700 Who are they?

00:16:53.840 30 people at the National Post signed a letter to the editors demanding that that never happen

00:16:58.640 again and demanding all sorts of rules and what you can say and not.

00:17:02.800 That's the majority of working reporters at the National Post, a newspaper that was explicitly

00:17:07.980 found it to be freer, conservative-ish.

00:17:12.700 And they actually had a struggle session where everyone vented and demanded that Rex be silenced.

00:17:18.300 Right.

00:17:18.560 And it's similar to what happened at the New York Times.

00:17:20.760 The difference, Ezra, is that at the New York Times, you know, they're a center-left

00:17:23.880 publication and you kind of expect them to be overridden by these sort of woke millennials,

00:17:28.260 whereas the National Post is not supposed to be that.

00:17:30.380 It's supposed to be the conservative one.

00:17:31.500 Oh, and that's the thing.

00:17:32.840 If they're in there, you know, forget about raising the drawbridge.

00:17:36.620 They're already in the castle.

00:17:38.700 So using the 70% number, we went from 70% saying not only should Western Standard and

00:17:45.760 Levant publish the cartoon, we all should, to 70% saying get rid of Rex.

00:17:50.280 Because he said the, in fact, they ran an article by one of those young red guard cultural Marxists.

00:17:58.520 Who is a Financial Times reporter, so she doesn't even write about, or Financial Post, she doesn't

00:18:02.480 even write about these social issues.

00:18:03.900 She writes about business.

00:18:04.620 Yeah, Van Malis, Supermaniam, and I very carefully read her rebuttal, and I mean, I disagree with

00:18:10.780 most of it, but there was a key line, she said, he should not be allowed to have a national

00:18:18.720 forum for these, so she didn't say he's wrong for these five reasons.

00:18:22.300 She said he's wrong for these five reasons, and he should not be allowed to argue back.

00:18:27.480 And I read this amazing picture book, I'll show it to you later because I've got it with

00:18:32.440 me, of the cultural revolution in Mao's China from 1966 to 1976.

00:18:39.840 The book is called Red Color News Soldier.

00:18:42.460 And it's photographs from a People's Liberation Army, actually a red guard photographer of the

00:18:46.980 struggle sessions, where people had to self-denounce.

00:18:49.820 And they had to wear dunce caps in the public square, as thousands of people pointed and

00:18:56.100 shouted.

00:18:57.060 And the psychological pressure, the political pressure, it was pure totalitarianism.

00:19:02.300 It was informants accusing each other, and it wasn't once, it was a ten-year reign of terror.

00:19:07.680 And there's a couple of photos in this book of someone who didn't go along with his self-denunciation.

00:19:15.560 So there were all these sham trials, and one guy didn't want to go along with it.

00:19:19.300 So they literally stuffed a cloth in his mouth so he wouldn't protest his innocence.

00:19:23.580 Another woman had her jaw dislocated because she kept saying, no, I didn't do it, I didn't do it.

00:19:28.980 And I swear to God, I felt, I had first come across this book in Hong Kong a dozen years ago.

00:19:35.920 It was a shocking book to me then.

00:19:38.240 And when I heard what the struggle session in the National Post was like, it was the

00:19:42.340 first thing I thought of.

00:19:43.680 Stuff a cloth in Rex Murphy's mouth if he won't self-denounce.

00:19:47.100 Well, we're going to bloody well stuff a cloth in his mouth.

00:19:49.660 That's pretty much what they were saying.

00:19:53.980 My second proof point is much more terrifying.

00:19:58.620 It's social media.

00:20:00.320 We used to have a very colorful character at Rebel News called Tommy Robinson.

00:20:04.980 It's not his real name.

00:20:06.580 Stephen Yaxley Landon is his name.

00:20:07.980 He lives in Britain, and he's worried about the Islamification of Britain.

00:20:12.420 He's very careful to draw a distinction between Muslims.

00:20:15.420 He has many Muslim friends.

00:20:16.820 And between Islam and the Islamification of the public square.

00:20:20.200 He can take him or leave him.

00:20:21.240 I like the guy.

00:20:21.900 He's a colorful character.

00:20:23.340 He's got a criminal record.

00:20:25.180 He's a working class Brit.

00:20:26.960 He's imperfect, but he raises a real issue in society that people are afraid to talk about.

00:20:31.600 I think so.

00:20:32.060 And as Majid Nawaz, the Pakistani-Brit talk show host in the UK, points out, because the

00:20:39.380 establishment media refuses to talk about those issues, it's fallen to the Tommy Robinsons

00:20:45.120 to talk about them.

00:20:46.480 People wouldn't go to Tommy Robinson if the Telegraph and the Times and the Mirror and the

00:20:51.340 Guardian would have a fair hearing of these issues.

00:20:53.640 So Majid Nawaz says it's because we're so afraid to talk about it that Tommy has the

00:21:01.260 mic because no one else is talking, and it's a very good point.

00:21:03.720 So anyways, Tommy worked with us, and he did great work.

00:21:07.040 He left us in 2018, and he's done his own thing.

00:21:10.460 But since he left us, I mean, it's coincidental, he's been deplatformed more and more.

00:21:16.160 Kicked off Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, even TikTok kicked him off.

00:21:21.220 Kicked off place after place.

00:21:22.840 Okay, we've seen that before, but he is on a special blacklist that has been confirmed

00:21:30.100 by Facebook itself.

00:21:33.700 Even putting his photograph on Facebook without even his name will be facially recognized and

00:21:42.440 taken down.

00:21:44.480 Any conversation about Tommy Robinson that represents his views or treats him favorably will be deleted

00:21:51.940 as a strike.

00:21:52.940 The only way you can describe or discuss Tommy Robinson on Facebook is if you denounce him.

00:22:00.700 Now that sounds like an insane, dystopian, 1984-style rule.

00:22:06.180 That doesn't sound real, does it?

00:22:07.680 That's crazy.

00:22:08.400 But it was confirmed when a Danish TV station was doing a show on Tommy.

00:22:15.980 Tommy was coming to town.

00:22:17.440 They wanted to denounce him.

00:22:19.540 They're liberals in Copenhagen.

00:22:21.220 So they put on their Facebook page, Tommy Robinson is coming in, what's your toughest question

00:22:26.120 for him?

00:22:26.500 We're going to get him.

00:22:27.920 And that was taken down by Facebook because it wasn't a denunciation.

00:22:31.400 So they complained to Facebook.

00:22:33.040 Facebook, Facebook's Scandinavian boss came on the show and said, we have a blacklist.

00:22:38.960 Tommy's on it.

00:22:40.620 You cannot say his name except to, whoa.

00:22:44.460 You cannot even, you can't have audio.

00:22:47.000 You can't have video.

00:22:48.260 And they will use the highest technology, facial recognition, to automatically detect that.

00:22:54.000 Now, we know that Tommy Robinson's on it.

00:22:56.300 Who else is on it?

00:22:57.120 And is there any oversight and how do you get off it?

00:22:59.960 The government has a no-fly list, but you can find out if you're on it.

00:23:03.480 You can appeal it.

00:23:04.200 You can sue.

00:23:05.000 How do you know?

00:23:06.220 Who do you sue?

00:23:07.140 What was the hearing?

00:23:07.980 Can I appeal?

00:23:08.960 What was I accused of doing?

00:23:10.680 This Danish TV station did a 15-minute segment with the head of Facebook and they couldn't explain

00:23:17.920 why he was on it.

00:23:19.380 They couldn't explain what he did to get on this blacklist.

00:23:21.340 I tell you this because you don't know what's being censored, right?

00:23:27.120 You don't know what Google has taken out of the search rankings.

00:23:30.180 You don't know what they pushed down.

00:23:32.260 One day, a favorite person you were looking for just isn't there.

00:23:35.380 Oh, well, you've got 100 other people to follow.

00:23:38.060 I went through the Alberta Human Rights Commission process and I hated it, but at least there

00:23:43.400 was a process.

00:23:44.600 I had lawyers.

00:23:45.720 I had hearings.

00:23:48.160 There was something I could hold on to.

00:23:51.640 But a couple months ago, I interviewed one of Facebook's censors.

00:23:55.320 Based in Phoenix, Arizona, he worked for a company called Cognizant.

00:24:00.860 1,500 people worked in their Phoenix office, three shifts a day, censoring 200 posts per

00:24:08.540 day each.

00:24:09.580 That's 300,000 posts per day.

00:24:14.020 They censored in this little Phoenix factory.

00:24:17.180 Right.

00:24:17.360 And they're not even Facebook employees, so there's no real recourse.

00:24:20.180 Because if you bring it up with Facebook, they kind of shrug and say, well, we have contractors

00:24:24.680 that do that kind of work.

00:24:25.680 Yeah, and I was talking to this guy and he said, oh, we had a Canadian election handbook.

00:24:30.060 I said, oh, you did, did you?

00:24:31.600 And he looked it up while I was talking to him.

00:24:33.160 He said, no one was allowed to criticize Jagmeet Singh's turban.

00:24:39.000 Okay, now I wouldn't want to criticize his turban.

00:24:41.140 I would criticize his ideology.

00:24:43.740 That's sort of mean and personal, but people call this guy fat or call this guy short or

00:24:48.840 call, you can be mean to people, you can say terrible, but you're not allowed to be

00:24:53.260 mean to Jagmeet Singh.

00:24:54.260 That was a rule.

00:24:55.900 He told me that the phrase Nazi, which is sometimes hurled at right-wingers, that's

00:25:01.120 allowed, but Feminazi, which is sort of a made-up criticism of feminists who act very

00:25:08.220 authoritarian, Feminazi is banned, but you can call someone a Nazi on Facebook and they

00:25:13.460 won't take it out.

00:25:14.400 You can't call someone a Feminazi.

00:25:17.280 Open Borders Immigration was specifically mentioned in their election handbook for censorship.

00:25:23.260 If people, for the Canadian election.

00:25:25.900 So here's a guy in Phoenix who's been given an election censorship handbook and with 1,500

00:25:32.180 people in Phoenix, they're censoring 200,000 posts, sorry, 300,000 posts a day.

00:25:38.180 I don't know how many are in Canada.

00:25:39.940 We don't even know about it.

00:25:40.920 We don't even talk about it.

00:25:41.800 There's no recourse.

00:25:43.120 And you don't know what you didn't see because it, how would you know what you didn't see?

00:25:48.740 You don't know what you don't know.

00:25:50.520 So in many ways, things are much darker now because at least I wasn't in a dark room punching

00:25:58.240 at shadows when I was facing down Charlene McGovern in 2008 with the cartoon kerfuffle.

00:26:04.380 In 2020, and this is an election year, who knows?

00:26:09.080 Right.

00:26:09.820 Who knows?

00:26:10.680 What they're coming at.

00:26:11.660 And it's interesting because I feel like the tech darlings in Silicon Valley was sort

00:26:15.680 of viewed upon very positively by the public up until a couple of years ago.

00:26:19.380 And then things really took a sour turn after Trump got elected.

00:26:22.620 And a lot of people blamed Facebook and, you know, the whole Russiagate and all that kind

00:26:26.320 of stuff.

00:26:26.840 I feel like the tides are turning.

00:26:28.480 So I'm not going to disagree with you, but I'm a little bit more optimistic just in saying

00:26:32.440 that I think that, you know, if the tech companies are doing this and they are and they're

00:26:36.260 getting exposed, it's just a matter of time before they have to become more transparent,

00:26:40.400 pivot, come up with a new way of doing things, come up with a transparent constitution that

00:26:45.520 they're going to use so that there is recourse.

00:26:47.680 And I hope there is.

00:26:48.340 And I think that part of the reason that we even know about this stuff is because of the

00:26:51.600 journalism that you guys do over at The Rebel.

00:26:54.700 Well, essentially to say I rely on Alan Bocari of Breitbart's tech correspondent.

00:26:59.340 He has a lot of great sources in these companies.

00:27:02.000 Again, I'm more pessimistic than you.

00:27:03.820 And I hope you're right.

00:27:05.240 But what's Google afraid of?

00:27:09.800 A fine?

00:27:11.840 Are they afraid of someone saying mean things about them?

00:27:15.860 I don't know if Google's afraid of anything other than maybe being broken up in a trust

00:27:20.240 busting action that Trump is obviously not going to achieve.

00:27:24.540 I don't think they're afraid of anything.

00:27:26.480 And I think they regard themselves as larger than any national law.

00:27:31.140 I think they regard themselves almost like a country of their own.

00:27:33.680 And a lot of these companies, Facebook in particular, are run by men who have a messianic

00:27:39.140 complex.

00:27:39.880 They think they're the messiah or a god-like complex.

00:27:42.600 Sometimes they say as much.

00:27:45.100 And it's Mark Zuckerberg.

00:27:47.140 I mean, and these companies are the largest spenders on lobbying in Washington, D.C.

00:27:51.140 And they colonize conservatives, too.

00:27:53.720 I mean, the Democrats are already on board with censorship.

00:27:56.160 But, you know, $100,000 is enough to often buy off a conservative think tank.

00:28:00.740 I am deeply worried about it.

00:28:04.100 And we ourselves have been hit by this.

00:28:06.460 And we have someone we can talk to at some of these companies now.

00:28:10.860 We were demonetized.

00:28:12.560 We were growing at 8% per month until early 2017 when all the conservative websites were

00:28:18.380 shut down.

00:28:19.540 We were on course to make over a million bucks in ads.

00:28:22.580 Wow.

00:28:22.820 From YouTube alone.

00:28:24.840 And then they knock that down by 90%.

00:28:26.720 They just demonetize it.

00:28:28.500 They say, oh, advertisers don't want to be on your controversial stuff.

00:28:32.360 Says you.

00:28:33.480 Says you.

00:28:34.000 They don't demonetize liberal sites like the Young Turks, for example.

00:28:38.140 So I think that so many of the changes are done subtly, quietly, and you don't even know.

00:28:45.080 And there's no one to ask.

00:28:46.280 Last anecdote, one day we were given a notice by Facebook.

00:28:52.420 You have violated Facebook policies.

00:28:56.580 Click this button to unpublish your site.

00:29:00.140 And the button said unpublish.

00:29:02.760 Okay, so that's the only button there was.

00:29:05.100 There wasn't two buttons, unpublish or I disagree.

00:29:08.440 That was just one button.

00:29:09.560 And they didn't say what policy we violated.

00:29:13.860 And they didn't say which posts we made that violated what rule.

00:29:17.680 They just said, you've done something somewhere.

00:29:19.740 We're not going to tell you what.

00:29:21.740 And there's just a big button in front of you now.

00:29:23.720 Just touch it and your entire site is gone.

00:29:26.740 Now, we just made such a fuss.

00:29:28.500 And they finally said, oh, it was a glitch.

00:29:30.460 A glitch, eh?

00:29:32.320 Can you pretend I'm not quite that dumb?

00:29:34.960 Can you actually give me a real answer?

00:29:36.380 Oh, it's a glitch.

00:29:37.340 You wouldn't understand.

00:29:38.260 No, try me.

00:29:38.740 Try me.

00:29:39.360 I'll try and figure it out.

00:29:40.580 Like just complete baloney.

00:29:42.280 And when all these glitches happen on one side of the ideological divide.

00:29:46.340 Look, San Francisco is the most left-wing city in North America.

00:29:49.640 And Silicon Valley are the elite.

00:29:52.780 And people are terrified of being conservative there.

00:29:56.540 And they don't even realize how left-wing they are.

00:30:00.180 Anyway, I think that censorship is the problem of our age

00:30:03.020 because free speech is the strategic freedom upon which all other freedoms are based.

00:30:09.200 Absolutely.

00:30:09.700 I agree.

00:30:10.300 I think that the concept behind the social media platforms was that it was going to enable free speech on a different level

00:30:16.540 and allow everyday Canadians, Americans, citizens to express their views.

00:30:21.460 So you wouldn't have to have an Alberta Report magazine.

00:30:24.940 You wouldn't have to have the printing press, all of the overhead.

00:30:28.620 Everyone could just state their opinion.

00:30:30.880 The problem for the Silicon Valley people was that when they extended this big free speech platform to everyone,

00:30:36.920 they realized that people have a lot of different views.

00:30:39.300 You know, there's not a lot of conformity.

00:30:41.040 There is intellectual conformity in elite circles.

00:30:43.540 You know, the Silicon Valley is sort of replicating like an Ivy League environment where they do all have the same opinions.

00:30:49.760 And my husband and I lived there for a couple of years.

00:30:51.600 We interacted in that environment.

00:30:53.680 And it's very much about conformity.

00:30:55.880 And so all of a sudden, you know, you have all these people from all over the country, all over the world that have really interesting, very different views.

00:31:04.020 And who's to say that you shouldn't have different views?

00:31:05.880 I mean, that's what makes a society more colorful.

00:31:08.440 But the idea, I think really since 2016 and Trump, sort of there's been a moral panic and they're trying to reverse themselves and crack down.

00:31:17.360 So I agree that we're seeing some really, truly awful sort of moments of totalitarianism.

00:31:21.920 But I just have to remain optimistic that we're going to swing back towards the more that people realize what's happening and these kind of things get exposed,

00:31:30.480 they're going to demand transparency.

00:31:32.460 And maybe it is through the government.

00:31:33.400 Maybe the government does have to break up some of these companies or at least bring in some kind of rules around intellectual property so that people own what they put out there or something.

00:31:41.660 Maybe it'll take decades.

00:31:42.940 But I still want to remain optimistic on that, Ezra.

00:31:46.700 I want to talk a little bit because, you know, you've had experiences in the mainstream media.

00:31:50.340 You worked for the National Post.

00:31:52.320 You had a show on Sun News Network that became, you know, the most popular conservative show in the country.

00:31:58.200 And then you kind of shifted towards independent media.

00:32:01.340 So first, let's talk a little bit about mainstream media and what it's like to work inside that environment.

00:32:07.240 So why don't you tell us a little bit about the National Post in the early days and what that was like?

00:32:11.520 Sure.

00:32:11.800 I mean, I started writing for newspapers when I was in college.

00:32:14.560 I was just such a frequent letter writer.

00:32:17.500 I really enjoyed writing short letters, especially if I could sneak in a joke.

00:32:21.460 And so one day the Calgary Sun editor said, you're writing so many letters.

00:32:25.180 Why don't we just give you a column and we'll pay you 50?

00:32:28.360 I think I wrote for free for months.

00:32:29.940 And then he gave me a raise to 50 bucks a column, which was a lot of money for me back then.

00:32:34.820 And by the time I was done law school, I had a little bit of a syndicate, Calgary, Edmonton.

00:32:39.800 I was writing for a newspaper in New Brunswick called The Daily Gleaner.

00:32:43.360 So I had this sort of fun.

00:32:45.120 I mean, I did dabble in student journalism, but it was more fun to write in the Edmonton Sun.

00:32:49.840 When I was going to law school at the University of Alberta, if I could fire back at my professors in the pages of the Edmonton Sun,

00:32:55.700 it felt like an equalizer in terms of power because I was a student at their mercy.

00:33:00.720 So I was always dabbling in that.

00:33:03.680 And when the National Post was born in 1998, I joined them soon after that.

00:33:10.820 It was wonderful being on the ground floor of an explicitly conservative newspaper that was so mainstream because it was owned by the biggest newspaper tycoon in the country,

00:33:19.840 Conrad Black, and that had a healthy budget.

00:33:23.360 And this was 98, 99, 2000, before the Internet came in and killed everything in the media.

00:33:27.800 So it was really the glory days.

00:33:30.520 And to be in to help set the ideological direction of the paper was wonderful.

00:33:35.040 And back then, because Conrad Black and the paper was so big, the Internet was not as big by comparison.

00:33:41.180 He was the mainstream.

00:33:43.060 So you can't de-platform the guy who has the biggest platform.

00:33:46.620 So it was great.

00:33:47.380 And over time, I went on and did other things.

00:33:53.840 But I switched to TV when Corey Tonight gave me a call and said,

00:33:59.220 we're starting at the Sun News Network with Quebeco, and you've got to come out to Toronto and be part of that.

00:34:05.160 And even though they're owned by a Quebec-based tycoon, they're going to be pro-conservative and pro-Western.

00:34:11.900 And that's the funny thing.

00:34:12.940 Quebeco, as the name implies, is very much Quebec-centric.

00:34:15.660 But they built an English-language cable news show that was pro-Western.

00:34:23.000 I mean, it was just very unusual.

00:34:25.360 And I think Pierre-Carl Pella, though, sunk $50 million or more into that.

00:34:29.940 But at the end of the day, the CRTC regulators euthanized it.

00:34:35.440 And Stephen Harper lacked the political...

00:34:39.780 Courage?

00:34:40.860 Well, I was going to say courage.

00:34:42.020 I was going to say ruthlessness to say to the CRTC, you approve this or you're out of a job.

00:34:46.400 Do you think Jean-Claude Chen would have allowed some bureaucratic agency to kill off a left-of-center media company?

00:34:53.200 He would personally have made the phone call himself.

00:34:56.920 Stephen Harper allowed the CRTC to kill the Sun News Network by not telling cable companies, you've got to run this.

00:35:06.420 I mean, in the names of, oh, I'm libertarian, I'm hands-off.

00:35:09.260 Well, you let someone else take those things.

00:35:10.920 The guys you left it up to were not libertarian and hands-off.

00:35:14.180 You let the incumbent legacy liberals kill off this conservative project by keeping your hands off Stephen Harper.

00:35:22.460 You didn't keep it neutral.

00:35:23.780 You gave it to your enemies.

00:35:25.380 So they euthanized the Sun News Network on the eve of the 2015 election.

00:35:30.540 I'm not saying it would have stopped Trudeau, but if you would have had a big, healthy, national, mainstream TV channel just blaring away 24-7,

00:35:39.400 you would have changed the media landscape the same way Fox News changed it in America.

00:35:42.880 But they didn't.

00:35:45.580 And when the Sun News Network shut down in February 2015, I was very sad.

00:35:49.920 It was the best job of my life.

00:35:51.800 It was so wonderful.

00:35:53.780 But I could sense that day was coming.

00:35:56.760 And so when we went in to pick up our severance checks, I said, you, you, you, you, you, come to my place and let's see if we can cook something up on YouTube.

00:36:05.080 And we spent a day in my living room and we hatched a plan.

00:36:09.960 And we just, okay, let's find a camera.

00:36:11.980 Does anyone have a camera?

00:36:13.320 Let's find a microphone.

00:36:14.460 Anyone have a microphone?

00:36:15.960 Okay.

00:36:16.280 How do we upload to YouTube?

00:36:17.460 Okay.

00:36:17.680 We figured that out.

00:36:18.680 So we did it the first day.

00:36:21.860 Okay.

00:36:22.700 Can we do it the next day?

00:36:23.720 Okay.

00:36:24.400 And we did it 10 days in a row.

00:36:26.040 And we put up about 50 videos in 10 days.

00:36:28.640 And we took a breath and we wrote to all our people because we had some email addresses and said, all right, the Sun News Network died.

00:36:36.360 If you want us to live, help out now.

00:36:38.700 And I'm not sure if I ever disclosed the figure, but that first email raised $85,000.

00:36:43.300 And when that came in, I said, okay, maybe we're going to be okay.

00:36:47.400 Because I had eight people.

00:36:48.780 I was paying them for my own severance.

00:36:50.540 I said, I'll pay you out of my severance until we get it going.

00:36:52.480 And by the way, the liberal media couldn't believe that we raised $85,000 that way.

00:36:58.040 They said, no, you must have some secret billionaire donor.

00:37:02.040 Because they couldn't believe that grassroots media could make it because I don't think they believe they could make it without some big benefactor, the CBC or a billionaire or Trudeau's bailout.

00:37:15.920 And we never looked back.

00:37:17.160 So here we are.

00:37:18.100 We're about five and a half years old.

00:37:20.360 And, you know, our staff grows and shrinks.

00:37:22.580 We're about 24 people now.

00:37:26.180 We've built some real stars.

00:37:27.960 Some have gone on to other networks.

00:37:30.320 Some stars have sort of exploded.

00:37:33.460 But others have gone on to become real shooting stars.

00:37:36.960 But most importantly, I think we've filled part of a void.

00:37:40.340 Our motto, we've had different mottos, but our motto right now is telling the other side of the story.

00:37:44.080 And the reason we chose that motto is to remind the world that it's okay to have another side of the story besides the government line, and it's okay to tell the other side of the story.

00:37:57.860 And that used to be a thing.

00:37:59.860 And it's not a bad thing.

00:38:01.400 Maybe you can't do that if you're on the government take, which so much of the media is these days.

00:38:06.980 If I'm not mistaken, the CBC itself has more resources and more staff in the news side than all the private sector journalists in the country combined.

00:38:18.600 That is not healthy.

00:38:19.660 And then most of the private sector journalists are now colonized by Trudeau's newspaper bailout.

00:38:26.960 And those on TV and radio are still at the whim of the CRTC.

00:38:31.280 And if you get too rambunctious, the CRTC will shut you down.

00:38:34.500 They threatened to do that to Schwa FM about 20 years ago.

00:38:37.820 So being on the Internet is really the only place to be free.

00:38:41.920 You've still got to fight with the Facebooks and the Twitters.

00:38:44.080 And don't think for a second they're not susceptible to political pressure.

00:38:47.660 But here we are five and a half years later.

00:38:50.860 We have 1.35 million YouTube subscribers.

00:38:55.120 Now I wish we got a buck a month for those.

00:38:56.980 It's free.

00:38:57.540 But people watch us.

00:39:01.420 We have viewers around the world also.

00:39:03.060 That's another fun thing is that the Sun News Network was just in Canada.

00:39:06.080 I mentioned Tommy Robinson.

00:39:07.220 We were active there.

00:39:08.120 We have American followers.

00:39:09.160 We have Australian followers.

00:39:10.580 Sometimes we travel around the world.

00:39:12.360 So we're still alive.

00:39:14.360 It's very much citizen journalism.

00:39:15.920 I think the only person in our whole shop with a journalism degree is David Menzies.

00:39:20.360 And he's very man on the street anyways.

00:39:22.740 And we make our share of mistakes.

00:39:25.260 But I'm very proud of what we've built.

00:39:28.980 And when you have to make your money 20 bucks at a time through grassroots donations,

00:39:35.600 it forces you to be extremely attentive to what viewers like and don't like.

00:39:40.560 And sometimes we get it wrong and we hear immediately.

00:39:44.140 Yeah, you get that immediate feedback, which you don't usually get in the newspaper or on the radio

00:39:47.860 because you see the comments and they sort of direct you and you see the view count and all that kind of stuff.

00:39:52.240 Right.

00:39:52.820 And if you work for the CBC or, frankly, any government bailed out media,

00:39:57.640 you actually don't even care what the public says.

00:39:59.500 You're playing to one viewer, Justin Trudeau.

00:40:02.180 If you please, Justin Trudeau, you'll be fine.

00:40:05.940 We have thousands of grassroots supporters, none of whom, even our biggest donor,

00:40:12.080 is maybe 1% or 2% of our total revenue.

00:40:16.180 So although I'm very attentive to if someone says here's 1,000 bucks, I have a point of view.

00:40:19.960 But there's no one who gives us so much money that I feel like I am bound to him or to her.

00:40:26.840 And that's the great freedom, is if you can look at any donor and say,

00:40:32.520 I really appreciate your point of view, but we're not going to change our ideology or philosophy to get your $1,000,

00:40:39.740 from that comes a great freedom and independence.

00:40:42.320 And that's actually why people give to us.

00:40:45.340 Well, you develop respect that way.

00:40:47.200 Like, you know, for me, I love your journalism, Ezra.

00:40:49.720 I probably disagree with about a quarter of what you say.

00:40:52.120 Fair enough.

00:40:52.600 But that is more likely to make me want to tune in and see you.

00:40:55.720 And we get the same thing at True North where someone will say,

00:40:58.700 Candace, I hate what you have to say about supply management.

00:41:01.460 You know, I'm part of the dairy business and I disagree with you.

00:41:04.700 But I really appreciate these other five things that you do and I respect you for that.

00:41:07.780 And, you know, that's normal and healthy in a society.

00:41:10.540 And so I feel like the sort of independent citizenship journalism is much more closely to what the service of journalism ought to be.

00:41:18.240 Yeah, and people sometimes say, Ezra, you're always crowdfunding.

00:41:21.460 I have two answers to that.

00:41:22.360 The first is, well, then don't chip in if you don't want to.

00:41:24.580 I mean, every time we send out a crowdfunding appeal, 99% of people don't give.

00:41:29.900 And that's okay because the 1% who does at any moment is enough to keep us going.

00:41:34.240 The second is, I think it's the most honest way to live.

00:41:38.080 I mean, like I say, YouTube has practically demonetized us so we can't really sell ads.

00:41:42.520 So what's the alternative?

00:41:43.500 Have a corporate benefactor?

00:41:45.140 Okay, that's fine as long as you follow that corporation's interest.

00:41:48.680 Have a government benefactor?

00:41:50.260 Well, then you're not a journalist at all.

00:41:51.680 So sometimes people say, oh, you're always crowdfunding.

00:41:54.600 Yeah?

00:41:55.280 Let me know if you have a better way to do it.

00:41:56.800 If I was a billionaire, I'd put my own money in the lid.

00:41:59.180 Right, and it's at least transparent because people know that that's how you make your money.

00:42:03.360 It's not like, you know, sometimes you see a journalism outlet and you realize that they're funded by, like, the government of Qatar or something like that.

00:42:09.340 And you're like, okay, well, that should be disclosed right up at the front.

00:42:13.220 And I think it's really kind of interesting how back then, you know, with the National Post and Sun News, there was a mainstream conservative voice in the media because that's basically been absence.

00:42:23.080 I write for the Toronto Sun, and even the Toronto Sun sort of teeters.

00:42:26.520 Yes, sometimes they're really good editorially and firmly conservative, but other times they sort of go with the trends.

00:42:32.000 And I think that there is a lot of pressure on them.

00:42:34.180 Same with the radio stations.

00:42:35.560 The radio hosts just sort of see the writing on the wall, and they don't want to be the next ones canceled.

00:42:39.540 So they just – it's not that there's any active censorship, but it's just, like, a self-censorship that happens.

00:42:45.300 And it has such an influence.

00:42:47.220 Like, if half of the journalists in Ottawa work for the CBC, that's going to impact the questions that are going to go to the politicians.

00:42:53.960 And that's going to influence the way that the stories are written.

00:42:56.260 And it's all so, you know, biased against any kind of conservative opinion.

00:43:01.720 It's just interesting to think that there was a time where those voices were legitimate and that there were conservatives in the mainstream.

00:43:07.820 And if you're one of the 50 percent or 40 percent of journalists who don't work for the CBC, you're thinking, yikes, if I get laid off, the CBC is the only safe bet.

00:43:15.940 I better start to, you know, tailor my reporting so I'm a good fit as a CBC guy.

00:43:21.060 So it does impact the non-government sector.

00:43:25.060 And, you know, post-media, they're taking $140,000 per week from Trudeau.

00:43:29.880 Don't tell me that's not subconsciously not on their mind.

00:43:33.800 You can't be.

00:43:34.680 If I knew someone was giving me – let me just make a different number – $14,000 a month, don't tell me I could separate that in my mind if there was a story to attack them.

00:43:45.520 About them, yeah.

00:43:46.200 I'll be very candid.

00:43:47.000 When I worked for Quebecor, there were two things I wouldn't do.

00:43:50.480 No one told me this.

00:43:51.440 I'm just not dumb.

00:43:52.600 Don't take on Pierre-Carl Paladeau and his dream of having the Nordiques in Quebec City.

00:43:56.500 Just don't.

00:43:57.700 And how about lay off Brian Mulroney, the chairman of the company?

00:44:00.840 And you know what?

00:44:01.380 There's 10,000 things to talk about.

00:44:03.200 I don't regard that as self-censorship.

00:44:05.000 That's just, okay, those guys run the company.

00:44:07.160 Maybe I'm not going to shoot at my boss.

00:44:08.660 And I don't feel like I was in any way censored.

00:44:11.020 I felt like I was the freest journalist in Canada.

00:44:13.260 But you'd have to be insane to go after literally your boss.

00:44:16.560 So I didn't.

00:44:17.020 But don't tell me that if you're working for Post Media, that's not in the back of your

00:44:22.080 mind when the heritage minister is in the news and the heritage minister is the one cutting

00:44:26.840 the check.

00:44:27.600 And like I say, when I don't even know who's donating on any given day, that's not on my

00:44:32.860 mind at all.

00:44:33.360 All that's on my mind is am I staying true to what I think is right here, my own conscience?

00:44:38.840 Am I being fair enough?

00:44:39.980 And I sometimes sort of think, well, who is the average rebel viewer?

00:44:44.760 Am I doing what they want?

00:44:46.560 That's a far better math than, uh-oh, will my company's lobbyists not get a meeting with

00:44:52.180 the heritage minister now because I was mean to them?

00:44:54.540 And don't think that politicians aren't petty that way.

00:44:57.200 They're extremely petty that way.

00:44:59.440 Yeah, I wonder if that was, I always wondered if that was part of the reason why Sun News

00:45:02.700 didn't get their license because you guys were too harsh on James Moore, who was the

00:45:07.220 heritage minister, who might have fallen on his desk.

00:45:09.840 But I won't speculate, but you're absolutely right that politicians having that kind of

00:45:14.260 power over journalists is just wrong.

00:45:17.280 And so I think that the independent media is the way to go.

00:45:20.140 I think it's the way of the future.

00:45:21.140 And if you look at the Canadian media landscape, you had Justin Trudeau bribing the CBC in his

00:45:25.920 first election with $150 million.

00:45:28.040 That money went towards creating a digital platform for CBC to compete with newspapers because

00:45:33.380 at that point newspapers were all coming online and that was how they were getting their

00:45:36.580 money.

00:45:37.160 So then all of a sudden, Trudeau made it so that the newspapers weren't profitable enough.

00:45:41.320 Then he had to bail them out.

00:45:42.280 And it's just like bailout after bailout after bailout.

00:45:44.480 I can't see it actually fixing the problem that there aren't enough subscribers to these

00:45:49.820 media outlets.

00:45:50.700 And I think that inevitably the model that you found, and you were one of the first ones

00:45:55.800 to go onto YouTube and to build this big kind of grassroots audience.

00:46:00.100 And it's been amazing to watch.

00:46:01.840 Now, if you don't mind, I kind of want to go into the history of The Rebel a little bit

00:46:05.720 and talk about, because, you know, you were this big rising star and you had this huge

00:46:09.000 platform.

00:46:10.000 You had these really, really talented journalists that were famous all around the world.

00:46:14.720 And then sort of, I don't want to say it blew up, but there was a moment where Faith Goldie

00:46:19.420 was down at the Charlottesville rally.

00:46:21.120 And it was sort of the height of the moral panic around our Trump supporters, Nazis.

00:46:25.220 And we've got these people who were acting kind of like Nazis in Charlottesville.

00:46:29.060 And Faith was there and she was sort of being too friendly with them.

00:46:32.120 She went on one of the podcasts with the Daily Storm, I believe.

00:46:36.360 Why don't you just tell us a little bit, as much as you're comfortable, you're talking

00:46:39.440 about what it was like on that side when that all blew up.

00:46:42.380 2016 was an amazing year.

00:46:44.540 It was the year of Trump.

00:46:46.600 It was the year of dissident, independent.

00:46:49.240 It was the year of the rebel.

00:46:50.540 We just blew up so huge that year.

00:46:52.600 And some of our stars were Lauren Southern, Faith Goldie.

00:46:56.540 I don't think Tommy Robinson was with us yet.

00:46:58.520 I can't remember.

00:46:59.240 I'd have to check.

00:47:01.360 You even had Claire Lamont who went on to start.

00:47:03.920 Oh, that's right.

00:47:04.500 She was doing videos.

00:47:05.580 You guys had a lot of talent all over the world.

00:47:07.480 Yeah.

00:47:07.860 And I think we were growing pretty quick.

00:47:10.960 Then Trump won and we grew even bigger.

00:47:13.260 And then we sent people down to the inauguration in January.

00:47:17.480 We grew even bigger.

00:47:18.220 So after the election, we continued to grow.

00:47:20.260 Like we were growing 8% per month.

00:47:23.800 And then in February, the tap was turned off.

00:47:28.000 We said, what's going on?

00:47:28.680 Our income just fell by 85%.

00:47:30.240 What's going on here?

00:47:31.420 And that was the great demonetization.

00:47:33.300 That was the panic in all these social media companies that said, uh-oh, YouTube, Twitter,

00:47:38.140 Facebook created Trump.

00:47:39.460 We have to ensure this never happens again.

00:47:41.180 That's not even controversial.

00:47:42.440 That's pretty much documented what happened.

00:47:44.100 So we had a financial blow then, but we thought, okay, let's just keep going through.

00:47:48.080 Let's keep trying to grow.

00:47:51.640 And some of our staff got a little hot.

00:47:53.420 I mean, when you go from, when you're 21 or 25 and you go from being a normal person to being an internet celebrity,

00:48:01.740 when you have a video that gets one or two million views and 10,000 comments,

00:48:06.380 and I think my observation is that sometimes women are more susceptible to love or hate comments on the internet.

00:48:14.440 I mean, it hurts my feelings a little bit too, but sometimes women have the most nasty comments put to them on social media

00:48:21.880 or the most flattering.

00:48:24.080 And if you're a regular human being and suddenly you become an internet celebrity

00:48:28.280 and you have 10,000 people a day talking about you,

00:48:31.700 you can become a little bit obsessed with getting that hit, getting that fix.

00:48:36.160 And I think that happened to a couple of our people.

00:48:38.120 I have a memo I circulated in the office called Twitter Killed the Video Star.

00:48:45.140 It's about how Twitter can seduce you and you can start to live for the clicks.

00:48:49.020 I think Twitter is responsible for the loss of more of our staff than anyone else.

00:48:53.360 Anyways.

00:48:54.280 The funny thing about Twitter is that there isn't really an upside.

00:48:56.960 It's fun and it's a good way to learn stuff.

00:48:58.940 But if you, say you have a scoop and you put it on Twitter, you know,

00:49:02.380 you don't really drive anyone to your story.

00:49:04.400 You kind of give it away for free.

00:49:05.780 It's a vanity.

00:49:05.940 It's all about vanity.

00:49:07.000 I mean, I know the adrenaline rush of getting 10,000 people to like something.

00:49:11.880 Anyways, you ask about faith.

00:49:13.280 So, yeah, I remember that weekend.

00:49:14.880 It was August.

00:49:16.220 And she had said, Ezra, there's this Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

00:49:19.360 I want to go on my own dime.

00:49:20.780 I'd never heard of this, so I Googled it.

00:49:22.600 And I looked at the lineup of speakers and I said, I remember I wrote her,

00:49:26.160 I still have the email I wrote to her.

00:49:27.340 I said, oh, you know what?

00:49:28.920 I don't like the looks of some of those speakers.

00:49:30.280 They're a little bit out there.

00:49:32.140 And, you know, alt-right, alt-light, what do these words even mean?

00:49:35.600 And I said to her, you know what?

00:49:36.820 Don't even go as a reporter because you simply being there, even if all you're doing is pointing

00:49:41.840 a camera, people will think you're part of it.

00:49:43.760 Just don't go.

00:49:45.920 And I forgot about it because, you know, this was before Charlottesville was a thing.

00:49:49.720 And then I actually went away that weekend with my family and I get this panic call on the

00:49:55.900 cell phone, Ezra, I just filmed a murder.

00:50:00.760 That was when the car rammed a protester.

00:50:03.360 I said, Faith, where are you?

00:50:04.440 What are you doing?

00:50:05.000 I had totally forgotten about this Unite the Right thing that she had asked me about a few

00:50:09.360 weeks earlier.

00:50:10.000 I didn't even know where she, I told her not to go, so I was surprised.

00:50:12.720 I didn't know you were somewhere.

00:50:13.520 But she captured the murder on camera.

00:50:16.860 And so, weirdly, I spent the next six hours negotiating with different news agencies around

00:50:21.680 the world who wanted to buy that footage.

00:50:23.320 So I didn't understand where she was, what had happened, because I didn't remember this

00:50:29.060 email exchange we had had weeks earlier.

00:50:31.180 So I wasted half a day on that little, well, everyone's stealing our footage thing.

00:50:36.940 I get back to the office the next day and I say, oh, this is what happened.

00:50:40.740 And I talked to her and I said, well, I didn't want you down there, and that's not good.

00:50:45.300 But if all you were doing was just pointing the camera and talking, that's not really

00:50:48.880 marching in the protest.

00:50:50.760 And people said, you got a fire, it's terrible, she's all right.

00:50:53.200 I said, well, she went to an event as a journalist.

00:50:56.980 Now, I hadn't watched all her live stream, it was hours of her footage, so I hadn't watched

00:51:00.880 it all.

00:51:02.860 So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday goes by, and I'm fighting, I'm saying, I'm not firing her

00:51:06.920 because she went there.

00:51:08.080 You don't fire a journalist because she goes to something.

00:51:10.160 That's when you politically correct, I was done.

00:51:12.360 I was taking on a lot of water, but I mean, I believe in some loyalty, even, I hadn't

00:51:18.960 really pieced it all together what this thing was.

00:51:21.820 And then Faith comes to me, I think it was on a Thursday or something, and she shows me

00:51:26.580 her phone, she says, Ezra, look at this.

00:51:28.500 So I look at it, and it's an email from a reporter saying, Faith, was that you on the

00:51:34.800 Daily Stormer Nazi podcast?

00:51:36.900 I'm doing this story, get back to me.

00:51:39.300 What?

00:51:41.120 And she says, and I could understand it, so apparently when she was down there, she wasn't

00:51:47.820 just a reporter.

00:51:49.140 She had kept hidden from me that she was participating in at least this one explicitly racist, I would

00:51:58.880 even say neo-Nazis, if it's called the Daily Stormer, that's a reference to Hitler's

00:52:04.000 Der Sturmer.

00:52:05.140 That was a Nazi publication.

00:52:07.740 So she had kept that secret, foolishly thinking that you're going on a public podcast?

00:52:14.280 You don't think that's going to be public?

00:52:15.980 That's the public part of it.

00:52:16.980 So she said, I know I have to resign.

00:52:19.720 I said, no, you're not resigning, I'm firing you.

00:52:22.540 Of course I'm firing her.

00:52:24.000 Not just that she lied to me, you don't go on a Nazi podcast.

00:52:26.860 I said, get your stuff, we're going to go to the boardroom, you're going to say goodbye

00:52:29.680 and you're out of here.

00:52:30.960 And so we did.

00:52:31.660 And I was stunned.

00:52:32.420 And of all our staff, in some ways I knew her the best.

00:52:37.220 I had known her many years from Sundays.

00:52:40.240 I had gone to Israel with her, the Jewish state, and she was so Zionist, she out-Zionist

00:52:47.800 the Jews.

00:52:48.380 I remember that actually because I had a personal trainer who was from Israel and she knew Faith

00:52:52.740 and this was in California and Faith was very well known amongst Israeli dedicated Jews

00:52:58.680 that were very pro-Israel.

00:52:59.920 Faith went to Israel and she was so turbo-Zionist.

00:53:02.940 She became this internet star, this beautiful, bold Canadian girl who was more pro-Israel

00:53:09.480 than the Israelis.

00:53:10.640 Literally millions of views in Israel.

00:53:12.900 It was incredible.

00:53:14.120 I had, you know, I don't hang out a lot with the staff.

00:53:17.640 The boss doesn't want to say, hey, staff, hang out with me because they feel an obligation.

00:53:21.500 But I would actually hang out with Faith a little bit.

00:53:23.940 My family, met her family in Florida once.

00:53:27.140 She had come on some rebel cruises and stuff.

00:53:29.920 So I felt like I knew her and in many ways she was the perfect employee.

00:53:34.100 And I thought she was a Jew lover, if anything.

00:53:36.420 Like I didn't talk to her a lot about Jews, but by God, she was a Zionist in Israel.

00:53:40.380 But I mean, it wasn't a big focus.

00:53:42.500 And I mean, she used some of the lingo of the alt-right, but I thought she was doing so

00:53:45.880 as a joker, ironically.

00:53:46.940 And then for her to go down there, contrary to my direction, secretly go on this show and

00:53:54.200 think it would be kept a secret, was stunning.

00:53:58.040 I fired her within 60 seconds of learning that.

00:54:02.460 And I, by the way, that night I had dinner scheduled with Jordan Peterson, just by coincidence.

00:54:08.240 I was so frustrated.

00:54:09.580 Anyway, I thought I'm going to go to dinner with him anyways.

00:54:11.160 Yeah, well, it's interesting because I've heard Jordan talk about Faith.

00:54:14.480 And I've known Faith and worked with her, and she was always a very nice person.

00:54:19.020 She was very conservative.

00:54:20.400 And that's the problem is that because she used to be a conservative activist and then

00:54:24.400 she kind of went down the rabbit hole, you know, it was always used against any conservative

00:54:28.520 who knew her, who interacted with her.

00:54:30.120 Jordan Peterson once, I watched a video where he talked about how Faith was kind of just

00:54:34.340 an agreeable person.

00:54:35.240 So when she's in Israel, she's like, yeah, this is great.

00:54:38.120 I love Jews.

00:54:38.780 I'm standing up for these people and they're my people.

00:54:41.340 But then when she was down in Charlottesville, she felt that same comfort and camaraderie,

00:54:46.100 but they were with people that she shouldn't have even been around with.

00:54:48.360 Now, I don't know.

00:54:48.800 You just told my story.

00:54:49.780 I was going to tell that story because I asked Jordan Peterson that night.

00:54:53.000 Like, I was so upset by what had happened.

00:54:54.800 And I told him.

00:54:55.920 And he used his psychological, I mean, he didn't diagnose, but he said she's very agreeable.

00:54:59.680 He used that word.

00:55:00.260 And the same things that made her such a great staffer because she knew exactly how to be

00:55:05.660 a great rebel.

00:55:06.640 She knew how to please the boss.

00:55:08.040 In Israel, she knew, she grokked the situation.

00:55:10.820 Okay, let me size it up.

00:55:11.860 I can be the best of this.

00:55:13.120 You send her to Charlottetown, surround her 48, 72 hours with these bad guys.

00:55:18.640 She'll figure it out, game the system, say, oh, I can be their super Aryan girl.

00:55:23.620 And like Zelig, I don't know if you know that old Woody Allen movie, a guy who would,

00:55:27.620 like a chameleon, literally become whoever he's with.

00:55:31.000 And that's why it was so shocking because the person I thought was the perfect employee,

00:55:34.880 well, that's because she was mirroring me back to me.

00:55:38.440 And exactly, and Peterson put his finger on it.

00:55:41.040 Because faith is so agreeable, she actually allowed herself to be transformed in that I

00:55:48.020 was stunned by him.

00:55:49.460 And I was deeply sad by him because I felt like I didn't know.

00:55:53.600 I felt like I knew her better than I knew any of my staff.

00:55:55.960 I was completely stunned by him.

00:55:58.760 And that did damage to our brand because, you know, our star, beautiful, bold, courageous,

00:56:06.900 funny, audacious.

00:56:07.840 And she knew everyone because, like, I first met her when I was working for Jason Kenney

00:56:12.460 and she back then was like a big conservative Catholic and she loved Jason Kenney.

00:56:15.820 With Jason, she'll be a conservative Catholic, yeah.

00:56:17.860 So that's sort of what we thought, that's what I thought she was.

00:56:21.140 And then, you know, the fact that she had taken photos and done videos with all these

00:56:24.420 different conservatives over the years started being used against people because the mainstream

00:56:28.520 media just clung to it as a way to, you know.

00:56:31.700 She was the greatest gift to the anti-right.

00:56:33.900 And I should tell you, maybe I shouldn't, but I will, a month after I sacked her, because

00:56:41.360 I had a friendly affection with her, I called her up.

00:56:44.200 I said, look, I'm not mad at you because you defied me and went down.

00:56:51.340 I'm not mad at you because you're politically incorrect.

00:56:54.200 I'm mad at you because you went on a Nazi show and said Nazi things.

00:56:58.440 And you may think you're a martyr for free speech and censorship.

00:57:02.540 That's not why you're fired.

00:57:03.600 You did Nazi things.

00:57:05.140 And she said, oh, well, on the street people are on my list.

00:57:07.720 No, because they don't know what you said and did.

00:57:09.260 I actually went and I listened to that part.

00:57:10.720 It was shocking.

00:57:11.560 Yeah, that's what I did.

00:57:12.560 And I said, you don't know this, but you've got a stinger in you.

00:57:16.060 I said, come on the show and we're going to pull that stinger out of you together.

00:57:20.060 And I'm not asking you to say you're suddenly for open borders or you're a liberal.

00:57:27.440 I'm not saying that.

00:57:28.440 You've got to take out that bizarre mania that you expressed for that one weekend.

00:57:33.940 We've got to pull it out together and it might hurt a little bit, but we'll hug it out.

00:57:37.720 And you've got to correct that because you don't even know that stinger is still in you.

00:57:43.860 I said, we'll hug it out.

00:57:45.580 We've got to pull it out together.

00:57:47.200 You're going to have to explain.

00:57:49.480 We're going to talk about why it was wrong.

00:57:52.140 And to my, I thought she would come back.

00:57:54.620 To my shock, she went harder than ever.

00:57:57.420 Never, never.

00:57:58.280 I will not bend the knee.

00:58:00.120 What?

00:58:00.820 Who is it?

00:58:01.520 And that was the last time we spoke.

00:58:04.880 We had some text messages and I, and I, my last words to her were, if someone truly loved you, they would take away your cell phone.

00:58:12.060 Because it's that social media hit.

00:58:15.460 Oh, I can be more and more outrageous and get more and more feedback from anonymous people who may even be robots or whatever, but it sure makes me feel good.

00:58:25.140 And what a terrible loss to the conservative movement, to the country.

00:58:30.380 She could have been anything.

00:58:32.360 But she went, she fell down that rabbit hole.

00:58:36.280 And having a chance to come back, she refused it.

00:58:38.980 And it makes me a little bit sad, but Sora's being replaced by anger because of what she's done to herself and to those around her.

00:58:47.060 Now, did it damage the rebel?

00:58:49.200 It damaged rebel news in the eyes of the fancy pants who forever used that as a talking point.

00:58:55.100 But it's a fact that when I found out what she had done, I fired her within a minute.

00:59:00.660 And we marched her out shortly thereafter.

00:59:04.100 We acted as soon as we had the information.

00:59:07.240 It's still embarrassing.

00:59:11.800 And people would use that talking point, and we had a few other people who used that as an excuse to kick us or punch us when we were down.

00:59:20.720 But I want to make a clear distinction between what I call the 30 mean girls of the Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal media clique and the severely normal people we were talking about earlier.

00:59:32.680 Because when people saw we were in trouble in the media and the newspapers were going crazy and the CBC was going crazy, Wendy Mesley called us racist.

00:59:41.420 How ironic is that?

00:59:42.560 Wendy Mesley, who was dropping the N-word like confetti around CBC, she called us racist.

00:59:48.380 Yeah, Wendy.

00:59:49.180 So people said, oh, my God, we're going to lose Rebel News.

00:59:53.700 We've already lost Sun News.

00:59:55.620 We're going to lose Rebel News.

00:59:58.180 And I said to folks, I sent out an email.

01:00:00.460 I did a video.

01:00:00.840 I said, folks, we're having a choppy water.

01:00:02.900 Here's my plan to get things back on track.

01:00:04.740 Hire a managing editor.

01:00:06.100 Make sure to keep an eye on staff.

01:00:07.600 We're going to do this.

01:00:08.240 We're going to do that.

01:00:08.980 I probably dropped the ball because we were growing so fast.

01:00:12.100 I wasn't watching things close enough.

01:00:13.740 I don't think there was any way to stop Faith from doing what she did.

01:00:16.840 I mean, she was our senior reporter.

01:00:18.080 How would I have known what she was doing?

01:00:19.640 There was no way to stop that.

01:00:21.640 But I sent out this call to our viewers.

01:00:23.200 I said, guys, I think we got off course.

01:00:25.220 We fired Faith.

01:00:26.100 We're hiring a managing director.

01:00:27.260 We're going to do this, this, this.

01:00:28.720 And you know what?

01:00:29.700 That month, August 2017, which was the most embarrassing month by legacy media standards,

01:00:36.540 all the fancy people said, we hate you.

01:00:39.560 It was actually the most successful month for Rebel News in 2017 because our people said,

01:00:44.860 Ezra, we know you're not anti-Semitic.

01:00:47.080 You're a Jew, we think.

01:00:49.700 We know you're not.

01:00:51.140 I mean, we've had such a variety of people come and go on the stage, people of every background,

01:00:56.720 every religion, Muslim supporters, visible minorities, whatever.

01:01:02.800 And people who watch us know who we are.

01:01:06.000 So they didn't believe the shrill shrieks from those who don't even watch us.

01:01:11.060 The opposite, they said, yikes, Ezra, we see what's happening.

01:01:13.380 We're going to be there for you.

01:01:14.360 We had more support in that crisis than in any other month that year.

01:01:20.420 Now, I don't like that.

01:01:21.760 I mean, you know, but it's a sign that, what would Nixon say?

01:01:27.060 He said, just because there's some chirping critters in the field doesn't mean they're

01:01:30.620 the only critters there.

01:01:31.400 There's a thousand cattle very quick.

01:01:33.080 He had a great metaphor about quiet cattle and noisy crickets or something.

01:01:37.240 My point is, don't mistake the 30 professional scolds, Rajme Barton, Wendy Mesley, someone

01:01:43.880 at the Toronto Star, someone at the Globe, Jesse Brown of Canada Land.

01:01:46.860 And don't mistake that for Canadian opinion, even opinion, it's not.

01:01:55.180 And I said that being a grassroots media publication allows me to track what people want and don't

01:02:01.840 want.

01:02:02.380 It also allows me to stay sane.

01:02:04.580 Because every day, it's not just Lauren Southern and Faith Goldie who get feedback online.

01:02:10.220 I do too.

01:02:10.800 Our average video is like a 98% like to dislike ratio.

01:02:18.500 I don't think I let that go to my head, but I use that as an antidote for if I'm reading

01:02:23.860 what the mean girls say about me.

01:02:26.600 Because I say, well, 98% of these 100,000 viewers seem to like it.

01:02:31.980 So sometimes you can get down and say, am I the only person who thinks this way?

01:02:36.040 Is everybody really condemning me?

01:02:37.780 Am I an anti-Semitic Jew?

01:02:39.440 But then you just, you're lucky because you actually know what real people say.

01:02:45.080 And I send, we send out many thousands of emails a week to our people and we get feedback.

01:02:50.460 People don't believe the BS.

01:02:52.860 They see us as an antidote to us.

01:02:54.780 And whenever we step in a pothole, which we do once in a while, our people aren't mad.

01:03:00.340 You know, they want us to do better because they don't want us to hurt ourselves.

01:03:02.900 But let me say this.

01:03:03.900 I talk too much about faith, but I wanted to tell you because we actually both know we're

01:03:06.960 together.

01:03:13.640 I think that if it weren't that, it would have been something else.

01:03:21.180 I want to give you an example.

01:03:22.600 Mitt Romney, the most perfect man by mainstream media standards.

01:03:29.380 Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

01:03:30.560 He paid more than his taxes were required.

01:03:36.880 Like that kind of guy.

01:03:37.640 Yeah.

01:03:37.920 And if you watch the Mitt, there's a documentary on Netflix called Mitt.

01:03:41.700 And it follows him during the campaign.

01:03:43.520 And it just paints this amazing picture of this remarkable man that's so committed to

01:03:47.000 his family, his faith, his community, his country.

01:03:49.340 Turn the other cheek.

01:03:50.060 You know, you watch that video.

01:03:51.400 You're like, why isn't this man present?

01:03:52.540 He seems so amazing.

01:03:53.780 Because they couldn't find a Charlottesville moment on him.

01:03:57.280 They couldn't find.

01:03:58.520 So they said, well, he put his dog on the roof of a car.

01:04:03.100 He had binders.

01:04:03.800 Remember, he said, well, I've got binders full of women.

01:04:05.880 Oh, you think women belong in a binder.

01:04:09.040 You, no, no, he was saying he's got binders full of names.

01:04:11.640 So he was saying he wanted to hire a lot of women and he had a lot of qualified women.

01:04:14.960 Yeah, I have got binders full of women.

01:04:16.580 No, women aren't in the binders.

01:04:18.400 It's just their names are in the binders.

01:04:19.860 So if, my point is, Mitt Romney is as close to a saint as you get.

01:04:26.120 But they could demonize him.

01:04:29.220 Preston Manning was gentle.

01:04:30.820 They demonized him.

01:04:32.320 Stockwell Day turned the other cheek.

01:04:33.720 They demonized him.

01:04:34.540 Part of the lessons of Trump is that they're going to demonize you no matter what.

01:04:39.280 You may as well punch back.

01:04:41.240 And my point about Faith Goldie is she gave our critics an easy shot.

01:04:47.120 This has been three years now.

01:04:48.580 I really don't hear about it.

01:04:50.280 Our millions of viewers, we've had more than half a billion views of our videos.

01:04:54.260 People know who we are because they know who we are.

01:04:56.880 But if it weren't Faith, it would have been Lauren Southern or it would have been Gavin McInnes or Tommy Robinson or me or Raheel Raza

01:05:03.680 or Sheila Gunn-Reed or David Menzies, they'll find something.

01:05:06.920 If they can find something about mild-mannered Mitt Romney to demonize, they'll find it about anyone.

01:05:14.260 And so you have to make a decision.

01:05:16.680 Are you going to lean into the wind or lean back?

01:05:21.020 And they'll get you no matter what.

01:05:23.680 It's like those red guards.

01:05:24.840 When the red guard comes for you, are you going to self-denounce?

01:05:29.740 Let me tell you how that ends.

01:05:31.180 You don't do any better by denouncing yourself than if you refuse to.

01:05:35.140 So why not live authentically and truly even if it's the last thing you do?

01:05:39.460 Because they're going to get you anyways.

01:05:41.000 And look, here we are.

01:05:42.060 We're coming up.

01:05:43.020 We'll be six years old next year.

01:05:45.200 We're five and a half years old.

01:05:47.640 In many ways, we're stronger than ever, bigger audience than ever in terms of YouTube subscriptions.

01:05:52.760 We may not share mistakes, but I don't think any of them are deeply moral errors.

01:05:59.640 Right.

01:06:00.080 And once the thing happened with Faith, then they started sifting through things.

01:06:03.180 And all of a sudden, they held Gavin McInnes up and said, look, he promotes violence.

01:06:07.220 You know, his videos, to me, were always sort of funny and satirical.

01:06:10.860 But they were sort of taking them literally.

01:06:12.500 And then, yeah, then it just turned into sort of a dialogue.

01:06:15.140 Comedy's being destroyed by the left.

01:06:16.680 You know, the dumbest old jokes.

01:06:17.920 I just flew in from Florida.

01:06:19.680 And boy, are my arms tired.

01:06:21.440 Or take my wife, please.

01:06:23.120 What?

01:06:23.580 He wants me to take his wife?

01:06:25.660 No, no.

01:06:25.980 It's a joke.

01:06:26.560 It's just a dumb joke.

01:06:27.800 You didn't fly in from Florida.

01:06:29.140 Your arms aren't tight.

01:06:29.720 I know.

01:06:30.020 It's a joke.

01:06:30.940 Gavin McInnes is a conservative version of Jon Stewart.

01:06:36.900 He's using humor.

01:06:38.040 Now, I think Gavin, over time, could have been a little bit more careful.

01:06:42.140 But he enjoyed twisting the knife a little bit.

01:06:46.660 Well, that's comedy.

01:06:47.840 That's comedy.

01:06:49.060 And it is kind of hard to know.

01:06:50.740 When you're doing an online publication, you don't have the normal standards.

01:06:54.360 So it is hard to know what the line is and where you can go too far.

01:06:57.640 I know a lot.

01:06:58.080 Gavin seems like the kind of guy who will seek out where the line is and then take one big step on the other side just to be provocative.

01:07:04.100 You know, he came with us to Israel, too.

01:07:07.280 And I have not laughed that much since I was a child.

01:07:11.400 He is so funny.

01:07:12.980 And he'll size you up.

01:07:14.560 And he'll spend a few minutes interrogating you.

01:07:16.240 And he'll find the thing you're most sensitive about.

01:07:18.860 And then he'll work on that until you either laugh or cry.

01:07:22.940 He's a unique guy.

01:07:23.980 One of many unique characters that we've had in The Rebel.

01:07:27.160 You know, I was talking to a unique friend of mine in the U.K. the other day, James Dellingpole, who's quite an eccentric.

01:07:32.820 And one of my favorite things about the United Kingdom that's vanishing is they used to love eccentrics.

01:07:38.620 They used to sort of be proud.

01:07:40.580 Oh, look at that eccentric.

01:07:41.620 Well, yeah, these are the eccentrics.

01:07:43.460 You know, the saying, reasonable people conform to the world.

01:07:47.440 Unreasonable people make the world conform to them.

01:07:50.280 So all progress depends on unreasonable people.

01:07:53.240 I like that.

01:07:54.580 And Britain especially has these quirky people.

01:07:56.940 Well, look at their prime minister.

01:07:58.160 He's quirky, yeah.

01:07:59.300 That's really funny.

01:08:00.100 I mean, so many Roger Scruton.

01:08:03.140 I can imagine what Isaac Newton was like.

01:08:05.560 I mean, that is a, George Orwell, all these people.

01:08:10.120 And you can say, no, no, no, I want everything homogenized.

01:08:13.240 I don't want anyone to take me out of my safe place.

01:08:15.500 Oh, he'll say something triggering.

01:08:17.620 Oh, I just don't like that.

01:08:19.240 You can live that way, but then don't go on the Internet because it's too scary a place.

01:08:23.440 One of the things I've loved at Rebel is the characters we've met.

01:08:27.680 Do they always work out well?

01:08:28.840 No.

01:08:30.720 I still like Gavin.

01:08:32.280 He's a little much.

01:08:34.200 Tommy Robinson, I visited the guy three times in prison.

01:08:37.000 That tells you something.

01:08:40.540 You know, Faith Goldie, I think she made a terrible moral mistake.

01:08:43.700 A moral mistake.

01:08:44.380 A shocking one.

01:08:46.140 Maybe it was a psychological mistake, as Peterson would say.

01:08:48.660 But do I regret for one second being interested in interesting people and sharing what's interesting

01:08:54.480 about them with our millions of people?

01:08:56.080 Not for a second.

01:08:57.220 And every week we try and be interesting and tell the other side of the story.

01:09:02.800 And there's something in human nature that wants to see that.

01:09:07.180 And it's not a dark part of human nature.

01:09:09.240 It's curiosity.

01:09:10.580 And it's maybe wanting to learn.

01:09:12.560 Or maybe there's something I didn't know before.

01:09:14.660 Or maybe my view is wrong in something.

01:09:16.960 Or let me at least hear what he has to say.

01:09:19.360 Or someone else is laughing.

01:09:20.740 What are they laughing at?

01:09:21.680 I don't apologize that we're not super boring.

01:09:25.320 And that, you know, we were talking before we turned the cameras on.

01:09:29.700 My chief criticism with the legacy media in this country is not that they're liberal.

01:09:33.660 Of course they're liberal.

01:09:34.940 They don't even know they're liberal.

01:09:36.460 It's the sameness.

01:09:37.900 It's the think-alikes.

01:09:38.940 I call it the media party because it's almost like they have a party discipline.

01:09:43.340 You're not allowed to read outside the party platform.

01:09:46.160 And that's what gets me.

01:09:47.860 They have the entire spectrum on their strategist panel.

01:09:51.240 They're lobbyists.

01:09:52.380 They're not even strategists.

01:09:53.720 The whole spectrum from A to B.

01:09:55.760 I mean, the National has their at-interest panel.

01:10:00.300 They've got Chantal Liberti, who was a Trudeau Foundation scholar.

01:10:04.460 They've got Althea Raj, Trudeau's official biographer.

01:10:09.580 They've got Andrew Coyne, who's a family relation to Trudeau.

01:10:13.340 And they've got Rosemary Barton, a plaintiff against the Conservative Party.

01:10:17.400 That's their spectrum of opinion.

01:10:19.860 Hey, guys, Ken is a sniff bigger than your little club.

01:10:24.840 And it's not—I mean, each of those people has a talent that I've just named.

01:10:28.740 I don't have an animosity—well, Rosemary Barton, I can't think of hers right now.

01:10:32.140 But you really have to be so sane.

01:10:36.640 Is vanilla the only flavor at your ice cream store?

01:10:41.920 It's sugar-free vanilla.

01:10:43.260 It's not even real vanilla.

01:10:45.120 Please let me—you know what?

01:10:46.280 We're a little bit of Tabasco here at Rebel News.

01:10:48.180 And you don't have to like the Tabasco.

01:10:50.100 But, you know, we don't all have to be vanilla.

01:10:55.440 Absolutely.

01:10:56.020 Ezra, I think it's so great to have a true diversity of opinions and thoughts.

01:10:59.560 And that's really what you at the Rebel are pushing forward.

01:11:01.740 So thank you so much for sitting down and doing this interview.

01:11:04.740 We've learned a lot about you.

01:11:06.160 And keep doing your things.

01:11:07.300 It's great to have the Rebel as part of the media landscape here in Canada.

01:11:10.500 Well, that's nice of you to say.

01:11:11.580 And you've been a friend to us even in the tough times.

01:11:13.980 So I appreciate that.

01:11:15.520 And it has been a great source of joy for me to watch True North grow into such a powerful and influential group.

01:11:22.380 And a well-respected group.

01:11:24.340 You and your teammates are outstanding.

01:11:27.520 I have a special affection for Andrew Lawton, as you know.

01:11:30.360 But you guys are doing important work.

01:11:32.240 So I really am so pleased to have other independent people.

01:11:36.240 And may you go from strength to strength.

01:11:38.220 Great.

01:11:38.600 Well, thank you so much, Ezra.

01:11:39.800 Right on.

01:11:40.140 Bye.

01:11:48.940 Thank you.

01:11:49.600 Bye.

01:11:50.060 Bye.

01:11:50.280 Bye.

01:11:51.300 Bye.

01:11:52.300 Bye.

01:11:52.880 Bye.

01:11:53.300 Bye.

01:11:54.940 Bye.

01:11:55.240 Bye.

01:11:56.320 Bye.

01:11:56.560 Bye.

01:11:57.320 Bye.

01:11:58.060 Bye.

01:11:58.280 Bye.

01:11:59.180 Bye.

01:11:59.340 Bye.

01:11:59.480 Bye.

01:12:00.240 Bye.

01:12:01.540 Bye.

01:12:02.300 Bye.

01:12:03.400 Bye.

01:12:04.360 Bye.

01:12:05.140 Bye.

01:12:05.840 Bye.

01:12:06.460 Bye.

01:12:07.640 Bye.

01:12:08.640 Bye.

Juno News - October 07, 2020

Ep. 15 ｜ Ezra Levant ｜ The most controversial man in Canadian media

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