China kneecaps billionaire businessman Jack Ma — and President Xi wants everyone to know it
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Summary
A company in China was set to have the world s largest IPO, the largest release of shares to the public in the history of the world, until the dictator Xi Jinping stopped it. And I ll tell you why, and its incredible story, and a cautionary tale about any Westerner who thinks he can work with China.
Transcript
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Hello, my rebels. Today I bring you news of fintech, financial technology from China.
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That's a change of pace. Well, you know, there's a company in China called the Ant Group,
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like the little bug, that was set to have the world's largest IPO, the largest
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release of shares to the public in the history of the world. Until the dictator Xi Jinping stopped
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it. I'll tell you what, and I'll tell you why, and its incredible story and a cautionary tale
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about any Westerner who thinks he can work with China. You've got to hear this story. That's
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ahead. But before that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus. That's
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the video version of these podcasts. It's just eight bucks a month, 80 bucks for the whole year.
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You can see that's two months for free if you buy the whole year. You also get weekly shows
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from David Menzies and Sheila Gunn-Reed. Just go to rebelnews.com and click subscribe. I'd
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be grateful if you would, because we rely on you, you know. We don't take any money from
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Trudeau like most reporters do. All right, here's today's podcast.
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Tonight, China's dictator swats down China's richest billionaire. It's November 13th,
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's
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For 15 years, I've been following the fool's errand of Western companies trying to make money
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in China. I went there myself a little more than a decade ago, and you could see how dangerous it was
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to Western companies who are used to the rule of law and the sanctity of contracts and the idea of
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property rights, especially intellectual property. There were official government tourist stores
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that sold nothing but counterfeit clothing brands. The government tourism buses would drive
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Western tourists there as a destination, as in they weren't hiding this theft. I was there when a
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new superhero movie had just been released in North America just weeks earlier. You could already buy
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a DVD bootleg copy of it on the street for 50 cents. There were some Western brands there officially,
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especially restaurant chains, Conducky Fried Chicken, Starbucks. And as a tourist, you're sort of drawn to
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them because the food's familiar, and maybe you want to use a clean Western-style bathroom. But you soon
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realized there were entire fake Starbucks stores there. Entire stores were counterfeits. I like what
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I saw with some of those Western companies. They were teaching skills and habits to Chinese workers that
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everyone in America and Canada ought to learn too, frankly. Personal responsibility, showing up to work
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on time, etc. I remember being in a Haagen-Dazs store in Beijing and overhearing a job interview, and it was
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basically teaching concepts like respecting the customer, handling criticism, food safety, being on
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time, taking responsibility. I think we need to teach those things here as much as over there. But I found
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it admirable what these companies were trying to do. But here's the thing. It's impossible to succeed in
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China for a Western company. It is impossible. In fact, the better you are, the less chance of success you
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have. At best, the Chinese Communist Party will skim away all of your profits. Your business partners
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in the Communist Party will take so much from you there's nothing left. Or they'll just steal
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everything. Just all of it. Let me read to you from an article that I wrote back in 2007. You know,
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I used to write the back page column for Canadian Lawyer Magazine. Can you believe it? So this story I
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wrote way back then was called The Outward Appearance of a Capitalist Country. Can I read a little bit of
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it? I can't believe I've managed to dig this column up. Here it goes. Danone isn't used to getting roughed up.
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The French company is the world's largest yogurt maker and owns Evian, the world's best-selling
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mineral water, too. Then it got the bright idea to invest in China. Danone teamed up with Chinese
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beverage manufacturer Wahaha Group Company Limited. That's named after the way kids supposedly laugh.
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Wahaha. That's a great name for a company, isn't it? Danone poured in money and Western technology
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Wahaha supplied the Chinese credentials. The joint venture is now Chinese largest beverage company.
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This is me writing back in 2007. So, so far, so great. But it all began to unravel earlier this year.
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Danone alleges that Zong Ching-ho, the founder of Wahaha and chairman of the joint venture,
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get this, had set up 20 of his own rogue companies producing the exact same products as the joint
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venture using the joint venture suppliers and distributors by keeping all the money for himself.
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It's part of the reason why Zong is now the 23rd richest man in China, according to Forbes.
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So that was what I was writing 13 years ago. Can you believe that?
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So the Chinese partner, he just set up 20 factories making the same stuff.
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He got the ingredients and the recipes. Now the French were paying for the marketing and
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the know-how. He just set up parallel companies just to take all the money. Let me get back to my column.
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At first, Danone offered to pay Zong to make his counterfeit brands part of their joint venture,
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offering more than $500 million. Zong scoffed. So Danone filed a lawsuit in California. Danone might
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even win, but with its bottling plants and marketing in China, that's a period of victory.
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Yeah, you can't enforce an American ruling in China. Good luck with that. I won't read too much more.
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It's just amazing to read this from what I was thinking back in 2007. Here's a little more.
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Maybe Danone should have seen it coming. One of Wahaha's signature brands is Future Cola,
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marketed in cans and bottles indistinguishable from Coca-Cola, with identical colors and styles.
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Ansley quotes Cao Xi Yuan, the father of Chinese bankruptcy law, on the fate of foreign litigants.
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It is absolutely impossible for a foreign party to win a case against a Chinese party in a Chinese
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court. Judicial exchanges by Canadian judges are just exotic tourist junkets for the Westerners
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and a PR fig lease for the Chinese government. So, if you're the CEO of a mega company like Danone,
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you think you're pretty smart. And you are. But you're bringing a knife to a gunfight when you go
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to China. You know, Disney found out the same thing recently when it worked with the Chinese
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Communist Party to make a live-action remake of their film Mulan in China, in Xinjiang province.
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They were so deferential to the Chinese communists, they even gave a shout-out to the secret police
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and security services that run Xinjiang's concentration camps for the Uyghur Muslims there.
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Seriously, Disney put them in the credits. They were saying thank you to the secret police.
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They clearly made the mathematical decision that it was worth sucking up to China,
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as in the Communist Party there, with the movie Mulan. Because if it had Xi Jinping's political
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blessing, it could make some serious money in China. I mean, forget about the American market.
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Imagine a billion-plus Chinese people watching a Disney-quality movie set in China and buying all
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the junk. Alas, something went wrong. Someone lost face. Someone's nose was out of joint. Someone
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didn't get the bribe or pay off. Whatever. Who knows? Because despite bending the knee and bowing
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deeply and thanking their secret police, China disparaged the movie and China just dissed it.
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I don't know why, but it was incredible. You saw Hollywood prostrate itself before the tyrant,
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violate everything that America stands for, to ingratiate itself, and it backfired still.
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Couldn't happen to a nicer group of people, nicer group of appeasers. Same thing with the NBA.
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They'll take a knee to protest who knows what in America, those millionaires playing for billionaires.
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But they won't say a peep of the Uyghurs or Hong Kong. I look forward to them being scorched by
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China, too. But look at this. If the stories about Danone and Disney don't shock you, look at this.
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Jack Ma is China's richest man. He's worth over $61 billion U.S. Great entrepreneur, great capitalist,
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tech and finance and business and cell phones and internet amazing. And his company called Ant,
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as in the little bug, was about to have the world's largest initial public offering, IPO.
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That means he was going to list his private company on the stock exchange and let people buy shares in
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it. That's important for a lot of reasons, not just for the company to get access to capital,
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but for the whole industry to have some public disclosure, to learn about Ant, to have some sort
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of oversight on the company. When you're in a stock exchange, it makes your company have to comply
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with certain rules. Obviously, there's a lot more corruption in China than in America.
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But being on a stock market brings some rules and oversight. It's healthy, I think. And I don't
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think Jack Ma was looking to scam people like so many stock market players in China do. He's a rich
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man who was building what he thought was his answer to the banking system, his answer to PayPal and
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Facebook combined, really. And it was set to be the world's largest IPO, as in it would raise more money
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than any deal in history. Put aside politics. I mean, wouldn't you want to own a slice of the Chinese
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version of Amazon and Facebook? But let me read this from the Wall Street Journal.
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Here's the story. I'm going to read for about two minutes. China's President Xi Jinping personally
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scuttled Jack Ma's Ant IPO. Senior government leaders were furious about wealthy entrepreneurs'
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criticisms of regulators. Rebuke was the culmination of years of tense relations. All right, here's the
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story. Chinese President Xi Jinping personally made the decision to halt the initial public offering
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of Ant Group, which would have been the world's largest, biggest, after controlling shareholder
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Jack Ma infuriated government leaders, according to Chinese officials with knowledge of the matter.
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The rebuke was the culmination of years of tense relations between China's most celebrated
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entrepreneur and a government uneasy about his influence in the rapid growth of the digital
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payments behemoth he controlled. Mr. Xi, for his part, has displayed a diminishing tolerance for big
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private businesses that have amassed capital and influence, and are perceived to have challenged both
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his rule and the stability created by factions in the country's newly assertive Communist Party.
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In a speech on October 24th, days before the financial technology giant was set to go public,
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Mr. Ma cited Mr. Xi's words in what top government officials saw as an effort to burnish his own image
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and tarnish that of regulators, these people said.
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At the event in Shanghai, Mr. Ma, the country's richest man, quoted Mr. Xi saying,
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success does not have to come from me, unquote. As a result, the tech executive said he wanted to help
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solve China's financial problems through innovation. Mr. Ma bluntly criticized the government's
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increasingly tight financial regulation for holding back technology development, part of a long-running
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battle between Ant and its overseers. Mr. Xi, who read government reports about the speech,
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and other senior leaders were furious. According to the officials familiar with the decision-making,
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Mr. Xi ordered Chinese regulators to investigate and all but shut down Ant's initial public offering,
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the official said, setting in motion a series of events that led to the deal's suspension on November 3rd.
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Investors around the world already had committed to paying more than $34 billion for Ant's shares.
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It isn't clear whether it was Mr. Xi or another government official who first suggested the shutdown.
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Yeah, I mean, the company would be worth a third of a billion dollars, because that $34 billion or
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whatever, that was just the value of the sliver that was being sold. So the market cap was a third
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of a billion. But if you said something mean about the dictator, or even just something presumptuous,
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which is what I think was going on here, well, that's what matters. That's all that counts in
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China. Don't let the dictator lose face. I'll read some more.
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Now, Xi doesn't care about if you made any of those rich lists or not, said a Chinese official.
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What he cares about is what you do after you get rich, and whether you're aligning your interests
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with the state's interests, unquote. All right, that was from the Wall Street Journal. Great piece
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there. Here's how Bloomberg described the same news.
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China's move to abruptly halt. The world's biggest stock market debut sends global investors a clear
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message. Any financial opening will only be done on terms that benefit President Xi Jinping
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and the Communist Party. Policymakers in Beijing shocked the investment world on Tuesday by suspending
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an initial public offering by Ant Group Company, a fintech company owned by billionaire Jack Ma,
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China's second richest man, apparently. The decision came just two days before shares were set to trade
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in a listing that attracted at least, oh my God, three trillion orders from individual investors
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that can't be in American money. That's probably Hong Kong dollar. The timing of the decision showed
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once again that for Xi and the party, financial and political stability take precedence over ceding
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control of the economy, especially to a private company. Yeah, they kneecapped their greatest
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entrepreneur, their greatest businessman, their startup master, their wealth creator,
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their Bill Cates plus Mark Zuckerberg plus Jeff Bezos, their top guy. They just threw him off the cliff
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on the eve of his great achievement. Why? Because they can and they want you to know it.
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Imagine being a Western company, a CEO in New York or London or Toronto,
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and thinking that you can outsmart or out-navigate China, that you've got an inside track. At best,
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you'll be Denon'd or Disney'd, or maybe you'll be stepped on like an ant. You know what? Come to
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think of it, I heartily recommend that Facebook and Google and YouTube and Twitter and all our
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banksters put their eggs in the Chinese basket. Go do business with them. Invest it all. Bet it all,
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you crooks. And may you get the result you so richly deserve. What a shame that shareholders will pay
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the price, but still. Trouble is, it's not just businesses who are getting skinned alive by Xi Jinping
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in the commies. It's foolish politicians too. We're quite proud. The prime minister has been given a
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fond nickname in China. He is called Pudou, which I believe means potato. And he's, I can't say the
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Chinese word. It's young, Pudou, little potato, because his father, Pierre Elliott, Pudou, was
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senior potato. Yeah. Watch Xi Jinping eat her alive. Stay with us for more.
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Welcome back. I recall that Leslyn Lewis, who had a very strong race for the leadership of the
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Canadian Conservative Party, an accomplished black woman, an immigrant, a lawyer, very thoughtful,
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had a very strong showing. And in the end, the CBC gave her precisely one minute and 45 seconds of
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airtime. Because a strong, thoughtful, black woman, immigrant lawyer, well, that just broke the
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narrative. At the same time, and this was before Kamala Harris was chosen as Biden's vice presidential
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pick, the CBC gave 20 times as much coverage to Kamala Harris, a foreign political candidate who,
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at that point in time, had merely succeeded in losing the Democratic presidential nomination.
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And so it is in the race recently in the United States Congress. Of course, there was the
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mighty presidential election that's still being counted. But across America, there were a new
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bumper crop of Republican women, including young women and minority women, success stories,
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immigrant women from Vietnam, people of Cuban descent. But of course, the attention was focused on
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the left-wing Democrat squad, as they call us. Joining us now via Skype from the West Coast is
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our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor at large of Breitbart.com. Joel, the idea of young, powerful,
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high-energy women being a Republican force, that just confounds the left too much. So they just
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Well, first of all, let me explain my outfit. I'm about to go boxing, take out my frustrations from
00:17:14.460
the week. So this is my sporting hobby. I go and punch some leather a few times a week.
00:17:22.040
But the women in the Republican Party know how to be fighters. And I think one of the reasons that the
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Republican Party is attracting so many talented women and minorities is because Americans like a
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challenge. And when you tell Americans that the Democratic Party is going to set aside certain
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positions, they're going to use identity politics here in California, they're going to reserve
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corporate board seats for people who are historically disadvantaged. That doesn't really motivate people
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to do better, to do more, to break the mold. But the Republicans say, we're not going to do any of
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that. We're just going to judge you as you are. But we're open to anybody who has the talent to
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compete. That ironically produces the kind of freshman class that Republicans are going to arrive
00:18:06.620
in Washington with in January. The 10 seats that Republicans have won so far in the House elections
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of 2020 are 100 percent women and minority candidates. And that 100 percent statistic is going to stick
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around because there is a Korean American woman who is about to win her race in Orange County,
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California. She's ahead by several thousand votes. It's probably going to be called in the next few
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days if it hasn't been this morning already. So Republicans are attracting talented women, talented
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minorities who want to make their mark on American politics and don't want to be reduced to their
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identity, don't want to be handed a set of talking points by a Democratic Party that essentially treats
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them as if they are functionaries carrying out a kind of representative role, but not really seen as
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future leaders. It's interesting that Kamala Harris, who is presumably our vice president elect, almost
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never spoke to reporters once during the entire general election campaign. From the time she was
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nominated in mid-August to Election Day, I think she held maybe one or two press briefings. They were all
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very brief, something like 10 minutes or less, and they were all in the presence of Joe Biden. She never
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really sat down with the press for spontaneous, extemporaneous questions. So that's the role that the
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Democratic Party reserves for women and minorities. You basically follow the script and you offer different
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versions of the accusation that the Republicans are racist and greedy and so forth. Whereas Republicans
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don't put any labels on people, they don't hand a script to people, the people who are running in these races,
00:19:50.300
they launch their own campaigns, they've got to raise their own money. If they do very well, they get some interest from
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national Republican Party organizations and donors. But these are all startup candidates. And it's incredible that they've come so
00:20:03.500
far and done so well. But it tells you also that Donald Trump, who may be on his way out as president, has
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diversified the Republican Party by sheer force of example, and against a media and an opposition that
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have constantly referred to him as Adolf Hitler, that are referred to his supporters as neo-Nazis, white
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supremacists, and so forth. Christiane Amanpour was on CNN yesterday, talking about how the Trump presidency
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reminded her of the Nazi regime in 1938 on Kristallnacht. Now, that's a form of Holocaust denial,
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when you reduce the unique suffering of the Holocaust to some kind of ordinary political
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event. That is, kind of, Holocaust denial is recognized as such by scholars in the field.
00:20:51.060
But CNN gets away with it because everything is permissible with regard to Trump. And yet,
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Trump has attracted this outstanding crop of female and minority candidates for the House of
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Representatives. He has, as someone said, longer coattails in defeat than Joe Biden had in victory.
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Yeah. I think a lot of people who are around the world riveted on the presidency, obviously the
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most important part of the election, might be surprised to see this strength. I mean, seriously,
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you've got a controversial president who's been in office for four years. You've had the pandemic
00:21:25.500
spook people. You've had a total war against them by the media. The idea that he would pick up 10 seats
00:21:33.880
four years in is, I think, I mean, that feels surprising to me to believe the vibe that the
00:21:43.360
pollsters and pundits were emitting. You would have thought he would have been crushed. I mean,
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Yeah, no. Every day, I wake up at three or four in the morning and I read the news. And leading up to
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election day, every single day in my inbox, there were two or three stories about how terrible the polls
00:21:59.680
were for Donald Trump. And they were terrible for Republicans. The pollsters were telling us
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Republicans were on track to a massive historic landslide loss. They were going to go down in
00:22:10.880
flames. And Donald Trump was the reason they were going to collapse. In Maine, Susan Collins, who was
00:22:17.820
leading, or sorry, was losing to her opponent, her Democratic opponent in every single poll taken
00:22:24.260
before the election, won quite comfortably on election day and is returning to the Senate.
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And she won, even though Democrats targeted her for supporting Brett Kavanaugh. Now, she ran away
00:22:35.840
from Donald Trump. She distanced herself from Trump, but she was one of the only ones who did.
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Mostly, the Republicans embraced Donald Trump, embraced his voters, embraced what he stood for.
00:22:46.720
And they have defended, the Republicans have defended Senate seats all over the map in places where the
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media said there was going to be a Democratic wave. Democrats were likely to win in North Carolina.
00:22:58.340
They were likely to win in Alaska. I mean, these were all places that the Democrats thought they
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had in the bag. And they were looking forward to a kind of unified government that would be able to
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carry out the excesses of their Democratic socialist agenda, the most progressive agenda in history,
00:23:13.540
as Joe Biden and Barack Obama both boasted, even though they rejected the label socialist.
00:23:18.240
It certainly was a socialist program they ran on, like it or not. Now it all comes down to this
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runoff election. Georgia has a system where if no candidate gets more than 50 percent on election
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day, they have a runoff election between the top two candidates. So by curious circumstance,
00:23:35.840
because one senator had to retire early for medical reasons, we have two runoff elections happening
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in the state of Georgia on January 5th. So the 2020 election really isn't over yet.
00:23:49.740
The Republicans still hold the Senate by a two seat majority. Democrats want to win both of those
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runoffs. If they do, there will be a 50 50 tie. And according to the Constitution, the tie breaking
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vote is the vice president's vote. So Democrats can win both of those runoffs. Then Kamala Harris will
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cast the tie breaking vote, giving control of the Senate effectively to the Democrats. That means they'll
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basically be able to do whatever they want as long as they can hold their caucus together and they
00:24:15.840
will control all the committees. They will be able to ramp through all the judges they want.
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They will end any oversight of the new administration. If you thought the Senate was going to investigate
00:24:24.260
Hunter Biden, all of that is history. If Democrats win both of these runoff elections, Republicans
00:24:29.980
have two very good candidates. The Democrats have two very weak candidates. One of them is a guy named
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John Ossoff, who's never held elected office before. But this would be his third election,
00:24:39.760
essentially, because he came second in the general for the Senate. He also ran unsuccessfully for
00:24:44.840
Congress a couple of years ago in a district he didn't even live in. And then the other guy is
00:24:49.040
this Reverend Raphael Warnock, who is a supporter of Jeremiah Wright, who has radical anti-Israel
00:24:55.840
opinions, who is a far left activist. And so these are weak candidates in the state of Georgia. But
00:25:02.360
Democrats are going to pour money and celebrities and volunteers. They're encouraging people to move to
00:25:06.660
the state to vote there, even though that is probably illegal. So the next stage of this fight
00:25:12.620
for 2020 continues. And it's really going to be a battle for all or nothing for Democrats in Georgia.
00:25:19.660
If they win both of these runoffs, they can run the table in Washington. If they lose, however,
00:25:23.840
they've got to deal with a divided government, Mitch McConnell running the Senate, and they're not
00:25:28.860
going to be able to do very much of what they ran on, which I think is what voters want.
00:25:33.220
Another interesting thing about this election is that Joe Biden's out there claiming a mandate to
00:25:37.080
do all kinds of things. But if you look at four key states that had they gone the other way,
00:25:42.320
Donald Trump would be reelected easily. The libertarian candidate won more votes than the
00:25:47.840
margin between Biden and Trump. So you can argue that the libertarian candidate was actually the
00:25:52.400
spoiler for Joe Biden in four states in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia. And it shows you
00:26:00.120
the peril of third parties in America's two-party dominant system, that if you vote for small
00:26:04.180
parties that are very unlikely to win, you end up handing the election to a party that you probably
00:26:09.920
don't agree with. So that's where we are right now. But Joe Biden doesn't really have a mandate.
00:26:14.820
If anything, it was an election for moderation, not for moving full steam ahead on the left-wing agenda.
00:26:22.400
But it all comes down to Georgia now. John Ossoff, I've seen some of his video clips. He feels like
00:26:30.580
he was made in a laboratory. He feels so focused, so fake to me. But I don't know. I mean, I'm a skeptic.
00:26:38.120
Maybe I would say that about any Democrat. I think the other candidate, Reverend Warnock,
00:26:43.100
does look extreme. But I don't know. Maybe that is where the Democratic Party is now. I don't know
00:26:48.500
enough about Georgia. I'm nervous about it. I think in the general election, you know, 10 days ago,
00:27:00.680
we saw that the Democrats were spending in some states more than $100 million on a Senate seat.
00:27:09.760
Like they were trying to boot Lindsey Graham out of there, if I'm not mistaken, at that price.
00:27:14.260
I can only imagine you got two Senate seats in one state. I think they're going to, I think between
00:27:20.640
the two parties, they're going to spend a quarter billion dollars, half a billion dollars in Georgia
00:27:25.760
in the next couple months. And I'm worried about all the shenanigans. Let me ask you,
00:27:32.600
do you think there will be some sort of fraud control? That's what really worries me,
00:27:39.080
Well, I think, I think the risk in this election, again, is going to be vote by mail. Vote by mail
00:27:45.780
introduces greater potential for fraud. It also is a form of voting that favors Democrats. That's
00:27:52.480
why Democrats pushed for it everywhere. Now, the Georgia state government is run by Republicans who
00:27:57.940
are presumably going to be a little bit more careful than Democrat governors were in Wisconsin,
00:28:05.100
So I think it is going to be harder for Democrats to steal Georgia, as it were. But I don't know that
00:28:12.800
Democrats are that confident about their chances in Georgia. Remember, Trump brings people out on
00:28:17.980
both sides on the ballot. So when Trump's on the ballot, Republicans turn out and Democrats turn out.
00:28:23.340
I don't know if it's going to be the same this time around. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in
00:28:28.720
the Senate and Senate minority leader, did a huge favor to Republicans a few days ago when he ran out into
00:28:35.320
the street to celebrate no social distancing, forget all that. But he ran out into the street to celebrate
00:28:41.140
Joe Biden declaring victory or being declared the victor by the media calling the race for him. And Schumer
00:28:47.720
declared loudly that we win in Georgia, we change America. That statement caught on video by a documentary
00:28:56.340
filmmaker is now featured in the campaign ads for Republicans in Georgia, basically telling voters,
00:29:03.380
Democrats want to use these runoff races to radically transform America, and you are the only
00:29:09.560
thing stopping them from doing so. So I think Republicans having that fear of Democrats pushing
00:29:16.220
all the socialist stuff they want to do is going to be more of a motivating factor than Democrats' belief
00:29:22.020
that they can actually win these seats and do it. There's an article in the New York Times Friday morning
00:29:25.980
about how there's a kind of donor fatigue among Democrats that they've been told they can win
00:29:29.820
all these Senate races. They pour, as you said, hundreds of millions of dollars into races in
00:29:34.100
South Carolina, in Alaska, and so forth, and then they get nothing. So I think it's going to be harder
00:29:39.540
to motivate Democratic donors to contribute to Georgia. They were very motivated about helping Joe
00:29:44.500
Biden and so forth. But I don't know that they're going to have the same energy behind their campaign in
00:29:49.940
Georgia. The celebrities are all in, the politicians are all in. So there are definitely going to be some
00:29:54.160
people who try. But I think that Republicans have more at stake in this election, and they have
00:29:58.780
better candidates. So right now, I think the odds are slightly in favor of the Republicans. The polls
00:30:03.120
are also slightly in favor. I don't know if you believe polls, but in both of the polls that I've
00:30:08.200
seen so far since Election Day, Republicans are modestly ahead of their Democratic rivals in Georgia.
00:30:14.840
Given the pro-Democrat bias of most polls, that probably means the Republicans have a slightly larger
00:30:19.160
edge than that. But we'll see. Well, I sure hope so. I mean, without a check on the excesses of
00:30:26.420
Biden and Harris, and I'm presuming that they do pull off the win presidentially, without a check in
00:30:33.460
the Senate against that, I am terrified of what will come. Well, we'll have to, what's the date for
00:30:39.420
the runoff in Georgia? I don't know. It is January 5th. So it'll happen before the end of Trump's
00:30:45.120
term. It happens January 5th. So we will know going into January 20th, you know, whatever the
00:30:51.800
result in the presidential race, we will know what Congress will look like already. Now, Trump is
00:30:57.600
hinting that if he runs out of legal room, he will concede the election. The idea that the media have
00:31:03.880
had in this country and around the world that Trump is some sort of would-be dictator is completely
0.99
00:31:07.760
ridiculous, insulting, false, and inflammatory. Never been true. And he's been saying all along he would
0.99
00:31:13.080
accept the result if he loses, but he doesn't like to lose. So he's going to exhaust all his options
00:31:16.820
until there's nothing left. But I do think that Trump has a lot to do still if he is going to be
00:31:22.600
a lame duck president. And I don't think Democrats are going to like it very much. And I hope that
00:31:27.000
Trump has a very, very ambitious agenda for the weeks he has remaining, because there are a lot of
00:31:32.020
things he can do to undo some of the damage Democrats have done and to set up his agenda to carry over
00:31:39.600
into the next administration, which I think is entirely appropriate to do, because I do think
00:31:44.220
that agenda is very popular. Biden's already talking about reversing immigration law and
00:31:48.860
other sorts of radical changes. He has a mandate for none of that. Trump ran on a tough immigration
00:31:54.500
policy and got more Latino votes, not less, not fewer. So I think that we're going to see these
00:32:00.380
battles happening a lot over the next few weeks. And Trump still has the advantage. He has the
00:32:05.660
advantage of the White House. And the media don't like it. They want him gone as soon as they
00:32:10.380
possibly can get rid of him. But he still has, if he indeed loses the election, he still has until
00:32:14.760
January 20th to do what he needs to do. Yeah, very interesting. Well, Joel, great to see you. We'll
00:32:19.340
let you go box, do some boxing, throw a few punches for us. Great to see you. Thanks for your wisdom,
00:32:24.980
as always. Thank you. All right. There you have it. Joel Pollack, senior editor at large at
00:32:28.800
Breitbart.com. Stay with us more. Hello, welcome back on my monologue last night. Greg writes,
00:32:46.440
I hope all places that serve cheesecake in Ontario ban Doug Ford for life. Yeah, you know what?
00:32:51.240
Seriously, good for those folks in Cheshire. A guy is literally voting to shut your company down. If a
00:32:58.160
guy says, I don't like you, all right, fine, whatever. That's just an opinion. If you don't
00:33:02.600
like the restaurant, don't come into the restaurant. But when through the power of the law, he shuts you
00:33:07.400
down. Why should he ever be allowed in again? Good for them. Jay Collins says, I would love it if
00:33:14.480
restaurants and bars started doing this in Canada. Yeah, exactly. Make these politicians
00:33:19.840
impolite company, persona non grata. Jesse writes, good on them. I hope this is just the beginning
00:33:28.060
of MPs shutouts. Isn't this exactly what they do to us all the time? Yeah, this is deplatforming. But
00:33:34.960
you know, I don't believe in deplatforming people because they have an opinion. But if this guy was
00:33:39.760
voting to close and destroy businesses, let him never be allowed to enjoy those businesses
00:33:46.160
that he attacked. All right, folks, what a busy week. What an interesting weekend. I'm sure next week
00:33:52.700
will be even busier and more interesting. Until then, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World
00:33:56.920
Headquarters, to you at home, good night. Keep fighting for freedom.