KINSELLACAST 318： Eylon Levy on the Information War, with Adler and Lilley - and songs my Mom liked： Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Daniel Johnson, Sinead O'Connor
00:02:25.560And we talk about, as you will see, what he calls the information war that has taken place since the 7th.
00:02:32.700And it's something that interests me quite a bit as well.
00:02:36.200So, one of the things we talked about briefly, it was happening on the same day, was the University of Toronto and the illegal occupation there.
00:02:48.900And, you know, the tents are gone, but the stench isn't.
00:02:52.980On Wednesday morning, suburban moms and dads, some actually wearing keffias, like they saw Madonna wear one time, I guess,
00:03:03.520pulled their shiny $80,000 SUVs up to the curb of the University of Toronto to collect Junior
00:03:10.540and wheeled them back to multi-million dollar white neighborhoods with nice views of the lake.
00:03:17.720The months-long illegal occupation of U of T was over.
00:03:23.840The illegal occupation was over because it was, in fact, illegal.
00:03:27.680My former law partner, Justice Marcus Conan, made all of the usual sounds about freedom of speech
00:03:34.460and the Charter of Rights in his 98-page Ontario Superior Court ruling in support of the injunction sought by the University.
00:03:42.400But, in the end, Marcus merely told us what we already know.
00:04:39.780Now, some of the aspiring Gazans may believe the triangle has something to do with the Palestinian flag or a wedge of watermelon, but it doesn't.
00:04:49.020Online, the inverted red triangle indicates support for Hamas.
00:13:17.540What do you mean by that, information war?
00:13:19.980There is an attempt by Israel's enemies to weaponize and militarize misinformation against Israel.
00:13:33.360Because Hamas' goal is not only to kill Israelis and shatter national morale, it's to poison global public opinion against Israel.
00:13:51.140It's to create tension and friction between Israel and its allies.
00:13:58.960It's to make good, ordinary, decent people turn against Israel by convincing them that Israel is evil incarnate.
00:14:11.560That is the meaning of the campaign to charge Israel with genocide, extermination, starvation, and being a white supremacist, colonial, apartheid fascist state, and throw every nasty word in the dictionary at it.
00:14:29.120It is a campaign to try to convince people that the descendants of the victims of the Nazis are the new Nazis, and therefore to make Holocaust inversion, and therefore to make people think, if the Nazis didn't finish the job, maybe we should.
00:14:51.580And if someone else will do that work, then more power to them.
00:14:56.740They want to prime Western public opinion, so that on the day they are ready to launch an all-out war on Israel, ordinary Western citizens will stand idly by and say the Jews had it coming.
00:15:14.380Because they look at Israel not as a democratic nation state fighting for its life against barbaric Islamist terrorists, but as the incarnation of evil that has no right to exist.
00:15:31.080Now, in the course of the information war, we see all sorts of made-up allegations being made against Israel that quickly gain traction on social media, get picked up in the mainstream media, and then the damage has already been done by the time the lies are refuted.
00:15:53.180The textbook example was the incident on, I think it was October 16th, with the Al-Afee Hospital in Gaza.
00:16:02.360Hamas puts out a press release claiming that an Israeli airstrike has flattened the hospital and killed 500 people.
00:16:10.200The sun comes up in the morning, and it turns out the hospital is still standing.
00:16:14.440The casualties are probably in the dozens.
00:16:18.040And it wasn't an Israeli airstrike at all.
00:16:20.160It was a misfired Islamic jihad rocket.
00:16:24.500But by then, the media had already begun reporting that it was an Israeli airstrike, according to Palestinian health officials.
00:17:09.760It includes people who died of natural causes.
00:17:12.100It includes people who haven't even identified who these people are.
00:17:21.500And critically, it doesn't distinguish between civilian and competent casualties.
00:17:28.040But by painting a picture of Israeli bloodthirsty aggression against innocent Palestinian people, they are priming the world to turn against Israel and therefore leave it vulnerable and at the mercy of the terrorist armies that want to destroy it.
00:17:50.480And Hamas not only declared war on Israel on October 8th, it then lured Israel into an urban war.
00:18:01.320It had built a network of tunnels one and a half times longer than the New York subway, with tunnel shafts poking out in schools, homes, hospitals, mosques.
00:18:12.340And that essentially gave Israel three options.
00:18:14.700Leave Hamas alone and give terrorists immunity just because they're hiding in the basement of a hospital or attack and then people will get hurt or urge people to get out of arms temporarily for their safety and get condemned for forcibly displacing people, even though it's doing exactly what it should be doing, which is giving prior warning of an attack on a legitimate military target.
00:18:42.280The same pattern we saw with the Al-Aqli hospital has been repeated on so many occasions.
00:18:49.660The allegations of mass rapes at the Shifa hospital, the allegations of mass graves at the Shifa hospital, the allegations of a massacre of innocent civilians waiting to get aid from a truck, the allegations of starvation and famine that even the United Nations has walked back.
00:19:07.560Time and time and time, these trial balloons, by the way, the most recent one, Al Jazeera reporting that Israel is using dogs to rape prisoners.
00:19:19.360I mean, there really is no lie so obscene and so ridiculous that people will not believe it.
00:19:24.980But people are people are people are going along with it.
00:19:29.240And Israel knows that as soon as any military operation begins, the clock immediately starts ticking on when there will be international pressure on Israel to desist.
00:19:42.880But time and time and time again, we've had military campaigns that have ended with Hamas still in possession of territory, able to shoot rockets at Israeli cities whenever they want, as if that's normal, as if that's something we just have to accept.
00:19:57.180Now, the attacks of October 7th were obviously so horrific that Israel enjoyed a good deal of support from the international community, parts of it.
00:20:07.520By the way, even Canada, the recent statement of the G7, which Canada is signed on to, expresses the leader's full solidarity and support for Israel and reaffirming their unwavering commitment to Israel security and condemned Hamas for waiting war out of civilian infrastructure.
00:20:24.200By the way, that was that was that was critical and went unnoticed in the G7 statement.
00:20:29.760But the clock starts ticking in a way that it doesn't in other wars.
00:20:35.100Canada was part of the 87 nation alliance that fought ISIS in the Battle of Mosul.
00:20:44.200There was no pressure from the international community to leave ISIS in control of Mosul because the war was fought by the international community, including Canada.
00:20:54.200You know, off record, I had dinner with a person who was the Minister of Defence at the time.
00:21:20.980So as you've indicated, you know, in their efforts, they're ultimately objective in this isolation war to create fear and to isolate Israel and so on.
00:21:35.140So they, you know, they've been obviously assisted by a gullible public in the West or people who have tendencies to be anti-satellites, of course.
00:21:49.380But, you know, they have been effective.
00:21:52.540As I said, you know, while evil, they've been effective.
00:21:55.940Who would you consider to be the generals of the other side of the information war?
00:22:08.540That's why it's important that there are investigative journalists like your good self to investigate that.
00:22:15.680Al Jazeera, of course, plays a central role.
00:22:19.360It has for nine months been running with a stripe that says genocide in Gaza.
00:22:23.780And they have their own Gen Z platform, AJ+, that targets young audiences as well.
00:22:31.660There's a whole network of NGOs, the SJP and the JVP and Sami Doon, all with their own very sketchy ties and sources of funding that I hope many more people are also looking into right now.
00:22:50.800Well, the sad fact is that for Israel to fight this information war, it's a battle of David against Goliath.
00:22:57.920Because not only are the images coming out of Gaza horrible, of course, no one denies that there is immense suffering there.
00:23:07.280Although we disagree, of course, on the reason for that suffering.
00:23:10.600First of all, Jews are vastly outnumbered by Muslims.
00:23:16.040There are simply many more people who will automatically, for cultural and religious reasons, express solidarity with the Palestinians and be on their side.
00:23:23.980They benefit as well from years of indoctrination in Western universities to believe the whole oppressor-oppressed narrative and twist reality upside down.
00:23:40.960To us, it's perfectly obvious, as I said before, Israel is a democratic nation state.
00:23:47.420It is where the Jews have reclaimed their independence in their ancient homeland, and we're fighting for our survival and for our security and prosperity.
00:23:57.140They tell a story of Israel as some white settler colonial project, as if refugees fresh out of the concentration camps and displaced person camps,
00:24:06.740or those who managed to escape Europe just in time, or even Jews from places like Morocco and Iraq and Algeria and Tunis were somehow scheming in some colonial project.
00:24:22.120But following years of this post-colonial ideology fed by Soviet propaganda, and a lot of what being said now feeds back to Soviet propaganda against Israel,
00:24:34.140there are unfortunately many people who are automatically primed to believe the worst about Israel and the Jews.
00:24:41.320And fighting to change that reference is, that frame of reference is an immense challenge.
00:24:49.680I mean, so as you're no doubt aware, we've got this superior court ruling yesterday on an interlocutory injunction to get these kids out of the University of Toronto,
00:25:00.860considered one of Canada's finest universities.
00:25:04.140And, you know, the assumption I have to make is not all of these kids are total dummies.
00:25:09.880How is it that the other side has been so effective with Gen Z, so 18 to 24, and millennials, you know, 25 to around 39 in Canada,
00:25:23.260in the United States, in Western Europe, how have they reached them to the degree that they have?
00:25:28.560Because the numbers that I've seen, and I'm sure you've seen, are quite alarming.
00:25:44.020Many know exactly what they are chanting for, and that makes it deeply, deeply sinister.
00:25:49.460I think part of the reason they've been successful is because so much of modern discourse, at least within progressive circles, assumes that the victim is always right.
00:26:02.920And if you can make yourself out to be the weak side, the vulnerable side, the oppressed side, then that makes you right.
00:26:13.500And Israel doesn't want to fight the sympathy Olympics.
00:26:20.720Israel says, we used to be weak, we used to be powerless, we used to be oppressed, but we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps.
00:26:28.040We have power, and we're using that power to defend ourselves and keep ourselves safe.
00:26:32.780But within a world that says that the victim is always right, that absolves the victim of responsibility, that divides the world into oppressor and oppressed.
00:26:43.680They have been able to spin a story in which, instead of looking at a lens that sees actually Israel as the one Jewish and democratic state in a vast Arab Muslim region as being the minority and the plucky little minority.
00:27:00.120They tell the story that the Palestinians are, in fact, the vulnerable, indigenous, weak minority that's been oppressed by nefarious white forces.
00:27:11.920The thing that's extraordinary, I took a stroll around with the documentary people last Friday at U of T, which will hopefully be a memory, you know, and it's festooned with the inverted red triangle, and the red hand, and the intifada, and, you know, I think the second intifada, not the first, and so on.
00:27:34.060And it's extraordinary, you know, when you talk to these kids, they either profess not to know what it means, or perhaps they do, and they're pretending otherwise.
00:27:46.420There should be indications to them that this is quite ominous and, in some cases, murderous, what they're advocating, and, you know, still they persist.
00:27:55.680So, you know, these, the bad guys have been very effective.
00:27:59.760What do you think, and again, this, I think I know the answer to this, but I have to ask you, what is the ultimate objective of the generals of the other side in this information war?
00:28:20.240But it's not ambiguous that the red triangles are what Hamas used in its snuff videos to mark out targets.
00:28:28.980And it's very clearly a way of marking out a target and making a violent threat of death.
00:28:34.520To your other question, it's what I said before, and I'll report it, I'll repeat it.
00:28:39.380But Iran, the Palestinian national movement as a whole, and their supporters around the world, want to destroy Israel from the river to the sea.
00:28:50.960This is not conspiratorial, nefarious thinking.
00:28:57.480They don't want to live next to Israel.
00:28:59.840They want, instead of it, they don't think Israel has the right to exist in any borders.
00:29:04.900They want an Arab-Islamist state from the river to the sea.
00:29:10.260But you said last night, in addition to that, they also want to dismantle Western democracy and the allies of Israel.
00:29:17.780Absolutely, because they see Israel as an outpost of the West and agree with us that Israel is on the front lines of the West against the forces of barbarism.
00:29:33.660Iran knows that if it knocks Israel out of action, there is nothing standing between it and the doorstep of Europe.
00:29:42.900And being able to drive a wedge between Israel and its allies and knock Israel out of action is a way of taking war to the West.
00:29:53.500Just as the other day, one of Hezbollah's leaders said that their real war is with the United States.
00:30:01.640I would zoom out, though, and look at a bigger picture.
00:30:04.180I think that the big story of the first half of the 21st century is that there are three democratic states that are at risk of extinction at the hands of aggressive neighbors.
00:30:18.600Israel at the hands of Iran and its proxy armies.
00:30:44.040Because a world in which Israel falls to Iran, Ukraine falls to Russia, and Taiwan falls to China will be a very dangerous world and the creation of a new order.
00:30:53.360And that's why you see China, Russia, and Iran increasingly coordinated.
00:30:59.000From whom does Russia acquire the suicide drones that are murdering Ukrainians on the streets of Europe?
00:31:10.800China has also begun selling attack drone parts to Russia as well.
00:31:16.500It's increasingly clear that these three countries, together with South Africa, I would add, are trying to undermine and subvert the Western-led order that has secured world peace essentially since the end of the Cold War.
00:31:33.060And you have to understand Iran's campaign against Israel in conjunction with the efforts by these other revisionist powers to destroy other Western allies.
00:32:03.760I had Suwala Braverman, the British, former British Home Secretary, on my podcast, who spoke about Iran employing criminal gangs in the U.K. to intimidate Iranian dissidents, to leveraging organized crime to perpetrate attacks, intimidate people, and said that the West has been far too timid in the face of Iran's attempts to subvert their own democracy.
00:32:46.340Final question, because I know you've got a business agenda ahead of you, is what in this propaganda war, you know, the war that began on the morning of the 8th, what can be done differently and more effectively?
00:32:59.920You talked about some of it last night, what individuals can do, and so on.
00:33:04.280What would be your top three priorities to leave with people as to what can be done differently or in addition to what's happening now?
00:33:13.540Insights to leave with whom, specifically?
00:33:16.100With the public, with governments, with police, prosecutors, politicians, you know, whomever the audience is.
00:33:23.900I mean, what we're seeing in Canada, which I think has got one of the worst problems in the world, we're seeing, you know, reluctance or intransigence or indifference by all of those audiences.
00:33:35.140That we're having problems, you know, across the board, and, you know, it's emboldened the bad guys to do even worse things, be even more brazen.
00:34:08.340Do not underestimate enemies who do not share your values and your openness and your commitment to freedom and equality and see the world very differently.
00:34:21.360It's very easy as Westerners to assume that ultimately everyone wants the same thing and we're all the same deep down.
00:34:27.480And I think that does a disrespect, actually, to the diversity of human opinion.
00:34:32.620And some people think very differently and have very different priorities.
00:34:37.080Sometimes when people say things, you should believe them.
00:34:42.200And understand what the implications of that would be if they had their way, instead of trying to downplay it or think that if you ignore it or deny it, it will go away.
00:34:54.680It is shocking that Jews in Canada are now having the conversation about whether Canada is a safe place to be.
00:35:02.220Because if Jews are not safe in Canada, they're not safe anywhere.
00:43:39.080The American public, for the third election in a row, does not have good choices.
00:43:43.780And the rest of us just get to watch on from the sidelines as a spectator sport, much like we were with the British election, which ended up with bizarre results.
00:44:10.460The one thing that's not disturbing that is actually a happy event, now that you mentioned the British election, that piece of shit, George Galloway, the voice of Hamas in the United Kingdom's legislature, lost his seat last night.
00:45:26.880Rishi Sunak could not get things back on, on board.
00:45:30.960And, and so all these, you know, a bunch of voters went to Farage's Reform UK, but a bunch of them just went back to Labor.
00:45:39.340And, you know, we all talk about politics as if everyone is attached at the hip to a party.
00:45:46.040That's not the way a lot of voters are.
00:45:47.860And a bunch of people who had traditionally voted Labor voted for the Tories back in 2019, you know, for Boris Johnson to do a great job campaigning up in the north of England because they wanted Brexit done.
00:46:01.760And they voted Tory to get Brexit done because the Labor guys had stopped listening to the, the working class who didn't want the EU anymore.
00:46:10.860And then they, they left the Tories because, well, they weren't paying attention to them either.
00:46:17.220And, you know, you've got to listen to, to voters.
00:46:20.620You've got to listen to where the population is.
00:46:22.520And that doesn't always make you popular with partisans who want some purity test, but you win elections.
00:47:04.980Now you've got Mark Garneau, who did serve as foreign affairs minister for a time under Trudeau, if I'm correct, coming out with a book saying that, you know, Trudeau doesn't really understand international relations, did not do a good job.
00:47:20.380And that Canada is not well respected on the world stage because of it.
00:47:24.800So, you know, things are are not getting better for Trudeau.
00:47:29.880He's got Karina Gould, his campaign co-chair, who is in charge.
00:47:36.220This is so once I describe why I'm bringing up Karina Gould, an MP that will soon lose her seat in Burlington, you'll get the the lovely irony of this.
00:47:45.440Her job right now is to find candidates to run under the liberal banner in Ontario.
00:47:49.840And this week she came out and blamed the local candidate in Toronto St. Paul's for why they lost the election.
00:47:56.260Leslie Church took 42 percent of the vote or vote there, lost by 700 or so votes.
00:49:01.340It should have just picked up where it was and been done within a couple of weeks.
00:49:05.200Instead, she started picking fights as soon as she was appointed to that file, leaving the Ford government saying, well, wait a minute, we almost had a deal.
00:49:13.460We had to put it on hold because you called an election.
00:49:57.320I have in the closest you could come to saying, yeah, that he did good things is McKenna, who's called for him to step down, that there needs to be a change.
00:50:07.460But yeah, Garneau, even backbenchers like Selena Cesar Chavanez, Jody Wilson.
00:50:46.160Because Justin Trudeau thinks he's an Instagram influencer.
00:50:50.760And I'll tell you a quick story about this that I've not told and I'm not going to use the names to protect the innocent.
00:50:56.680But Trudeau's flying back from Europe and he asks someone with the government to come on his plane to brief him on something, a very serious file, on the way back to Canada.
00:51:11.800And as this person's talking and talking, they look over and they realize that Trudeau's not listening.
00:51:18.100He's scrolling through the photos that he's been sent, picking which ones will go on social media.
00:54:47.320But so here you and I are again around our metaphorical campfire and I'm going to throw on a log and you can respond to it.
00:54:59.880By the way, just for total edification for those people who know everything about my life, I did play the role of an inquisitor many years ago.
00:55:10.780It was in a church in Montreal and the play was called The Lark.
00:55:16.660And I played the head of the inquisition and the prosecutor for the inquisition.
00:55:22.180And it was my role to prosecute Joan of Arc.
00:57:02.140Could, but it, it, it, a lot of people are curious this week.
00:57:06.060You and I are at a disadvantage as we sit around our campfire here.
00:57:10.060It was George Stephanopoulos, who actually worked for Bill Clinton in 92 and helped me set up the first liberal war room in 93.
00:57:19.560Um, is, is, is interviewing Joe Biden tonight and, um, live and it hasn't happened yet.
00:57:29.760My, my hunch is because, you know, that end of the microphone, Stephanopoulos has to be tough on Biden because everybody thinks because he's been a Democrat, you know, he's going to throw him softballs.
00:57:46.700Well, George Stephanopoulos is not a softball thrower and, uh, we'll repeat for folks who are listening to this in the coming days that we recorded this, uh, just a few hours before the Stephanopoulos event with Biden.
00:58:01.460So we have no idea precisely what will go on.
00:58:04.840Um, I don't know whether Biden can do well in any kind of live opportunity this week.
00:58:10.240Every time he was live, he was terrible and horrible.
00:58:15.900He was trying as often as possible when the prompter was available to read the prompter, but he was actually not very good at reading the prompter.
00:58:22.220Sometimes the prompter tells you to repeat something that's just been said and you're not supposed to say and to repeat.
00:58:30.720And the way you're, sometimes you're asked to quote someone and you offer a quote and it'll say end of quote so that you'll pause.
00:58:37.180So it's not really smart to say end of quote.
00:58:40.600I'm not saying he's not smart, but I am saying he's, he's addled.
00:58:44.380I'm saying that he's, uh, he's down a couple of liters, down a couple of liters of Molson, a Canadian, regardless of what the price is.
00:58:51.860And, uh, I think, uh, the, the central problem and all of the, us who follow politics, uh, know this cold.
00:58:58.640It's got nothing to do with right wing or left wing.
00:59:00.220It's not about ideology or philosophy.
00:59:02.760Once the people have made their minds up, most of them do not change.
00:59:08.020So when people watch this tonight, those who have made their minds up that Biden is not up to the task, it'll be reinforced to them that guess what?
00:59:18.580And those people who are almost religiously attached to the idea that only one person in this universe can defeat Donald Trump and he must be defeated.
00:59:45.060And, um, so hopefully people give us a break, but like, you know, Charles, you and I have been critical of Joe Biden and the people around him in the past few days.
00:59:58.380And I've had people remark on it to me.
01:00:00.620It's like, boy, you guys are, you sound really disappointed or angry.
01:00:03.380And I said, well, you know, I can't speak for Charles.
01:00:05.540He will on, you know, this weekend on the show, but like, I am, I'm mad, you know, I feel like this got hidden from me.
01:00:17.020And, you know, I gave hours of my life to him and I feel like something was hidden from me.
01:00:22.220And I said, I don't know if Charles feels the same way, but I'm going to ask him, you feel the same way?
01:00:26.960Well, I feel the same way because I feel that he's behaving like a typical human and he ought to know better.
01:00:34.580Uh, he ought to know from the years that he has lived that typical human beings, when they have a problem, they go to one place only denial.
01:00:44.580And it is easier for a human being emotionally.
01:00:49.660And we are all emotional beings, regardless of what our intellect might be.
01:00:54.740Some of us are gifted with a great intellect.
01:04:35.700Okay, so anyway, the people who have, the people who will have the most authority at that convention are those people who have been Democrats for a long time and have held high offices like the Hillary Clintons and the Barack Obamas and what have you.
01:04:48.320And Biden's people fear, and of course, Harris's people fear, if there is a contested convention and Harris is not on the ticket, not at the top of the ticket, not the presidential nominee or the vice presidential nominee, that there will be a ruckus in the party.
01:05:06.060And so they're coming up with, well, if Harris is off the ticket, we'll try to make sure that a black is on the ticket, either a black woman or a black male.
01:05:14.880And, you know, it goes to all of this, you know, diversity business, and I'm all for diversity, but at some point, you know, if you're in politics, you have to ask the question, you know, can we win?
01:05:27.860Is Harris a winning, is Harris a winning brand?
01:05:33.040Social media matters, no matter how many people want to disparage it.
01:05:36.000And social media is literally littered with dozens of clips of Harris from her days in California, and from more recent days, in which she seems to be saying a whole lot of things that make it easy for people who want to make fun of her, to make fun of her.
01:05:54.320You know, I had thought, if he, let's say Joe agrees to go, and he says, I'm going to, we're going to go to the convention in Chicago, and I'm going to release all of my delegates.
01:06:04.500You know, they acquired in the primary system, and then she becomes a candidate, you know, along with all the others.
01:06:12.400But Lily pointed something out to me this morning, which I did not know.
01:06:15.880I got to check it out, which is that he can't do that.
01:06:21.860They're locked in, many of those delegates.
01:06:24.420The only person that they can go to is the other person on the ballot, under the arcane rules, which is her.
01:06:33.200No, well, yeah, there was another person on the primary ballot, I can't remember his name, and that's the whole point.
01:06:44.420But I, you know, the thing is, I think sometimes, you know, with all due respect to the person that you were talking to, I think that we sometimes forget that these so-called political organizations, like Democratic Party, is a private company.
01:06:58.020They're all private, Republican Party, same.
01:07:17.220And, yeah, I mean, this is why, you know, when candidates get upset and they're kicked out or disallowed and they talk about going to court, and I always say to them the same thing, knock yourself out.
01:07:41.920There's no history of the government telling the Democratic Party or Republican Party, no, I'm sorry, you've got to do your nomination differently.
01:07:55.560Although, although I do sometimes wonder, especially since all this foreign interference stuff has arisen in the past couple of years, you know, affecting all three of the mainstream parties, you know, it's obviously that China and Russia and Iran and all the bad guys have figured out where our parties are most vulnerable is in the candidate nomination process.
01:08:29.780The nomination process is loosey-goosey.
01:08:31.900But look, you're a veteran of politics, all the political work that you've done.
01:08:35.600And you know damn well that no matter how much various prime ministers, this has nothing to do with liberal or conservative, no matter how much they stroke the members of the caucus, the members of the caucus have zero power.
01:08:47.460All decisions, all important decisions reside in the PMO.
01:08:50.920So for all this stuff about foreign interference, I'm not, I'm not for foreign interference.
01:08:55.140I'm just not for, you know, we talked about bedwetting earlier.
01:08:58.320I'm not for wearing my pampers because of foreign interference.
01:09:02.180There's no, there's just no, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no, I'm just trying to get that image out of my head.
01:09:09.940I mean, it's, it's a hell of a visual.
01:09:11.540And that's, that's why I'm the damn inquisitor.
01:09:14.180But the thing is, there's no evidence, whether it's the Globe and Mail or any other organization, CSIS, God love them, there's no evidence that suggests that the prime minister's office, whether it was Stephen Harper or Justin Trudeau or Pierre Trudeau or Joe Clark for 10 minutes, there's no evidence that suggests that foreign interference changed a prime minister's mind and changed its policy toward Russia or China or Cucamonga.
01:09:45.920No, and, you know, I mean, Justin Trudeau, to give an example of what you're talking about, you know, his dealings with China were anything but friendly over the past few years, principally because of the two Michaels being held there illegally, but, you know, also China dealing with us, treating us like, you know, we were chump change, like we were nothing.
01:10:07.740So it's, but it's, I just hope Joe goes, like I just, for him, but also for the United States, like it's really in the interest of us little Canadians up here in this little country above them in the attic, like we really need them to get it right.
01:10:26.480Because if they don't, like there's going to be hell to pay.
01:10:30.200Well, for people who don't care about democracy, let's talk about something simpler and that's called trade and that's called our economy.
01:10:37.060It's well known that President Trump, and I'm calling President Trump because I can still call him that, you never lose your title officially, I guess we could say former President Trump.
01:10:49.300But in either case, we know that Donald Trump loves tariffs and he's been babbling to all kinds of people about how we'd love to replace taxes, income taxes, whether it's personal, corporate, he'd love to replace taxes, reduce taxes by as much as possible and make up the money with tariffs.
01:11:06.160Because Donald Trump seriously wants to believe that tariffs are paid for by the country that you're imposing the tariffs on and you're not, whether it's Canada, the States or any other country, when you oppose it, if I impose a tariff on something that was made in Afghanistan, Afghanistan doesn't pay the tariff.
01:11:24.720So Canadians buying this product from Afghanistan, they pay it.
01:11:28.280So the stuff that we want the Americans to buy from us, and we absolutely depend on them.
01:11:33.960They are, for the most part, our exclusive customer, or at least the customer that buys most of our stuff, no matter what it is, whether it's been grown on the ground or whether we've manufactured it.
01:11:44.160Americans are our most important customer.
01:11:47.840So if Donald Trump says, which he says right now, that he'd like to impose a 10% tariff across the board on everything that's imported, so whether it's from Canada or any other country, the tariff would go up by 10%.
01:12:04.000Well, if he puts a 10% tariff on Canadian products, it means we will sell fewer products.
01:12:12.780So, number one, from an American point of view, it will create more inflation.
01:12:17.020The last thing in the world any leader wants is inflation, but increasing the price of goods creates more inflation.
01:12:22.820But from our point of view, okay, if he puts a 10% tariff on everything we send them, we will end up sending them less, meaning it will hurt us, meaning it will hurt our economy.
01:12:34.340So if you don't like the idea that Donald Trump is not good for democracy, if that's too esoteric for you, how is this?
01:12:47.400It'll mean a lower level of economic growth.
01:12:51.140And that means more poverty, more drug addiction, more of all the crap that we'd love to get away from.
01:12:58.300And, you know, now that I, now that you've made me think about it, Mr. Poliev has maintained a very courageous silence on the consequence of Trump's trade madness.
01:13:12.580I can't, I can't, I don't think he said anything about it at all.
01:13:15.720Well, if Donald Trump does become the president, I guess not November, because the election is in November, so he'd be sworn in in January.
01:13:24.920That is still almost a year away from the next Canadian election, okay?
01:13:29.820Because the next Canadian election is likely in October.
01:13:31.840So if Trump is sworn in in January, and Trump causes trouble for the Canadian economy, trouble for the average Canadian by February or March or April, that will be a huge issue.
01:13:45.600And so at that point, if the conservatives are still talking about the Arrive Can app, and the We Scandal, and Jody Wilson, Raybould, God Lover, and all that kind of stuff, the average Canadian will say, that is old news, okay?
01:14:03.380I care that Johnny and Warren are having a tough time finding work because of that jerk in Washington.
01:14:09.300And if the guy that wants to become the new PM, Pierre Polyev, if he stays agnostic about it, if he stays on the sidelines, if he's worried about his base that reveres and worships Donald Trump, if he doesn't want to criticize Trump at all, it'll be a field day for the prime minister.