Rebel News Podcast - A spring election is coming, and Justin Trudeau will win again

00:00:00.000 Hello, my rebels. You know, I think it's pretty clear the stars are aligning.

00:00:03.440 We're going to have an election this fall in Canada. Pretty sure about it. There's a cabinet

00:00:06.900 shuffle. Trudeau's sharpening his blades. The media party's getting revved up. And I'm a little

00:00:11.960 bit worried about Aaron O'Toole. I'll tell you why I think an election's coming and how the

00:00:17.100 conservatives are doing so far. That's ahead. Before I do, let me invite you to become a video

00:00:21.680 viewer of this podcast. I think the video version is the bestest version because it's got all the

00:00:27.640 extra stuff in it. It's just eight bucks a month, which is less than Netflix. Go to rebelnews.com,

00:00:34.080 click subscribe. And not only do you get my show, you get Sheila Gunn-Reed's weekly show,

00:00:38.900 David Menzies' weekly show, and the satisfaction of knowing you keep Rebel News alive. Okay,

00:00:44.700 here's today's podcast.

00:00:57.640 Tonight, a spring election is coming, and I'm afraid Justin Trudeau, he's going to win

00:01:06.520 again. It's January 12, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.

00:01:11.960 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?

00:01:15.700 There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.

00:01:19.780 The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my

00:01:24.380 bloody right to do so. The last election was October of 2019, just 15 months ago. But it

00:01:35.240 feels like an eternity ago. The whole world has changed. The pandemic was unknown and unthinkable

00:01:40.500 back then. The world's economy was being led by our close friend and ally, the United States,

00:01:45.420 and that's usually enough for us to benefit by being just close to them. But then came the virus

00:01:51.200 from China that scared us all and killed 17,000 Canadians. I acknowledge that those statistics 1.00

00:01:57.400 are questionable. I see headlines that there are no flu cases this year, and I wonder if

00:02:03.100 they're simply being counted as COVID cases. The symptoms are similar. I know that every year,

00:02:09.740 about 6,000, 8,000 people die from the regular flu, so it's fair to say COVID-19 is like a bad

00:02:17.300 flu season. And no one should be happy about that. But it is simply not true that this meets

00:02:25.180 any reasonable standard for a national emergency, a national lockdown, a national flattening of our

00:02:32.740 civil liberties. In Alberta, which is one of the few jurisdictions to publish useful information,

00:02:38.860 you can see that a grand total of 33 people in all of Alberta have died from the virus who did not

00:02:45.220 have serious underlying conditions. Out of 1,307 total deaths, and I'm not saying there is a moral

00:02:53.340 difference. A life is a life. But it is useful to govern our public policy to know that this virus is not

00:03:00.600 a serious risk to people under 70 who are healthy. Statistically, it's just not. So why are those

00:03:08.760 people, young, healthy people, being locked down, curfewed, fined, and economically and socially

00:03:14.680 devastated? If the average age of people dying is 82, why are we threatening to taser a 21-year-old

00:03:22.840 extremely fit hockey player on an outdoor skating rink? What's the science or the public policy there?

00:03:30.820 But you see, no one in authority is asking such questions, and everyone is stressed and confused

00:03:36.240 at best, scared at worst. I know there are some people who will never again emerge from their homes

00:03:42.040 in a normal way, never again visit their grandchildren again, never go to the restaurant again, never travel

00:03:48.320 again. I know one grandparent who told me his own daughter refuses to meet him, not because they're

00:03:53.820 not getting along. She just is terrified, she says, of killing him. So she just won't visit him. She has

00:04:00.400 been psychologically abused, I guess, turned into such a terrified person, and she is now abusing him

00:04:08.940 in a way? I don't know. It's very unhealthy what's going on, and I'm sure that's one of thousands of

00:04:13.660 such cases. So imagine what such a population en masse looks like in an election vote. The answer is they

00:04:24.280 vote from a position of terror, or at least many of them do. They vote for the party that has taken

00:04:30.720 the pandemic the most seriously, and by seriously I don't really mean scientifically, I mean the most

00:04:36.980 dramatically, the most extremely. There is no reason for a curfew as Quebec has done. The virus is not

00:04:44.120 safe at 7.59 p.m., but deadly at 8 p.m. That's not science, that's theater. It's public health theater.

00:04:52.740 I saw this insane headline in the Montreal Gazette, doctors saying they're going to have to start

00:04:58.400 killing people if we don't have a curfew. Imagine saying that, how unethical that is to say.

00:05:06.720 You know, we're going to have to start putting up with this public health theater, much like we've

00:05:09.780 all learned to put up with airline security theater airports, except for that charade takes what,

00:05:15.760 an extra 20 minutes of your life and only when you travel? It's limited in scope and cost. Sure,

00:05:21.180 it's over time, cost hundreds of billions of dollars in lost time and destruction to the

00:05:26.340 travel industry, but that's chump change compared to what lockdowns have done to all of us all the

00:05:32.800 time. A perpetual airport security line for everything, just for stepping out of your house.

00:05:39.400 Trillions of dollars in damage already, but also countless profiteers too. This is so absurd,

00:05:45.760 it sounds made up like satire. Californian's Gavin Newsom, he's the governor, saying, sure,

00:05:52.220 lots of little people have gone bankrupt, lots of working class people, lots of small businesses,

00:05:57.920 but the billionaires are doing even better than ever. Yeah, paradoxically, the crazier the politician

00:06:05.660 is about the lockdown, the more likely they are to be reelected, or at least the more dramatic they are,

00:06:10.980 the most concerned they are, the most authoritarian they are. So far in the past year, when provinces

00:06:16.140 have gone to the polls in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, those governments

00:06:21.380 have come back with increased majorities. Trump lost his election, but barely, and I put it to you,

00:06:27.600 it's because of the pandemic in a couple of ways. The fear mongers made people afraid, slowed down the

00:06:34.260 economy, and of course, most importantly, the pandemic allowed mail-in voting to be approved by the

00:06:40.440 courts. In the last moments of the campaign, as our friend Joel Pollack says, it wasn't free,

00:06:46.020 it wasn't fair, but it was made legal. The Democrats saw to that. So here we come now in Canada.

00:06:53.620 Look at this. Cabinet ministers who aren't running again have been asked to step down

00:06:59.180 to clear the decks for new cabinet ministers and new candidates. Why would you do that just 15 months

00:07:04.880 after the last election? Obviously, an election is coming. A cabinet shuffle. No important changes.

00:07:10.840 The foreign ministers shuffled, but not disavowed. No major changes, but just getting ready for the

00:07:16.360 looming election. This is the team that will govern if they win again, which I think they will.

00:07:22.840 And you know that because the liberals have revved up their smear machine, they're getting ready.

00:07:28.140 Their go-to move in a campaign, I mean, it worked last time, it'll be their go-to move again now,

00:07:32.740 is calling everyone they hate a Nazi. Everyone they hate is a Nazi. It's childish, 0.81

00:07:38.360 but it works. Because the media party uses the same playbook, so they'll go along with it again,

00:07:45.180 of course. They'll add a new word to that, terrorist. Domestic terrorist. Because of what

00:07:52.080 happened in Washington last week, a summer Black Lives Matter riots, they would never use the word

00:07:57.300 domestic terrorist, but now they'll call any conservative terrorist, they'll simply call their enemies

00:08:01.740 Nazis, terrorists. In other words, they'll actually incite violence against their own conservative

00:08:07.180 opponents. They're all in on it. And naturally, they're putting us here at Rebel News on that list

00:08:13.120 because we are the largest independent news media company in Canada, the largest that has an audience.

00:08:19.120 We produce an awful lot of news. Contrary to the official narrative, we're rebutting, we're refuting

00:08:26.060 the official line all the time. They can't have that. And because we don't take Justin Trudeau's

00:08:31.280 bailout money, he hasn't been able to buy us off or buy our silence. So I fear they're going to try

00:08:37.120 and come for us in some other way, like the big tech companies silenced Donald Trump by just banning

00:08:42.440 him. Like they silenced the new app called Parler, just shutting it down, smashing every company that

00:08:48.820 did business with it. So of course, Justin Trudeau is going to have a spring election.

00:08:54.860 Here's an aggregator of every public opinion poll in Canada in recent weeks and months.

00:08:59.780 Now this is from the CBC's website, but it really isn't the CBC's opinion. It's just them

00:09:05.320 compiling the work of other pollsters. And you can see the polls for weeks, for months.

00:09:11.900 The polls have all said the same thing with remarkable uniformity.

00:09:15.560 The liberals are going to win. The only question is how big. Pretty much a 50-50 chance of Trudeau

00:09:22.940 either getting a majority or a minority. Less than 10% chance of the conservatives winning

00:09:28.480 and only with a minority. Now again, this isn't really the opinion of the CBC. It's what these

00:09:34.200 polls would suggest if you aggregate them. Now things can change in an election campaign.

00:09:40.440 Events matter. But you really think they're going to change? Has the new conservative leader Aaron O'Toole

00:09:48.080 put together a battle plan and a team to execute that plan? Well, he has something called a shadow

00:09:54.220 cabinet, right? With official critics for different subjects, right? But as we showed you with that

00:09:58.940 simple quiz, his front bench has pretty much been invisible this past year. That was the quiz. Can you

00:10:05.700 name, without Googling it, the health minister? Can you name the environment minister? Can you name

00:10:10.800 the minister of other things in the news, the foreign minister, the defense minister? Very few

00:10:15.280 people can, which goes to the fact they're not getting the message out. Here's Michelle Rempel,

00:10:20.180 the health critic. I had to Google that. Take a listen to this.

00:10:23.100 I'm going to be totally upfront with you guys. I spent Christmas alone in Calgary.

00:10:27.840 It was a really hard decision to make. I didn't get to see my family at Christmas.

00:10:34.560 I miss my husband. He's in Oklahoma. But I knew if I went down to Oklahoma, I knew that I would have

00:10:44.700 vultuous CBC reporters reporting on my whereabouts, saying that I was a bad example to the Canadian

00:10:51.420 public. And I knew I couldn't go. So it's a personal complaint that although she has a six-figure

00:10:58.040 income, and she's recording that from home, she's complaining that she can't actually skedaddle 0.98

00:11:03.140 off to the United States to be with her family there, because she's worried she's going to be

00:11:08.040 caught and embarrassed. So she wants to go. And she's letting you know she wants to go, but she's

00:11:12.920 worried about being caught. So she told us what she actually wants to do secretly. So she doesn't want

00:11:18.740 to live under the rules that the rest of us have to live in. And certainly she doesn't want to stay

00:11:23.400 here and fight. She wants to go to the States. Now, some might expect her to actually fight given her 0.99

00:11:29.040 job title. It's her job, which is paying her six figures plus endless perks and expense accounts. 1.00

00:11:36.380 She is the health critic for the conservative opposition. But she just wants to go to the U.S. 0.97

00:11:43.500 during the lockdown. How about stay and fight? Look, I want to go to the U.S. too. Millions of the rest of

00:11:47.820 us. Want to go somewhere nice and warm, where you don't have to wear a mask, where you can go to a

00:11:51.420 restaurant. But she is actually the only person in all of Canada called official opposition critic

00:11:58.500 for health, which should tell you your job. Oppose the government on matters of health,

00:12:04.960 the pandemic. But instead of fighting, she wants to run away and only because she's worried she'll be

00:12:11.100 caught doesn't she go. This is not very inspiring. Come on, we're going to get slaughtered in this next

00:12:17.740 election. And by we, I mean the opposition to Trudeau, anyone who's worried about him. He's

00:12:23.240 going to get a majority this time. Although I'm not really sure what he would do differently with

00:12:28.620 the majority, as opposed to what he's doing now. I mean, has he been stopped with any of his plans

00:12:33.980 now? He has us all in a state of emergency now. Parliament barely functions now. It's borrowing what,

00:12:41.180 a billion dollars a day to spend now. Massive sweetheart contracts to liberal insiders

00:12:46.560 now. A totally lapdog media now. Really, what would Justin Trudeau do with a majority that he can't do

00:12:54.940 with his minority now? A few things, the parliament, the committees looking into ethics, they would be

00:13:01.900 even more toothless finding out his own corruption, his own ethics, like the WE charity in the SNC

00:13:07.540 lab land. He'd control the ethics committee about things like that, his secret vacations.

00:13:15.060 But really, he's never apologized. He's never admitted doing anything wrong. He just keeps

00:13:19.200 operating. He pays his $500 ethics fine and moves on. It's worked for him his whole life. Why would

00:13:25.560 he stop now? I think he'd do more in the way of civil liberty squashing if he had a majority. His MPs,

00:13:32.280 more or less, are calling for conservatives to be labeled terrorists and extremists and violent

00:13:37.800 people now. That's enough to scare Aaron O'Toole, apparently. I mean, just hours after we published

00:13:43.700 our email interview with O'Toole yesterday in the morning, O'Toole then told the Globe and Mail

00:13:49.040 that he wouldn't have anything more to do with us. Why? What happened in those few hours? Did we

00:13:54.540 misquote him? No, we didn't. Did we do something wrong? Of course not. We ran the interview verbatim.

00:14:00.640 It was a good interview. I thought he looked good in it. He panicked, though, because the fancy

00:14:05.940 people, who are also the mean people, told him that they would call him a terrorist or a Nazi or

00:14:12.680 whatever if he didn't disown us, even though he just did that interview with us, which is pretty

00:14:16.680 weird. I mean, we're a media company. We don't really need the endorsement of politicians. It's

00:14:22.600 sort of the opposite. Normally, politicians try to get the endorsement of media, except the media is

00:14:27.260 completely bought and sold in Canada already. They're all for Trudeau. So for O'Toole to say

00:14:31.780 he's not going to give us his endorsement, that doesn't make a lot of sense. It's sort of upside

00:14:35.100 down. Now, we will keep reporting the news as we always do. We really do good work during elections,

00:14:41.120 if I may say so myself, and we'll do an even better job this time, given our expanded team.

00:14:46.440 We've got new reporters now. We've got Drea in Vancouver. We've got Andrew and Tamara in Ontario.

00:14:52.660 We're looking to hire in Montreal and Ottawa. I'm excited about things. And obviously, we still

00:14:59.180 think that Aaron O'Toole winning is better than Justin Trudeau winning. We just don't think that's

00:15:04.900 very likely. And after O'Toole showed how quickly and pathetically he caves into the media party,

00:15:11.220 the mean girls on Twitter, well, I really don't think O'Toole needs to worry about us. I think he

00:15:16.480 needs to worry about his own party's base, which is surely demoralized. If you cave in so quickly,

00:15:23.600 you're not ready for a campaign. I'd expect more from a military man. I won't tell you any names,

00:15:30.560 but I can assure you that today I have received a large number of messages from very senior

00:15:35.240 conservatives, even in O'Toole's own staff, who say they're flabbergasted by his complete surrender

00:15:42.360 to the media party. I mean, forget about O'Toole's repeated promises to stand up to cancel culture.

00:15:48.180 Now he's in charge of cancel culture. He's trying to cancel us. I don't think that's going to happen

00:15:52.700 though, mate, because he's worried the media party will cancel him if he doesn't cancel us.

00:15:57.480 He can't cancel us. I promise you we will still be here fighting hard the day after the next federal

00:16:04.600 election. I'm not so sure if O'Toole will be. Not that I don't like the guy. I mean, he seems like a good

00:16:10.360 enough guy, but he really hasn't done anything since becoming leader and neither of most of his

00:16:18.120 critics other than complaining about not being able to escape the lockdown. And at the first whiff of

00:16:23.020 gunpowder yesterday, they surrendered to the media party about us for no reason. Come on. Well, I think

00:16:29.540 we know how it's going to go every day during the campaign. I mean, really, is something going to

00:16:33.380 change now? So we're getting ready for the election, just like we did last time. We'll be covering the

00:16:39.960 campaign everywhere we can, including the leaders' debates, even if we have to go to the federal

00:16:44.300 court to get an order to let us in again. And unlike O'Toole's critics, you won't have trouble

00:16:51.060 finding out where we stand on Justin Trudeau or his policies, will you? Stay with us for more.

00:16:57.960 Well, as you know, one of our favorite things to do is to talk to conservative authors or authors with

00:17:15.500 the other side of the story, people who have a dissident opinion. Tragically, it's very rare in

00:17:21.940 our media literature landscape. But what a pleasure to have such a thoughtful book published today

00:17:29.040 against the establishment opinion on COVID-19. The title of the new book is called COVID-19,

00:17:37.620 The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic. And that's exactly what it is, isn't it? And it's published by

00:17:45.460 the Frontier Center for Public Policy, one of the good guys, that's for sure. It's co-authored with

00:17:50.300 Marco Navarro-Gini and Dr. Barry Cooper, who joins us today via Zoom. Dr. Cooper, great to see you

00:17:59.120 again. Congratulations on this book. And I have to say, I'm a little bit surprised that Amazon is even

00:18:05.760 letting you sell it because they have censored other books that take a skeptical view of the

00:18:11.980 pandemic moral panic. Well, what we do, I mean, we footnote things up the union. We got, I don't know

00:18:20.060 how many hundred footnotes. So it's actually not meant to be a polemical discussion of all of the

00:18:26.820 misinformation and kind of goofiness around COVID-19. It really is a scholarly analysis.

00:18:34.020 And we use, believe it or not, a certified lefty intellectual, Michel Foucault, to provide the main

00:18:43.800 conceptual lens through which we look at all this stuff, namely his concept of what he, in French,

00:18:50.340 he calls it pouvoir savoir, power knowledge. And that, we think, is the central issue in all of this

00:18:57.880 nonsense that's been going on. Well, you talk about an idea that was popularized about 50 years ago

00:19:04.220 in a book written by Stanley Cohen called Folk Devils and Moral Panics. And right away, I think

00:19:15.620 you're getting into it because it's an emotional thing. It's a, it's a faith thing. It's a superstition

00:19:20.560 thing without even, I have not read that book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. But right away, I'm thinking

00:19:26.840 the madness of the Salem witch trials. I'm thinking of madnesses, maybe even some anti-Semitic pogroms.

00:19:34.500 Oh, the Jews have poisoned our well. We have to get rid of the Jews. Like, or some of the superstitions 1.00

00:19:40.740 that grew up around the great plague, the Black Death. I think that there's a great psychological fear

00:19:47.880 over things. I mean, listen, COVID-19 is a real disease and it has killed around 17,000 Canadians.

00:19:54.680 But I point out that the flu on any given year kills 8,500. So it's, it's twice as bad as an

00:20:00.200 average flu year. But this is not the apocalypse that our political class says it is. Or am I wrong?

00:20:06.220 No, that's exactly right. When the guy who is a sociologist in the UK, you're probably too young

00:20:13.800 to remember the mods and the rockers. I remember them. I didn't realize until I started studying this

00:20:20.000 stuff in graduate school. That in the UK, this was almost seen as the, as the end of the world as

00:20:26.840 we know it. A bunch of young men, mainly, going down to Brighton and fighting each other. This was

00:20:34.160 supposed to be some kind of apocalyptic event that would end civilization in the UK. Well, that

00:20:40.780 attitude can be transferred to all of the examples, the historical examples you just cited.

00:20:45.900 And it is certainly important in the COVID panic. I want to, I just have your blurb here, the book,

00:20:52.160 and I want to read it because it's really in bullet point form. And this really, I think you've grasped

00:20:58.440 the way of thinking here. Let me read just 50 words. The process occurs in stages. One, an event or

00:21:07.080 perhaps a person is defined as a threat, perhaps only a vague threat to existing values, traditions,

00:21:12.480 or interests. Two, the event is simplified and presented in the mass and now social media in a

00:21:18.800 stereotypical way. Three, moral barricades are manned by editors, politicians, experts, and other

00:21:24.660 right-thinking people and socially authorized knowers. Four, ways of coping with the disturbance

00:21:31.820 are developed. And eventually, five, the public profile of the disturbance, event, individual,

00:21:36.980 et cetera, declines and is forgotten or is retained as a memory and as a diffuse or potential threat.

00:21:43.840 The folk devil. I really think that's the thinking going on. And I think people wearing masks, 0.99

00:21:50.140 it's like they're maybe in the past they would have worn a garlic around their neck to be immune from a

00:21:57.060 Dracula or even a religious, you know, rosary or something. I think the mask is a quasi-religious

00:22:04.100 pagan symbol of, oh, I'm a believer. I'm against the folk devil. Be gone, folk devil. Be gone. Oh, 0.99

00:22:10.800 you're not wearing your mask? You must be in league with the folk devil. 1.00

00:22:15.520 Yes, exactly. The number of people who have, I just encountered them in stores, some of whom are

00:22:22.920 wearing masks, some of whom are not, have said exactly that, that their customers who come in

00:22:29.380 who are not wearing masks, they are treated by other customers as if they're somehow, you know,

00:22:36.220 infected. Those who are think of themselves as being morally superior. What they, they don't seem

00:22:43.400 to get the symbolism. I mean, the whole point of a mask is to shut you up. You know, the experimental

00:22:51.020 evidence on the effect of masks is, let's say, mixed. Nobody wants to talk about that. So you 1.00

00:22:57.380 get these authoritative doctors saying one thing and other equally certified doctors saying other

00:23:04.620 things. And so normal people just get confused and they say, well, I guess I get it better do what

00:23:10.200 everybody else is doing. And that's why they do it. One of the interesting things in the last month,

00:23:15.840 doctor, is how many of this official class, you talked about the official knowers, the high priests

00:23:23.820 of this moral panic, how many of them have in their personal and sometimes private and even sneaky

00:23:31.880 conduct, have exempted themselves from the rituals that they command us to do. I'm talking about

00:23:38.600 politicians going away on a sunny beach here in Ontario. You had one doctor take five

00:23:45.160 vacations. Now he just gets a $1 million severance. A police chief who's enforcing the laws. He goes to

00:23:53.360 the beach. And by the way, I'm, I'm all for going to warm and sunny beaches, but these are the enforcers

00:23:58.460 of the new austerity. And I think this is how it always is, is that all these inquisitors, all these

00:24:06.980 investigators, they don't, A, they don't believe in it. And B, they're the biggest hypocrites of all. 0.99

00:24:12.580 What effect, if any, do you think that this almost daily discovery of lockdown cheaters, 0.97

00:24:19.760 and I'm only using that word for the lockdown enforcers who cheat, you and I are normal humans

00:24:24.360 trying to live our lives. But when an enforcer is caught lockdown cheating, what do you think the

00:24:29.160 impact of that is, doctor? I would say that the first impact is that nobody says we're all in this

00:24:35.040 together anymore. You remember that slogan, a meaningless slogan. We haven't heard that lately

00:24:40.640 because everybody in this country and in most other countries know we're not all in this together,

00:24:46.780 particularly when these enforcers and other authorized important people go off to Hawaii or

00:24:53.540 to the West Indies or something like that. We've never really been in it together. Everyone has known

00:24:59.980 from at least last March, probably from February, that the effect of this virus on human populations

00:25:08.380 is much, is differentiated. I mean, old people who are sick are the ones who get it and have serious 0.98

00:25:16.260 effects. And then there are huge problems with the statistics. Do you die with or from COVID?

00:25:23.020 There's been so much evidence about people who die with it are diagnosed as having died from it.

00:25:30.980 And people know this. And so they simply distrust, and I would say quite properly, distrust these

00:25:37.300 self-styled authorities because they are not really authoritative. They refuse to acknowledge what they

00:25:43.860 don't know. And the rest of us can figure that out pretty quickly. Yeah. I mean, the absurd case of someone

00:25:50.000 falling off a ladder, dying from falling off a ladder, and it was tagged as a COVID-19 death.

00:25:57.200 So how do we get out of this? Because I think that things are getting worse, not better in 2021.

00:26:03.520 I mean, I recall, and I point out that the mandatory masks were not brought in until August, September,

00:26:11.380 when the months after the pandemic peaked in early, mid-April. So it all, the masks all came in

00:26:21.640 together in August, September. And now the vaccine, I'm certain we're going to have vaccine passports,

00:26:27.340 freedom passports, flying passport, whatever you want to call them. I think things are about to get

00:26:34.300 tougher. And I think all these previous waves of civil liberties violations, those were just to

00:26:41.000 condition us to, I mean, now they've got curfews in Quebec, and they're talking about it in Ontario.

00:26:46.960 What's the end game here? Like, what's next? Is this how it's going to be forever?

00:26:53.060 That's a very good question. It would take a kind of responsibility among our politicians,

00:26:58.580 for which there is absolutely no evidence at the present, for them to start behaving responsibly.

00:27:04.580 I don't think that's going to happen. They, I mean, Lord Acton did not say absolute power

00:27:09.600 makes you more generous. It is a very corrupting thing in terms of our entire political system.

00:27:17.000 And it divides in terms of the lack of trust that ordinary Canadians have for their political leaders.

00:27:23.060 It's not going to end well. I can't see how our politicians are going to actually use some common

00:27:29.660 sense for a change. They certainly haven't in the last year. You know, I'm pretty sure we're heading

00:27:35.120 into a spring election. Justin Trudeau shuffled his cabinet. They're making announcements that sound

00:27:40.120 like they're clearing the decks for a campaign. The media is in almost complete support of the lockdown.

00:27:46.880 There's a few skeptics out there, but I really think they're an anomaly. Opposition parties are

00:27:54.320 either silent or egging on the governments to do more. The only government in Canada that has tried

00:28:02.440 to put on the brakes a bit is Jason Kenney in Alberta, and he was undermined by his own caucus,

00:28:08.980 and the media has just been pillaring him. I can't see any organized opposition to this. Doctors

00:28:15.640 who speak out are getting complaints to the College of Physicians and Surgeons. I see no institution

00:28:22.840 that's acting as a brake here. I see a lot acting as an accelerator, but none acting as a brake.

00:28:30.100 Yeah, I agree entirely. On the other side, reality is still what it is. And, you know, eventually,

00:28:38.480 reality, as all of the climate change guys say, reality gets the last innings at bat. I mean,

00:28:46.780 we'll see. I suspect, you know, I'm not in the business of predicting, but I suspect that there

00:28:53.040 may be a sufficient number of Canadians who say this, we have a technical term in political science,

00:28:58.420 the short firm is BS. This is so much BS that we're not going to take it anymore. But that will lead to

00:29:05.540 some very serious, I would say, political disorders. But I can't see any other way out.

00:29:13.640 We're talking to Dr. Barry Cooper, the author of the new book, COVID-19,

00:29:17.640 The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic. You know, I don't wear a mask. I sometimes wear a mask

00:29:27.620 exemption button just to stop scolds from coming up to me. I have noticed in the last two months

00:29:33.780 a souring of the public mood, whereas people never used to remark or anything. Now I see people with

00:29:41.720 masks on that are either not wearing them properly or clearly hate wearing them coming up to me in

00:29:47.560 scolding me. And I think it's because they have a cognitive dissonance. They hate the masks.

00:29:54.960 They're irritated by it. I think their own use of the mask is in a manner that indicates they don't

00:30:02.540 really believe in it. But they're saying, if I have to do this, you have to also. It's not that

00:30:08.480 they're actually worried about the virus. They're just saying, how come you're not complying like I am?

00:30:13.420 There's a sourness there I didn't notice until a few months ago. I don't know. It reminds me of

00:30:22.140 how people in the Soviet Union used to live. There was your public face and then there's your secret

00:30:28.760 honest talk that you would have only with true friends and close family members. You had a public

00:30:34.400 facade and then a private facade. You always have to worry about informants and snitches, which by the

00:30:39.740 way we're seeing again. I wonder if an if all the compliant mask wearers and people cheering along,

00:30:47.420 if they secretly know this whole thing is a scam. I don't know. I just sense a sourness out there

00:30:53.660 against people who are not believers. What comes after the sourness and these sort of laser

00:31:00.560 looks of disgust when you're not wearing your mask are jokes. The Soviet Union was famous 0.92

00:31:08.320 for its very funny and completely critical of the establishment jokes. So when, say, Teresa Tam gets

00:31:18.520 ridiculed, that's a good sign. When the Prime Minister gets ridiculed because of this, that will be a good

00:31:25.700 sign. And I suspect it will be coming fairly soon. You know what? I take your point. And of course,

00:31:31.220 jokes are, I mean, the Ayatollah says there are no jokes in Islam. He hated jokes. Stalin, I mean,

00:31:39.120 he sent, I think Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag for writing a joke about Stalin's mustache.

00:31:46.200 Yes. But both of those stories make the point that, yeah, jokes are a sign of rebellion. Was it Orwell who

00:31:53.340 said every joke is a little revolution? I think it was him. But that didn't stop Solzhenitsyn from being

00:31:58.260 sent to the gulag. So we can make jokes. But as they're, as they're still cracking down on us,

00:32:04.340 as they're giving us $6,000 curfew fines in Montreal, you can joke about that gallows humor,

00:32:11.000 black humor. But the jackboot is still there. If you're banned from Twitter, if you're banned from

00:32:18.080 flying on an airplane, you can make all the jokes you like, but it doesn't make the situation much

00:32:21.940 better, though. That's absolutely correct. This form of tyranny is what Hannah Arendt called 0.95

00:32:29.880 administrative tyranny. And she said something very interesting about it. It is the worst kind

00:32:36.700 of tyranny because the desperate measure of tyrannicide is not available. It is just an

00:32:44.120 administrative blob about which most of us are. We can be ironic. We can make jokes and so on.

00:32:51.660 But we still have to put up with the mask police. We still have to put up with dirty looks when we go

00:32:57.260 into co-op and we're not wearing a mask. But, you know, you have to do what you have to do, I guess.

00:33:03.640 Yeah. I mean, listen, I don't mind the dirty looks and I don't even mind the scolding. I assure you,

00:33:09.060 I give better than I get. But it's the cops with guns and tasers. Like it's the cops screaming at

00:33:17.740 Ocean Weisblatt on that outdoor hockey arena in Calgary and threatening to taser him. That's what

00:33:25.000 I don't know how to deal with. And I'm worried that there will be much worse things before things

00:33:31.160 get better. In the meantime, Dr. Cooper, congratulations on your book. We'll have a link

00:33:36.700 to it underneath this video. And I think I'd like to send this video out to our viewers across Canada

00:33:42.880 because I think they'd be very interested in hearing your thoughtful points. The book is called

00:33:46.960 COVID-19, The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic. I think that's such a helpful way of looking at it.

00:33:54.560 Yes, it is a real disease that has killed twice the annual death toll of the annual flu. It is. But

00:34:02.120 the civil liberties restrictions, the diminution of parliament,

00:34:10.300 the overweening powers of the police, that has nothing to do with the virus. That has everything

00:34:14.880 to do with, as Dr. Cooper says, absolute power. Thanks for your time today. I wish you good luck

00:34:21.160 with this book. And we'll have to have you back on to talk more about this in the future.

00:34:26.280 Thanks, Ezra. All right. You take care. There you have it. Dr. Barry Cooper,

00:34:31.060 co-author of the book with Marco Navarrogini. And you can get it at the link below. Stay with us.

00:34:36.460 On my show last night, Paul writes, conservative party members let the media party choose who is

00:34:52.820 and isn't electable. So we get controlled opposition. Canada dies in weakness. You know,

00:35:01.320 I was watching this whole thing unfold yesterday. And it was like some Twitter chatterboxes gossips that

00:35:07.940 managed to provoke O'Toole's communications director in making it a big deal. Like, seriously,

00:35:13.840 if she would have just focused on doing her real work, rather than wasting time on Twitter,

00:35:18.000 it would have been a nothing. Who let some Twitter trolls command their whole day and turn 1.00

00:35:24.000 it into a two-day story? I'm so embarrassed for them. Nellis writes, big tech has now become the

00:35:30.840 ministry of truth, it seems. Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. So therefore,

00:35:35.440 whoever controls the medium controls the messages on it. You are so right. You know, it's funny.

00:35:40.920 Twitter was starting to censor candidates in Uganda. Apparently, there's some political thing

00:35:46.640 going on. Maybe it's an election. I haven't followed it. So Twitter was trying to do their

00:35:49.900 moves in Uganda. And today, the Ugandan president said, no, we're just going to shut you down on

00:35:56.940 Facebook too. And look at this tweet from Twitter. Oh, how dare you censor us? Do you forget that you

00:36:05.020 just censored the president of the United States last week? And they're outraged at censorship.

00:36:11.100 You know what? I'm on Team Uganda in this one. Bruce writes, the interview with Calvin Robinson

00:36:18.040 shows us how dangerous these militant leftists are to freedom. It's true to that those who love

00:36:25.040 deplatforming others might end up the same way themselves. It reminds me of Orwell's 1984. It's

00:36:30.740 a book worth rereading. You know what? I should reread it. I like to read it every five years.

00:36:36.540 Probably time to read it again. That's our show for today. Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us

00:36:43.920 here, the Rebel World Headquarters, and we're around the world, but Canada's the big fight,

00:36:49.020 you know. Good night, and keep fighting for free.

00:36:51.840 Thank you.

00:37:04.320 Thank you.

00:37:06.420 Thank you.

00:37:06.500 Thank you.

Rebel News Podcast - January 13, 2021

A spring election is coming, and Justin Trudeau will win again

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