Juno News - Fake News Friday Award Show

00:00:00.040 It's the season finale of Fake News Friday. We'll announce the biggest fake news narrative of the

00:00:05.140 year as chosen by you, the True North viewer. Plus, I'll be joined by a special guest who has

00:00:10.020 been criticizing what he calls the media party for years and years now. I'm Candice Malcolm,

00:00:15.680 and this is The Candice Malcolm Show. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into

00:00:24.320 the show. So as you recall, last week, we laid out what we thought were the top five

00:00:29.020 fake news narratives of the year. We went through each of them and, you know, follow True North,

00:00:34.400 you follow The Candice Malcolm Show, you know these narratives inside and out. Well, I'm excited

00:00:39.220 to announce the winner of the poll. It wasn't even close. The number one fake news narrative of the

00:00:45.240 year as chosen by you was the idea of moving goalposts when it comes to vaccines. They kept

00:00:51.440 telling us one thing. They kept saying, all we have to do is get fully vaccinated. We'll go back to

00:00:55.580 normal. All we have to do is X, Y, and Z, and it never came true. And so 44% of the vote,

00:01:01.280 that was the biggest fake news narrative chosen by you. Number two, there's a tie for second. The

00:01:07.600 first one was that unmarked grave story. And the second was the legacy media's outright defense

00:01:13.100 of Justin Trudeau throughout the federal election. And so thank you so much to everyone who voted on

00:01:19.100 that. And I am pleased to be joined by another person who is a well-known media critic in this

00:01:25.380 country. He's been doing it for a very long time. And of course, I'm talking about Ezra Levant,

00:01:29.740 Commander-in-Chief over at the Rebel News. Ezra, thanks so much for joining The Candice Malcolm

00:01:34.260 Show. Well, my great pleasure. Thanks for having me. Well, so here you have it. I think that the idea

00:01:41.660 that all we had to do was trust the health experts, all we had to do was trust Justin Trudeau,

00:01:47.980 and our life would go back to normal. That was a mistake. And so many people chose to get

00:01:52.000 vaccinated, Ezra, because they thought that it would just let them go back to normal. It would

00:01:55.940 end the lockdown. It would end the rules. It would end just all the restrictions that we've been living

00:02:02.220 with. And I think that we experienced one of the biggest bait and switches that we've ever

00:02:07.460 experienced. I'm wondering if you could comment on what just happened in 2021 with regards to

00:02:13.800 vaccines and COVID and, you know, what you think that the role that you think that the media played

00:02:19.720 in that. Yeah, I think it's a libertarian's nightmare come true. I mean, for many years,

00:02:26.560 I was a little bit as skeptical of the purest libertarians out there, the Ron Pauls, who would

00:02:32.240 talk about the welfare warfare state. And but I see all of those warnings. I mean, it's almost

00:02:38.720 like the conspiracy theorists of 2019 was simply a couple of years ahead of time. What I think that

00:02:49.420 when we were told two weeks to flatten the curve, that was to get us to accept something that wasn't

00:02:55.840 acceptable. Hey, guys, I know it's a violation of your civil rights, but just two weeks and we're

00:03:00.380 through this. I don't know if you remember Donald Trump sent a hospital ship to New York port and

00:03:07.520 the port of L.A. to take thousands of COVID patients who were overflowing the hospitals. They were turning

00:03:14.940 convention centers into makeshift hospitals. The army engineers were working on that. None of those

00:03:21.220 were ever used. The hospitals were not overrun. Even in Canada, where we don't have enough hospital beds

00:03:27.180 because we have a government run health care system, they were never overrun. So the premise

00:03:33.080 by which we were thrown into this whole emergency was proved fake within two weeks. And yet here we are

00:03:38.340 after almost two years. But it's not just Justin Trudeau. It's the entire public health deep state.

00:03:45.540 And I know that that phrase sounds kooky, but really, who's been making the rules the last two years?

00:03:50.640 Very few of these policies have been debated on in parliament, let alone voted on. They're not even

00:03:57.380 written by cabinet ministers in an executive capacity. These are individual public health

00:04:05.080 officers of every city and province and federally who are just issuing edicts that change regularly,

00:04:13.420 that make no sense in practice, that have no accountability session in a parliament. The

00:04:20.280 judiciary has been compliant to the point of submissiveness. The media has been cheerleaders

00:04:27.040 for this because the media loves a war. And the war on COVID is also a war on individual freedom,

00:04:35.380 a war on small government. Every institution in society has failed. The courts, the media,

00:04:43.120 the government and the opposition, pop culture. I mean, you see late night comedy shows basically

00:04:50.460 becoming infomercials for Pfizer. And my last point would be, where's the left? You know, until

00:04:56.980 two years ago, the left's big demon was big pharma. Now they're Pfizer salesmen. And until two years ago,

00:05:04.120 the left talked about my body, my choice. Keep your, you know, laws off my body. What about the choice

00:05:10.980 of being forcibly injected? Or, hey, it's your choice. Yeah. Well, you're going to lose your job,

00:05:16.160 lose your access to public life. I just think every institution out there has failed. Trudeau

00:05:21.360 obviously goes along with it because he's not a particularly thoughtful person. And he really is

00:05:26.260 a globalist. And a lot of these ideas emanate from the World Health Organization. But it's been a total

00:05:31.160 failure of the entire system. I compare it to a net, like a fishing net. And if one or two knots on the net

00:05:37.920 fails, well, the net still works because all the other nodes hold. But what if every single knot

00:05:44.380 in the net fails at the same time? That's our democracy during the pandemic. Every system,

00:05:51.580 where's the civil liberties associations? Where are they? I just think that this is the worst

00:05:56.980 public policy inferno in our lifetimes, for sure, possibly in Canadian history.

00:06:03.560 Well, you certainly break down the problem really clearly there. I mean, it feels like a hot mess.

00:06:09.360 And it's hard at this point to see a way out of it, Ezra, because like we talked about, it's

00:06:15.080 constantly moving goalposts, even to the point where, you know, when we look back to the beginning

00:06:20.080 of the pandemic and how many beds were used and how full our hospital was, it's nothing compared to

00:06:26.020 what happened later on. And yet we overreacted so much. We sort of slowly gave away those liberties to

00:06:32.200 the point now that nobody is there defending them. You know, the Liberals used to be the party

00:06:35.880 of the charter. And Justin Trudeau won his election in 2015 by saying, a Canadian is a Canadian is a

00:06:41.960 Canadian, and we all get these same rights no matter what. And then, you know, fast forward to

00:06:45.820 the 2021 campaign, and he's out there completely scapegoating unvaccinated people, calling those

00:06:50.460 people and demonizing them and blaming them for everything in society. We see the Toronto Star,

00:06:55.940 one of the strongest legacy papers in the country. They ran an absolutely horrific, really just

00:07:03.760 a psychotic front cover. I don't know if you know the one I'm talking about. It ran during the summer,

00:07:08.840 but it says, I have no empathy left for the willfully unvaccinated. Let them die. I honestly 1.00

00:07:14.520 don't care if they die from COVID, not even a little bit. And I don't even know who that is a

00:07:19.540 quote from. It's just on the front page of the Toronto Star, you go to the full paid paper and

00:07:23.380 article in the paper, and it talks about people online saying nasty things about unvaccinated

00:07:28.460 people. But that's the comfort that they chose to run with. I mean, it's wild, Ezra. So what do

00:07:33.760 you think we can do, you know, as freedom-loving Canadians, as people who want, you don't want to

00:07:38.200 live in a healthy state, don't want to live under these restrictions anymore? What do you think we

00:07:43.220 can do to get our country back? Well, I think on a very small level, I think, you know, it's like

00:07:48.820 Solzhenitsyn and other Soviet refuseniks and dissidents. In some ways, it's impossible to fight 1.00

00:07:57.200 the total system. I mean, I left out, I think, the worst culprit of the last two years, which is the

00:08:03.120 College of Physicians and Surgeons. I mean, the doctor's motto, do no harm. And the idea of medicine

00:08:09.940 practiced for a particular patient, it's not medicine. When public health is not medicine,

00:08:15.840 medicine. It's not treating an individual patient by caring about them and listening to their case.

00:08:22.140 You're treating people like ants in a colony. That's politics with a medical degree. That's

00:08:27.880 very different. And the College of Physicians and Surgeons has chosen sides, and they've gone to war

00:08:33.540 against doctors who have a patient-centered approach. Any doctor in Canada who gives a medical

00:08:40.500 exemption for allergic reasons or myocarditis or pericarditis, they are suspended or investigated

00:08:50.520 by the College of Physicians and Surgeons. My point is, for any individual person, it may seem impossible

00:08:57.120 to fight. You might lose your job. Some people are in a position where they can make that sacrifice.

00:09:03.520 But for everyone else, I think the Soviet dissident's advice would be, just try the small step of not

00:09:11.340 participating in the lie. It's maybe impossible for an ordinary person to actually fight the entire

00:09:17.480 world, to fight the entire system. But maybe what you can start by doing is not perpetuating the lie,

00:09:25.360 not telling the lie, not believing the lie. And in my own life, I mean, I hate masks. I think they're

00:09:32.560 fairly pointless. If someone's triple-vaxxed, why do they need me to wear a mask? I don't wear one.

00:09:38.140 And there's certain occasions where I have one in my pocket because I don't want to have a

00:09:42.820 breakdown in my day. Like Uber. I ride Ubers a fair bit. They require you to put on a mask. I never do,

00:09:49.880 and it never comes up. When I go shopping, I just don't wear a mask. And I know that sounds like a petty

00:09:55.400 thing, but it's not actually. It's just I'm not going to pretend that this mask is anything other than

00:10:00.740 a political amulet that's a superstition or a flag of my politics. I mean, because it's the doorway to,

00:10:09.460 well, just two vaccines, just three, just four. Now, if someone wants to take a vaccine, I'm

00:10:14.000 certainly not against that in any way. I would never tell someone not to take a vaccine if they

00:10:18.420 choose to do it. But at a certain point, when you're on your fourth booster shot, which in Canada,

00:10:26.880 in some jurisdictions are already on their fourth booster shot in one year, maybe it's time to

00:10:32.760 reassess if that really is working and if it really makes sense to force people to get vaxxed to keep

00:10:41.020 their job when vaxxed people can get sick. In many jurisdictions, most people who are coming down with

00:10:47.400 the virus are vaxxed. I was looking at Saskatchewan's details just the other day. They're on their fourth

00:10:53.340 booster in that province. And a majority of the cases are double-vaxxed people. So I think the

00:11:01.240 rationale falls away. So I'm not saying any individual can fight this monster, but just how

00:11:06.440 about don't be a propagandist for it. Just start with that. That's my advice for an ordinary person.

00:11:13.300 Well, that's great. I've heard someone else say the same thing, that even though this person is fully

00:11:17.740 vaccinated, they refuse to show their vaccine card, that they refuse to participate in the system

00:11:22.220 where we're saying that you need to show papers in order to get into a restaurant or go into a

00:11:26.260 doctor's office. And even though they are vaccinated and they do have the papers, they refuse to show

00:11:32.660 it just exactly like you're saying, a small act of civil dissidence because we don't want to live in a

00:11:39.060 society where we are required to show our papers, to get into basic places. And also that we have one

00:11:46.560 set of rules for one class of people and another for another. So I think that's good advice. It's

00:11:52.720 sort of sad that that's where we've become comparing ourselves to Soviet dissidents as well.

00:12:00.140 I want to talk a little bit more about some of the big media fake news narratives of the year

00:12:05.480 and some of the stories that just the media just show their true colors. And I know you've been

00:12:10.480 a critic of the media party, what you call the media party for a very, very long time. So maybe

00:12:16.820 you could just tell us a little bit about why you call the media, the media party. And if you had,

00:12:21.640 you know, one or two of your own examples of some stories that the media just got flat out wrong this

00:12:26.180 year. Sure. I mean, there's a lot of ways to describe the phenomenon that we see in Canadian media.

00:12:31.280 The fact that more than 99% of journalists in Canada take the government bailout from Trudeau. And that's

00:12:39.020 not an exaggeration. There are literally 1,500 media companies in Canada, including bizarrely,

00:12:45.660 like the Canadian Auto Association, you know, they have a little magazine, even they take the media

00:12:51.780 bailout, like literally everyone is on the dole, except for you and us and Black Walks, and maybe,

00:12:58.660 maybe five others in the country, Western Standard Online, Spencer Fernando, and I'm almost on my entire

00:13:04.360 list. So what do you call that phenomenon? Some people call it the corporate media, because I think

00:13:10.500 that's true. The legacy media, because they used to have a gravitas and authority. That's, that's fairly

00:13:17.840 accurate. But I think that if you look at how it operates, I think it operates like a political party. They

00:13:23.180 have a common set of beliefs. And it's really the sameness of it, because there's not a broad spectrum

00:13:32.120 of opinion. For example, on the core issue, we're talking about lockdowns, vaccines, there's, if you

00:13:37.520 would dare to say, well, I'm skeptical of vaccines, I've had all my vaccines all my life, but I'm a little

00:13:42.560 skeptical of this one that's been rushed into market, especially now that we know that the virus only really

00:13:47.200 affects the very old in a serious way. And there's some side effects that are showing up, especially

00:13:51.560 for young men. Even if you say it in the most moderate, modest way, you're a kook conspiracy theorist, 1.00

00:13:56.620 alt-right. Like, there's no room for a spectrum of opinion in this. What is that? That's a political

00:14:02.680 party. They, they have a discipline amongst themselves. They will attack anyone within the

00:14:09.960 party who is not on all fours with their policy. They attack outsiders. And of course, during elections,

00:14:16.280 they come to the aid of their favorite candidate, which is typically Justin Trudeau. So they really act

00:14:23.680 like a party, but they don't disclose their partisanship. I mean, I find it very odd that

00:14:29.040 journalists who take money from Justin Trudeau through the media bailout do not disclose that

00:14:33.720 in their reports. I mean, if, if it was the tobacco industry that was giving hundreds of millions of

00:14:39.920 dollars to these news outlets, that would be a disclaimer or that would be called an ad. Trudeau

00:14:45.020 gives the money and they just nod and wink. I mean, you did ask me a specific question. There's one story

00:14:51.680 I go and check, but once a month to see if it's still online and it is, and it's a CBC story,

00:14:59.840 a fact check fighting against disinformation. And, and it's a CBC story saying those kooky

00:15:09.600 conservatives with their conspiracy theory about COVID quarantine jails, they're crazy. And that's

00:15:16.720 still, you can find it pretty quickly on the CBC. I check what I say, is that still up? Because of

00:15:21.680 course we did have those. Now you can call them what you want. You can call them a quarantine hotel,

00:15:28.320 but you are law lawfully required to stay in them. Now they were around for a few months for anyone.

00:15:35.520 They were brought back for the Omicron virus from people from, from Africa. 0.98

00:15:39.920 There are detention centers in Canada that you must go to on paying a prosecution.

00:15:48.240 And even if you're healthy, in fact, if you're, if you have the virus, you're not allowed in. Bizarrely,

00:15:53.360 they're only for healthy people. So that is a fact. That's not a conspiracy theory. One of our former

00:16:00.240 reporters was required to stay there. And he later was a plaintiff. We sued the government and federal

00:16:05.600 court, Kian Bexie, I'm talking about. He counted, he had contact with 14 different people at this

00:16:13.440 COVID jail, whereas he just wanted to get in his car and go straight home, home and quarantine at home.

00:16:18.800 So there's no sense to it. But the federal court rules, not only was it constitutional, but the three

00:16:25.600 day detention wasn't even a lawful detention. So there was no charter violation at all. So the media lies

00:16:34.400 about it. The courts uphold it. And of course, there's some hotel chains making a lot of money off it.

00:16:41.600 The entire system's broken. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association hiding under their desk.

00:16:48.000 By the way, just like in the United States, there's a disproportion of new Canadians and minorities who are

00:16:55.120 skeptical for whatever reason about the vaccines. So you have, if I was a lefty, I'd be talking about

00:17:02.560 systemic racism. Black people, new Canadians less likely to be vaxxed. So they're being marginalized

00:17:10.720 and segregated. I find there's a classist issue as well. You see all these fancy events where the

00:17:17.680 politicians or the celebrities don't have masks on, but all the serving staff do. What happened to the

00:17:24.080 classists? What happened to the champions of the working men? You see these unions, Unifor,

00:17:30.560 QP, so many unions not fighting vaccine mandates, being in league with the employer. You know,

00:17:39.120 there's an old saying, if the union and the company say the same thing, one of them is not needed.

00:17:46.880 So where are the labor union champions for the working men? Because if you're in a labor union

00:17:52.240 and your union won't fight the company for you, you've given away all your rights in collective

00:17:59.520 bargaining. So I think another atrocious failure, I talked about the knots on the net being broken,

00:18:05.040 the labor union movement completely co-opted by the government and big corporations. So I think

00:18:11.040 that's part of the fake news there is that these terrible things, they're not really happening.

00:18:16.880 Those COVID jails are just a figment of the fever dreams of the alt-right. And don't worry about

00:18:23.760 that pastor Arthur Pawlowski being arrested like he's a drug kingpin on the roads of Calgary by a

00:18:30.240 SWAT team. Don't even pay attention to that. We're certainly not in a civil liberties bonfire.

00:18:35.920 Everything's fine. What are you, some sort of conspiracy theorist? The whole thing is fake news.

00:18:41.520 Well, you're right, Ezra. There's so many elements there. And we're so grateful for the reporting that

00:18:46.160 you do over at True North because I don't think that Canadians would even be aware of what was

00:18:49.840 happening with pastors being arrested and the entire, like you say, bonfire of civil liberties.

00:18:57.440 What is the point of labor union leaders when they just allow their members to be fired for

00:19:03.600 something arbitrary? And that's the point of the labor union is to defend the rights of these workers,

00:19:08.240 and yet they're completely letting them down. I just wanted to comment on the point you made about

00:19:13.600 how they're making conspiracy theories of all of us, because I remember back in 2020, when some of

00:19:20.880 our reporters at True North were looking into this idea of a potential vaccine mandate. And we had

00:19:28.640 members of the parliamentary press gallery going crazy about us on Twitter, calling us conspiracy theorists

00:19:34.320 and far right. And, you know, just give it six months. And then there it was, right. It's like,

00:19:39.440 it's like anything that you could be a conspiracy theorist about a few years ago, just give it six

00:19:43.680 months and it'll come true, which is, which is, is pretty scary stuff. Well, I wanted to talk to you

00:19:49.360 about this one, one story because it, it, it sort of made, you know, it made a lot of conservatives

00:19:57.200 sort of raise an eyebrow and wonder about the CBC. First of all, the CBC is doing this weird thing now

00:20:01.600 where they publish op-eds, they publish perspectives and, you know, they're all far left perspectives

00:20:06.640 as you would imagine. But there was one, um, written by a woman, I hadn't heard of her before,

00:20:11.920 her name is Ziha Rehman. And it was about how she was an Elections Canada worker who wrote this,

00:20:19.120 this really deranged piece about how she greeted people all day and interacted with Canadians who,

00:20:24.400 who turned out to be hateful, awful people. Right. And so you're waiting for the, for the punchline,

00:20:29.360 you know, what was she talking about? Were there a bunch of, um, you know, people in her district,

00:20:33.760 in her writing, uh, that voted for a neo-Nazi party or something? Was there an independent neo-Nazi

00:20:37.840 party? No, she, she was just talking about the conservative party, not even the people's party,

00:20:41.360 as well, but the conservative party. And the fact that the CBC decided to run this piece, I mean,

00:20:47.200 what, what, what does this say about, first of all, the state broadcaster, but also our elections,

00:20:52.960 the integrity of our elections, when these are the kind of people who are running Elections Canada,

00:20:56.960 they're, they're so hateful and they're so deranged that they think that anyone who's white,

00:21:00.560 anyone who's a conservative is just an evil racist person out to get them.

00:21:05.200 Yeah. I mean, um, a good way to, to test if something is unacceptable or racist,

00:21:11.120 I think a good shorthand is just to switch the race around. And how would you feel if they were 0.96

00:21:16.080 talking about a different group? I did read that insane psychopathic rant. I mean, it, it was shocking.

00:21:23.680 And what was shocking about it is not just that it was someone's weird imagination. Like there was

00:21:28.880 not a single incident. It's just that she was looking at these white people, these conservatives

00:21:34.160 or whoever, as if non-white people don't vote for conservative, for example. I mean, uh, Leslyn Lewis,

00:21:41.920 is she racist too? So there was no factual basis for her to call people haters. It was her own hatred

00:21:50.400 that she was projecting on them. If you swap it around, if there was a, um, uh, someone saying,

00:21:56.960 well, all these Jews were coming in and, and I just know what these Jews were thinking or, um,

00:22:04.960 these black people were coming in. And I just know, like it, it, it wouldn't work in any other way. 1.00

00:22:11.120 It would be so obviously racist and that the CBC would run this shows that we've lost Martin Luther

00:22:18.880 King's concept of, you know, equality, uh, before the law by the content of their character, not the

00:22:25.840 color of their skin. That I don't even think that was a left-wing idea. That was a traditional liberal

00:22:31.760 idea. That was an enlightenment idea. 50 years ago, you had the Martin Luther King style of civil rights,

00:22:38.640 equality before the law, get rid of, uh, Jim Crow laws, uh, judge us based on, on our individual

00:22:47.920 nature. 50 years later, we have racism again, but it's not racism, uh, as you just described there in

00:22:56.800 that CBC article, so racism by white supremacists. It's this critical race theory, anti-white racism,

00:23:05.120 anti-Christian bigotry. It's so shocking. The so-called anti-racists are the biggest racists

00:23:11.520 around. And, and it's not just at the CBC. I want to point fingers at the national post.

00:23:18.240 And I worked at the national post on their editorial board for two wonderful years, about 20 years ago.

00:23:23.120 And I, I love that newspaper, but boy, is it gone down a funny path. You might recall that,

00:23:28.080 uh, just over a year ago that a majority of their newsroom signed a petition denouncing them for

00:23:39.040 running a column by Rex Murphy. It's a wonderful column. It just says Canada is not an inherently

00:23:44.800 racist country. We really bend over backwards to make people feel welcome. Multiculturalism and open

00:23:50.800 immigration are hallmarks of our country. We're not a racist country. That's all he said. And not only

00:23:59.200 did a majority of national post writers condemn him and demand that he not be able to speak on those

00:24:07.360 subjects again, but the management of national post actually had a staff town hall, like a struggle

00:24:13.680 session where one after another denounced the paper for even letting him have a voice there. Um,

00:24:20.320 so it's not just the CBC and there's a new obsession with race and racism. And the, the trouble is

00:24:29.760 demand exceeds supply. It's like Jussie Smollett in the U S he had to manufacture a racist incident

00:24:37.840 against himself because it just wasn't enough natural racism and he needed to get some publicity

00:24:43.520 for, for his acting career. And I think in Canada, it's the same thing. I think we, we are probably

00:24:50.480 the most tolerant country in the world. I really can't think of any country that could beat us in

00:24:55.200 terms of racial harmony. And I challenge the CBC or the national post, um, wokists to find a better 1.00

00:25:01.520 place. There's a reason why a third of a million people from around the world come here every year,

00:25:08.400 most of whom are visible minorities because we're not racist. And these journalists, these activists

00:25:15.600 and that absurd CBC election worker who should never be allowed anywhere near a public, uh, process again, 0.92

00:25:23.680 they, they found, you know, we found the enemy and it is us. They found the racist and it's them.

00:25:30.560 They're the ones obsessed by race. The CBC just had a story on 18 words. You shouldn't say anymore,

00:25:37.040 including the word blacklist or first world problems. Like you're crazy. Black hole. The word

00:25:44.720 black hole is racist. Manitoba. I'm kidding about that. That was on the list. They're crazy. That's

00:25:52.400 mental illness. And I know that's cool in the faculty lounge, but you talk to an ordinary person of any race

00:25:58.800 about that. It's, it's, it's like that affectation to call people Latin X. No Latinos say that.

00:26:07.360 That's only what white liberals say. Those are crazy people. Right. It's like they've gone so far,

00:26:12.720 Ezra, that they have become the butt of the joke and they don't even recognize it. Like I got that

00:26:16.880 piece sent to me by about 20 different people that CBC piece and everyone was laughing at it. It's like,

00:26:21.680 they don't even recognize how absurd they sound to Canadians because the people who wrote that were

00:26:26.480 completely serious. They're like, these are the words that you should purge from your dictionary

00:26:29.440 and that we should expel from the English language. And it's like, who do you think you are?

00:26:33.280 Right. And, and I just think that they've really gone too far with this race thing. I think that

00:26:38.560 most Canadians recognize that Canada is a great country. We're not racist. Sure. There's a couple

00:26:42.560 of racist people here and there. Some of them work at the CBC to your point, but trying to paint the

00:26:47.200 whole country with that brush is just patently absurd. It's laughable. And, and, and I do think it's

00:26:51.920 backfiring on them. Well, I was going to say, thank you so much for joining us on Fake News Friday. It's

00:26:57.280 a lot of fun to have you on the show. We'll have to have you back in the new year. And why don't you

00:27:02.160 give us a little bit of an update as to what's happening over rebel? Because you, you're, you're

00:27:06.240 sort of one of the leading forces in the, in the counter fake news business, trying to inform

00:27:10.960 Canadians of what's actually going on, not what the propagandists that are paid by Justin Trudeau,

00:27:16.720 what you believe. So why don't you give us a little update on what you're up to? Sure. Thank you.

00:27:21.040 Thanks for asking. Rebel News, because the world is so bad, people want to hear the other side of

00:27:26.720 the story. I know that True North has had a banner year. Rebel News now has 50 staff. We have a team

00:27:32.480 in Quebec, both reporting in English and French. We have reporters in the UK again. And of course,

00:27:37.920 in Australia, the amazing Avi Yamini. Here in Canada, we have new reporters in Saskatchewan,

00:27:42.960 Kelly Lamb, great team in Vancouver. We're, we're, we're trying to cover the other side of the story.

00:27:48.800 Our focus, of course, is video based journalism. We try and get out of the office and onto the ground.

00:27:55.440 But really, I think what defined 2021 for us is we spun off our civil liberties work

00:28:02.960 into a charity called the Democracy Fund. As you know, we were defending people by crowdfunding lawyers

00:28:08.720 if they got a lockdown ticket. And so we, we sort of pushed that into its own entity called the

00:28:13.520 Democracy Fund. And I think that that that's probably our greatest achievement in 2021 is that,

00:28:20.640 I mean, I've always felt odd about that moment where someone has a cell phone and there's a terrible

00:28:25.760 thing happening. And they take out their cell phone and they record the terrible event, a crime,

00:28:30.640 a tragedy, a crash, a fire, whatever. Because on the one hand, I'm really glad that I saw it

00:28:35.920 and I wouldn't know about it if they didn't film it. But on the other hand, part of me thinks,

00:28:40.080 put down the phone and help. So what should you do? And so with the Democracy Fund and

00:28:45.040 our Fight the Fines project, and now our Fight Vaccine Passports dot com project,

00:28:50.080 we're, we split the two functions. So Rebel News, we tell the story, but now the Democracy Fund,

00:28:56.000 its own separate entity, can try and do something about it. So we'll still hold the camera,

00:29:02.320 but we're going to try and do something about it. And we've actually got a little network of 25 lawyers.

00:29:07.200 And as you may know, charities have to disclose their financials every year. So the Democracy Fund

00:29:13.280 is coming up on its first year. And again, totally separate entity from Rebel News, different board,

00:29:19.840 different directors, different bank, different everything. It is now at $5 million a year,

00:29:28.560 the largest civil liberties organization in Canada. It's triple the size of the defunct Canadian Civil

00:29:34.720 Liberties Association. It's even larger than our good friends at the Justice Center for Constitutional

00:29:39.200 Freedoms. And again, I'm happy that we built it, but I'm tragically sad that it's so necessary.

00:29:45.760 But I feel that if I look back on the last year, the greatest thing we did wasn't even journalism.

00:29:50.480 It was helping 2,100 people fight back against the madness. That's just a drop in the bucket,

00:29:57.760 by the way. We probably could have helped 200,000 people if we had the funds. But that's sort of what

00:30:02.960 we've done the last year. And I think the next year, unfortunately, will be just as bad.

00:30:07.360 Well, it is incredible what you're doing. And I know you're one of the biggest critics of the sort

00:30:12.000 of defunct, what you say, civil liberties organizations in this country that exist or existed

00:30:18.240 to defend people like the ones that you're defending now. So it's really

00:30:21.600 great to see you step up, step into that role and fill a really, really necessary and vital role in

00:30:28.400 our society, which is defending individual people against the massive encroachments by the government.

00:30:35.040 So congratulations on that, Ezra. It's great to see your success and all the work that you're

00:30:38.880 doing. It's really incredible. So thank you. Thank you so much for being a guest on the Candace Malcolm

00:30:43.360 show. It's great to have you. And happy holidays. I know Hanukkah is over already,

00:30:47.920 but I'll say Merry Christmas to you anyway, Ezra. And I hope you take care.

00:30:51.360 Thanks, my friend. All the best to you.

00:30:53.760 All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. It's Fake News Friday. I'm Candace Malcolm,

00:30:57.680 and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

Juno News - December 17, 2021

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