Rebel News Podcast - China kneecaps billionaire businessman Jack Ma — and President Xi wants everyone to know it

00:00:00.000 Hello, my rebels. Today I bring you news of fintech, financial technology from China.

00:00:05.960 That's a change of pace. Well, you know, there's a company in China called the Ant Group,

00:00:11.060 like the little bug, that was set to have the world's largest IPO, the largest

00:00:16.620 release of shares to the public in the history of the world. Until the dictator Xi Jinping stopped

00:00:23.620 it. I'll tell you what, and I'll tell you why, and its incredible story and a cautionary tale

00:00:29.900 about any Westerner who thinks he can work with China. You've got to hear this story. That's

00:00:35.920 ahead. But before that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus. That's

00:00:39.980 the video version of these podcasts. It's just eight bucks a month, 80 bucks for the whole year.

00:00:45.140 You can see that's two months for free if you buy the whole year. You also get weekly shows

00:00:49.100 from David Menzies and Sheila Gunn-Reed. Just go to rebelnews.com and click subscribe. I'd

00:00:54.080 be grateful if you would, because we rely on you, you know. We don't take any money from

00:00:57.760 Trudeau like most reporters do. All right, here's today's podcast.

00:01:16.040 Tonight, China's dictator swats down China's richest billionaire. It's November 13th,

00:01:21.760 and this is The Ezra Levant Show.

00:01:25.600 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?

00:01:29.280 There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.

00:01:33.360 The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's

00:01:37.760 my bloody right to do so.

00:01:44.040 For 15 years, I've been following the fool's errand of Western companies trying to make money 0.96

00:01:49.640 in China. I went there myself a little more than a decade ago, and you could see how dangerous it was 1.00

00:01:54.720 to Western companies who are used to the rule of law and the sanctity of contracts and the idea of

00:02:00.000 property rights, especially intellectual property. There were official government tourist stores

00:02:06.300 that sold nothing but counterfeit clothing brands. The government tourism buses would drive

00:02:13.300 Western tourists there as a destination, as in they weren't hiding this theft. I was there when a

00:02:18.920 new superhero movie had just been released in North America just weeks earlier. You could already buy

00:02:25.040 a DVD bootleg copy of it on the street for 50 cents. There were some Western brands there officially,

00:02:32.760 especially restaurant chains, Conducky Fried Chicken, Starbucks. And as a tourist, you're sort of drawn to

00:02:38.480 them because the food's familiar, and maybe you want to use a clean Western-style bathroom. But you soon

00:02:44.020 realized there were entire fake Starbucks stores there. Entire stores were counterfeits. I like what

00:02:51.940 I saw with some of those Western companies. They were teaching skills and habits to Chinese workers that

00:02:57.520 everyone in America and Canada ought to learn too, frankly. Personal responsibility, showing up to work

00:03:02.680 on time, etc. I remember being in a Haagen-Dazs store in Beijing and overhearing a job interview, and it was

00:03:09.640 basically teaching concepts like respecting the customer, handling criticism, food safety, being on

00:03:16.220 time, taking responsibility. I think we need to teach those things here as much as over there. But I found

00:03:21.800 it admirable what these companies were trying to do. But here's the thing. It's impossible to succeed in

00:03:27.780 China for a Western company. It is impossible. In fact, the better you are, the less chance of success you

00:03:33.200 have. At best, the Chinese Communist Party will skim away all of your profits. Your business partners 0.74

00:03:40.620 in the Communist Party will take so much from you there's nothing left. Or they'll just steal

00:03:45.440 everything. Just all of it. Let me read to you from an article that I wrote back in 2007. You know,

00:03:52.360 I used to write the back page column for Canadian Lawyer Magazine. Can you believe it? So this story I

00:03:57.540 wrote way back then was called The Outward Appearance of a Capitalist Country. Can I read a little bit of

00:04:05.240 it? I can't believe I've managed to dig this column up. Here it goes. Danone isn't used to getting roughed up.

00:04:11.640 The French company is the world's largest yogurt maker and owns Evian, the world's best-selling

00:04:17.500 mineral water, too. Then it got the bright idea to invest in China. Danone teamed up with Chinese

00:04:23.540 beverage manufacturer Wahaha Group Company Limited. That's named after the way kids supposedly laugh.

00:04:32.080 Wahaha. That's a great name for a company, isn't it? Danone poured in money and Western technology

00:04:37.540 Wahaha supplied the Chinese credentials. The joint venture is now Chinese largest beverage company.

00:04:44.180 This is me writing back in 2007. So, so far, so great. But it all began to unravel earlier this year.

00:04:51.260 Danone alleges that Zong Ching-ho, the founder of Wahaha and chairman of the joint venture,

00:04:58.280 get this, had set up 20 of his own rogue companies producing the exact same products as the joint

00:05:06.540 venture using the joint venture suppliers and distributors by keeping all the money for himself.

00:05:12.200 It's part of the reason why Zong is now the 23rd richest man in China, according to Forbes.

00:05:16.920 So that was what I was writing 13 years ago. Can you believe that?

00:05:19.240 So the Chinese partner, he just set up 20 factories making the same stuff.

00:05:25.680 He got the ingredients and the recipes. Now the French were paying for the marketing and 1.00

00:05:31.240 the know-how. He just set up parallel companies just to take all the money. Let me get back to my column.

00:05:37.780 At first, Danone offered to pay Zong to make his counterfeit brands part of their joint venture,

00:05:43.500 offering more than $500 million. Zong scoffed. So Danone filed a lawsuit in California. Danone might

00:05:51.960 even win, but with its bottling plants and marketing in China, that's a period of victory.

00:05:57.500 Yeah, you can't enforce an American ruling in China. Good luck with that. I won't read too much more. 0.68

00:06:02.280 It's just amazing to read this from what I was thinking back in 2007. Here's a little more.

00:06:06.440 Maybe Danone should have seen it coming. One of Wahaha's signature brands is Future Cola,

00:06:13.140 marketed in cans and bottles indistinguishable from Coca-Cola, with identical colors and styles.

00:06:20.800 Isn't that funny? Last quote.

00:06:23.300 Ansley quotes Cao Xi Yuan, the father of Chinese bankruptcy law, on the fate of foreign litigants.

00:06:29.660 It is absolutely impossible for a foreign party to win a case against a Chinese party in a Chinese

00:06:35.640 court. Judicial exchanges by Canadian judges are just exotic tourist junkets for the Westerners

00:06:40.660 and a PR fig lease for the Chinese government. So, if you're the CEO of a mega company like Danone,

00:06:46.700 you think you're pretty smart. And you are. But you're bringing a knife to a gunfight when you go

00:06:52.420 to China. You know, Disney found out the same thing recently when it worked with the Chinese

00:06:56.240 Communist Party to make a live-action remake of their film Mulan in China, in Xinjiang province.

00:07:01.760 They were so deferential to the Chinese communists, they even gave a shout-out to the secret police

00:07:07.700 and security services that run Xinjiang's concentration camps for the Uyghur Muslims there.

00:07:13.240 Seriously, Disney put them in the credits. They were saying thank you to the secret police.

00:07:18.160 They clearly made the mathematical decision that it was worth sucking up to China, 0.98

00:07:22.420 as in the Communist Party there, with the movie Mulan. Because if it had Xi Jinping's political

00:07:28.180 blessing, it could make some serious money in China. I mean, forget about the American market.

00:07:32.560 Imagine a billion-plus Chinese people watching a Disney-quality movie set in China and buying all 1.00

00:07:38.200 the junk. Alas, something went wrong. Someone lost face. Someone's nose was out of joint. Someone

00:07:45.100 didn't get the bribe or pay off. Whatever. Who knows? Because despite bending the knee and bowing

00:07:50.740 deeply and thanking their secret police, China disparaged the movie and China just dissed it. 0.54

00:07:55.280 I don't know why, but it was incredible. You saw Hollywood prostrate itself before the tyrant,

00:08:00.420 violate everything that America stands for, to ingratiate itself, and it backfired still.

00:08:06.940 Couldn't happen to a nicer group of people, nicer group of appeasers. Same thing with the NBA.

00:08:12.760 They'll take a knee to protest who knows what in America, those millionaires playing for billionaires.

00:08:17.640 But they won't say a peep of the Uyghurs or Hong Kong. I look forward to them being scorched by 1.00

00:08:22.800 China, too. But look at this. If the stories about Danone and Disney don't shock you, look at this. 0.95

00:08:29.820 Jack Ma is China's richest man. He's worth over $61 billion U.S. Great entrepreneur, great capitalist,

00:08:38.560 tech and finance and business and cell phones and internet amazing. And his company called Ant,

00:08:43.480 as in the little bug, was about to have the world's largest initial public offering, IPO.

00:08:48.500 That means he was going to list his private company on the stock exchange and let people buy shares in

00:08:53.700 it. That's important for a lot of reasons, not just for the company to get access to capital,

00:08:58.680 but for the whole industry to have some public disclosure, to learn about Ant, to have some sort

00:09:02.860 of oversight on the company. When you're in a stock exchange, it makes your company have to comply

00:09:07.620 with certain rules. Obviously, there's a lot more corruption in China than in America.

00:09:11.300 But being on a stock market brings some rules and oversight. It's healthy, I think. And I don't

00:09:16.700 think Jack Ma was looking to scam people like so many stock market players in China do. He's a rich

00:09:21.780 man who was building what he thought was his answer to the banking system, his answer to PayPal and

00:09:28.660 Facebook combined, really. And it was set to be the world's largest IPO, as in it would raise more money

00:09:35.340 than any deal in history. Put aside politics. I mean, wouldn't you want to own a slice of the Chinese 0.99

00:09:42.940 version of Amazon and Facebook? But let me read this from the Wall Street Journal.

00:09:47.980 Here's the story. I'm going to read for about two minutes. China's President Xi Jinping personally

00:09:56.660 scuttled Jack Ma's Ant IPO. Senior government leaders were furious about wealthy entrepreneurs'

00:10:02.840 criticisms of regulators. Rebuke was the culmination of years of tense relations. All right, here's the

00:10:08.560 story. Chinese President Xi Jinping personally made the decision to halt the initial public offering

00:10:14.660 of Ant Group, which would have been the world's largest, biggest, after controlling shareholder

00:10:19.940 Jack Ma infuriated government leaders, according to Chinese officials with knowledge of the matter.

00:10:25.700 The rebuke was the culmination of years of tense relations between China's most celebrated

00:10:29.800 entrepreneur and a government uneasy about his influence in the rapid growth of the digital

00:10:33.880 payments behemoth he controlled. Mr. Xi, for his part, has displayed a diminishing tolerance for big

00:10:40.540 private businesses that have amassed capital and influence, and are perceived to have challenged both

00:10:45.660 his rule and the stability created by factions in the country's newly assertive Communist Party.

00:10:51.540 In a speech on October 24th, days before the financial technology giant was set to go public,

00:10:56.020 Mr. Ma cited Mr. Xi's words in what top government officials saw as an effort to burnish his own image

00:11:02.300 and tarnish that of regulators, these people said.

00:11:05.020 At the event in Shanghai, Mr. Ma, the country's richest man, quoted Mr. Xi saying,

00:11:10.700 success does not have to come from me, unquote. As a result, the tech executive said he wanted to help

00:11:16.060 solve China's financial problems through innovation. Mr. Ma bluntly criticized the government's

00:11:21.920 increasingly tight financial regulation for holding back technology development, part of a long-running

00:11:26.840 battle between Ant and its overseers. Mr. Xi, who read government reports about the speech,

00:11:32.400 and other senior leaders were furious. According to the officials familiar with the decision-making,

00:11:37.840 Mr. Xi ordered Chinese regulators to investigate and all but shut down Ant's initial public offering,

00:11:43.620 the official said, setting in motion a series of events that led to the deal's suspension on November 3rd.

00:11:49.400 Investors around the world already had committed to paying more than $34 billion for Ant's shares.

00:11:55.300 It isn't clear whether it was Mr. Xi or another government official who first suggested the shutdown.

00:12:00.140 Yeah, I mean, the company would be worth a third of a billion dollars, because that $34 billion or

00:12:06.680 whatever, that was just the value of the sliver that was being sold. So the market cap was a third

00:12:12.320 of a billion. But if you said something mean about the dictator, or even just something presumptuous,

00:12:17.460 which is what I think was going on here, well, that's what matters. That's all that counts in

00:12:21.360 China. Don't let the dictator lose face. I'll read some more.

00:12:25.140 Now, Xi doesn't care about if you made any of those rich lists or not, said a Chinese official.

00:12:31.580 What he cares about is what you do after you get rich, and whether you're aligning your interests

00:12:37.000 with the state's interests, unquote. All right, that was from the Wall Street Journal. Great piece

00:12:41.960 there. Here's how Bloomberg described the same news.

00:12:45.740 China's move to abruptly halt. The world's biggest stock market debut sends global investors a clear

00:12:56.380 message. Any financial opening will only be done on terms that benefit President Xi Jinping

00:13:01.260 and the Communist Party. Policymakers in Beijing shocked the investment world on Tuesday by suspending

00:13:06.720 an initial public offering by Ant Group Company, a fintech company owned by billionaire Jack Ma,

00:13:11.760 China's second richest man, apparently. The decision came just two days before shares were set to trade

00:13:18.660 in a listing that attracted at least, oh my God, three trillion orders from individual investors

00:13:26.800 that can't be in American money. That's probably Hong Kong dollar. The timing of the decision showed

00:13:33.240 once again that for Xi and the party, financial and political stability take precedence over ceding

00:13:37.900 control of the economy, especially to a private company. Yeah, they kneecapped their greatest

00:13:42.040 entrepreneur, their greatest businessman, their startup master, their wealth creator,

00:13:47.020 their Bill Cates plus Mark Zuckerberg plus Jeff Bezos, their top guy. They just threw him off the cliff

00:13:53.020 on the eve of his great achievement. Why? Because they can and they want you to know it.

00:13:59.180 Imagine being a Western company, a CEO in New York or London or Toronto,

00:14:03.740 and thinking that you can outsmart or out-navigate China, that you've got an inside track. At best,

00:14:11.800 you'll be Denon'd or Disney'd, or maybe you'll be stepped on like an ant. You know what? Come to

00:14:18.180 think of it, I heartily recommend that Facebook and Google and YouTube and Twitter and all our

00:14:23.320 banksters put their eggs in the Chinese basket. Go do business with them. Invest it all. Bet it all, 1.00

00:14:30.180 you crooks. And may you get the result you so richly deserve. What a shame that shareholders will pay 0.99

00:14:37.560 the price, but still. Trouble is, it's not just businesses who are getting skinned alive by Xi Jinping

00:14:43.000 in the commies. It's foolish politicians too. We're quite proud. The prime minister has been given a 1.00

00:14:50.380 fond nickname in China. He is called Pudou, which I believe means potato. And he's, I can't say the

00:14:59.120 Chinese word. It's young, Pudou, little potato, because his father, Pierre Elliott, Pudou, was

00:15:06.600 senior potato. Yeah. Watch Xi Jinping eat her alive. Stay with us for more. 1.00

00:15:20.380 Welcome back. I recall that Leslyn Lewis, who had a very strong race for the leadership of the

00:15:31.380 Canadian Conservative Party, an accomplished black woman, an immigrant, a lawyer, very thoughtful,

00:15:38.260 had a very strong showing. And in the end, the CBC gave her precisely one minute and 45 seconds of

00:15:47.120 airtime. Because a strong, thoughtful, black woman, immigrant lawyer, well, that just broke the 1.00

00:15:55.360 narrative. At the same time, and this was before Kamala Harris was chosen as Biden's vice presidential

00:16:01.240 pick, the CBC gave 20 times as much coverage to Kamala Harris, a foreign political candidate who,

00:16:08.900 at that point in time, had merely succeeded in losing the Democratic presidential nomination.

00:16:15.040 And so it is in the race recently in the United States Congress. Of course, there was the

00:16:21.460 mighty presidential election that's still being counted. But across America, there were a new

00:16:27.700 bumper crop of Republican women, including young women and minority women, success stories, 0.92

00:16:36.720 immigrant women from Vietnam, people of Cuban descent. But of course, the attention was focused on

00:16:43.620 the left-wing Democrat squad, as they call us. Joining us now via Skype from the West Coast is

00:16:50.480 our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor at large of Breitbart.com. Joel, the idea of young, powerful,

00:16:57.080 high-energy women being a Republican force, that just confounds the left too much. So they just 1.00

00:17:03.780 pretend it doesn't exist. Am I right?

00:17:05.100 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 1.00

00:17:27.080 Republican Party is attracting so many talented women and minorities is because Americans like a 1.00

00:17:33.160 challenge. And when you tell Americans that the Democratic Party is going to set aside certain

00:17:39.740 positions, they're going to use identity politics here in California, they're going to reserve

00:17:44.920 corporate board seats for people who are historically disadvantaged. That doesn't really motivate people

00:17:50.480 to do better, to do more, to break the mold. But the Republicans say, we're not going to do any of

00:17:55.920 that. We're just going to judge you as you are. But we're open to anybody who has the talent to

00:18:00.700 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

00:18:15.460 of 2020 are 100 percent women and minority candidates. And that 100 percent statistic is going to stick 0.91

00:18:24.660 around because there is a Korean American woman who is about to win her race in Orange County, 0.99

00:18:30.620 California. She's ahead by several thousand votes. It's probably going to be called in the next few 1.00

00:18:34.800 days if it hasn't been this morning already. So Republicans are attracting talented women, talented 1.00

00:18:41.640 minorities who want to make their mark on American politics and don't want to be reduced to their

00:18:46.040 identity, don't want to be handed a set of talking points by a Democratic Party that essentially treats

00:18:51.720 them as if they are functionaries carrying out a kind of representative role, but not really seen as

00:19:00.780 future leaders. It's interesting that Kamala Harris, who is presumably our vice president elect, almost

00:19:06.460 never spoke to reporters once during the entire general election campaign. From the time she was

00:19:10.800 nominated in mid-August to Election Day, I think she held maybe one or two press briefings. They were all

00:19:18.680 very brief, something like 10 minutes or less, and they were all in the presence of Joe Biden. She never

00:19:24.200 really sat down with the press for spontaneous, extemporaneous questions. So that's the role that the

00:19:31.860 Democratic Party reserves for women and minorities. You basically follow the script and you offer different

00:19:39.480 versions of the accusation that the Republicans are racist and greedy and so forth. Whereas Republicans

00:19:45.260 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

00:19:55.060 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

00:20:10.120 diversified the Republican Party by sheer force of example, and against a media and an opposition that

00:20:18.320 have constantly referred to him as Adolf Hitler, that are referred to his supporters as neo-Nazis, white

00:20:23.580 supremacists, and so forth. Christiane Amanpour was on CNN yesterday, talking about how the Trump presidency

00:20:31.200 reminded her of the Nazi regime in 1938 on Kristallnacht. Now, that's a form of Holocaust denial,

00:20:38.200 when you reduce the unique suffering of the Holocaust to some kind of ordinary political

00:20:44.400 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,

00:20:55.380 Trump has attracted this outstanding crop of female and minority candidates for the House of 0.96

00:21:00.740 Representatives. He has, as someone said, longer coattails in defeat than Joe Biden had in victory.

00:21:05.840 Yeah. I think a lot of people who are around the world riveted on the presidency, obviously the

00:21:11.900 most important part of the election, might be surprised to see this strength. I mean, seriously,

00:21:18.140 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,

00:21:47.740 I'm not, he's not going to win.

00:21:49.240 Yeah, no. Every day, I wake up at three or four in the morning and I read the news. And leading up to

00:21:55.340 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

00:22:04.680 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.

00:22:30.440 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.

00:22:40.960 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

00:22:52.540 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

00:23:02.760 had in the bag. And they were looking forward to a kind of unified government that would be able to

00:23:07.640 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

00:23:23.320 runoff election. Georgia has a system where if no candidate gets more than 50 percent on election

00:23:30.680 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 0.82

00:23:43.380 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

00:23:55.740 runoffs. If they do, there will be a 50 50 tie. And according to the Constitution, the tie breaking

00:24:00.860 vote is the vice president's vote. So Democrats can win both of those runoffs. Then Kamala Harris will 1.00

00:24:07.460 cast the tie breaking vote, giving control of the Senate effectively to the Democrats. That means they'll

00:24:12.180 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.

00:24:19.740 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

00:24:34.960 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,

00:27:36.900 the fraud that we saw likely.

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,

00:28:03.420 Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

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.

00:34:00.620 veel more.

00:34:05.660 We'll be right back.

00:34:06.520 See you in the future.

00:34:16.320 meeting

00:34:18.240 during the war, that's where you can relax.

00:34:19.220 People willются

00:34:20.360 but there's only one

00:34:22.420 hoping that there will be goodttle to hold

00:34:25.720 and, you know,

00:34:27.920 them.

Rebel News Podcast - November 14, 2020

China kneecaps billionaire businessman Jack Ma — and President Xi wants everyone to know it

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