Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ Are they really going to arrest Trump like they do in banana republics？

00:00:00.180 Hello, my friends. Today, we're going to talk about the Manhattan DA's plans to arrest Donald Trump.

00:00:06.920 That was the best million-dollar campaign gift that George Soros ever made, don't you think?

00:00:12.300 Then we'll talk to my friend Janine Younis about her lawsuit against the Biden regime.

00:00:17.020 Very interesting stuff today. But first, let me invite you to go to rebelnewsplus.com.

00:00:21.360 That's our video version of this podcast. We put a lot of effort in the video. I'd love for you to see it.

00:00:27.200 It's just $8 a month. Go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe, and you'll also have the satisfaction of supporting Rebel News

00:00:34.300 because you know we don't take any money from Trudeau, and it shows.

00:00:38.020 All right, here's today's podcast.

00:00:39.400 Tonight, are they really going to arrest Donald Trump like they do in Banana Republics?

00:00:59.720 It's March 21st, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.

00:01:02.500 I don't think it's happened yet, and all we have to go on is rumors and leaks, but they say

00:01:23.000 that Donald Trump, the former U.S. president, could be arrested at any moment.

00:01:27.460 In fact, today was supposed to be that day. Now, it's all just leaks and speculation,

00:01:34.480 but it appears to be serious enough that the various law enforcement agencies at hand are meeting each other.

00:01:40.120 I mean, you've got Donald Trump's Secret Service detail, as all ex-presidents have,

00:01:45.560 that's armed and on 24-hour duty to protect him from anything and everything, including terrorism,

00:01:51.560 kidnapping, revenge, just even ordinary crimes. So he's really got this personal police detachment

00:01:58.220 with him, with serious counterterrorism training. So how does police force A arrest a man protected

00:02:07.100 by police force B? And for what, by the way? Stormy Daniels, and whether or not Trump gave her a

00:02:16.040 payment to hush up something that he did do or didn't do, but she said he would do, that whole

00:02:21.520 thing is being litigated to death. In fact, litigation, she had to pay Donald Trump hundreds 1.00

00:02:26.520 of thousands of dollars after their court battle. Stormy Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, is in

00:02:32.800 prison right now. I remember when the left said he was going to be the candidate for the Democrats in

00:02:37.820 2020 and beat Trump. So it's hard to imagine that that would be the crime that would cause

00:02:45.780 the former president to be arrested, handcuffed, jailed, and prosecuted, especially by the New York

00:02:53.960 City district attorney, given the skyrocketing crime in that city. I mean, if we're suddenly going

00:03:01.740 to prosecute crimes, really? The Stormy Daniels stuff? Not actual political crimes like Hillary

00:03:08.460 Clinton destroying tens of thousands of documents. Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, who was running 0.59

00:03:14.600 the Clinton Foundation when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, steering hundreds of millions

00:03:19.900 of dollars of donations from countries she was making decisions about as Secretary of State,

00:03:25.500 those countries would pay money to the Clinton Foundation. No charges there, no investigations,

00:03:31.740 no raids on their homes, only a raid on Mar-a-Lago. How about Hunter Biden? The crimes that you can see

00:03:39.400 him committing in his own selfie videos on his laptop. Well, forget about Hunter. He's not actually

00:03:45.500 a politician. He's just a gateway to his father, the big guy, Joe Biden. As we mentioned on our live

00:03:54.900 stream the other day, Democrats and Republicans alike see that a million dollars, records of a

00:04:01.720 million dollars paid to a Biden family member. Why? For what? And Biden just simply denies it, no

00:04:08.600 investigation. It's just Trump that obsesses the left. You know, in many other countries, sitting

00:04:16.580 politicians, sitting legislators are immune from criminal prosecution. Now, I always, whenever I heard

00:04:24.540 of that, I always thought it was a terrible idea. I always thought it obviously encouraged corruption.

00:04:29.800 If being a politician meant you got to get out of jail free card, you could never be criminalized for

00:04:36.020 what you do, then surely criminals would all want to become politicians. How would you ever root it out?

00:04:42.180 But I now see the logic of that in a corrupt country. It's a logic that only works in banana

00:04:47.900 republics where charges against political leaders are trumped up and used for political gain.

00:04:52.820 I don't know if you saw, but the Oscar for foreign documentary called Navalny. Navalny is the name

00:05:04.840 of a Russian opposition leader to Putin who was charged with corruption. I think he's in jail right

00:05:09.740 now. That's the kind of thing that countries, authoritarian regimes with bully rulers do. They

00:05:16.000 arrest and trump up charges against their critics. But that's what's allegedly, purportedly, reportedly

00:05:23.560 going to happen in the United States, maybe even today. And whose direction? Well, the district

00:05:33.400 attorney of New York County, really the DA of Manhattan, this guy, Alvin Bragg. You've never heard of him

00:05:40.700 before. Don't feel bad. Most people haven't. He was elected district attorney. They do that in the

00:05:45.940 states. They vote for their prosecutors. And he won. And typically we hear of sheriffs or prosecutors

00:05:53.500 running on a tough on crime platform, a hang them high platform, but not on the Democrat side in the U.S.,

00:06:00.480 not in the blue states. They run on the opposite. They run on sanctuary cities. They run on, for example,

00:06:07.200 not charging anyone if they are shoplifting less than $1,000, not getting involved at all. It's insane.

00:06:15.960 The race to the left is the opposite of tough on crime. And this guy, this DA, won the Democratic Party

00:06:25.000 primary for being the DA with just 85,000 votes. Really, if you're in New York City, you know the

00:06:33.640 Democrat's going to win. So it's Democrat versus Democrat. He just squicked by his competitor in

00:06:40.720 the primary who had 77,000 votes. So just by a 10,000 vote margin with fewer than 100,000 votes

00:06:47.340 altogether. Oh, but he had something going for him. A million dollars from George Soros. Of course,

00:06:54.940 we have to find out about that, as we often do, in the U.K. press. As I say, crime is way up in New York

00:07:02.780 City. Small crime, petty crime, big crime, racial crime, crimes against Jews, crimes against shopkeepers.

00:07:10.160 I didn't know this, but it was this DA who made the atrocious decisions in the Jose Alba matter that

00:07:16.900 we covered. Jose Alba was a shopkeeper, and he was attacked in his shop, and he defended himself,

00:07:24.980 and in the tussle, he killed his attacker in self-defense. Bragg wanted to throw the book at

00:07:32.660 Jose Alba, demanded a half a million dollars bail. He couldn't come up with that money.

00:07:38.180 The judge lowered it to 250,000. The attacker's accomplice, his girlfriend, also stabbed Jose Alba,

00:07:45.580 the shopkeeper, but no charges against her. That DA that would throw a shopkeeper to the wolves and 1.00

00:07:54.140 free his attackers, that is the Soros DA coming for Trump. And it's brilliant. I mean, think about it,

00:08:02.640 a million bucks for a DA in New York City. That's a bargain at twice the price. Certainly easier and

00:08:11.020 cheaper than beating Trump in 2016 or in 2024. And you know what? It divides the United States

00:08:18.640 against itself. It demoralizes half the country and teaches the other half that you can game the 0.82

00:08:25.180 system and have an inside job. It makes conservatives the worst part. It makes conservatives lose respect

00:08:31.760 for law and order and police and prosecutors and the rule of law. And that is a huge win for the left

00:08:37.340 too. Demoralize half of America, the law and order half, the support the cops, back the blue half, 0.98

00:08:46.040 turn them against their institutions, just like they turn them against their institutions in

00:08:51.720 football with the taken knee. You know, there is no justice anymore for conservatives or Republicans

00:08:57.840 in blue counties. This is what happens. Now, will the red counties, will the Republicans respond in kind?

00:09:05.040 Will they prosecute Hillary Clinton or Obama or any leftists for their crimes? Well,

00:09:11.980 we know the answer to that. They will not. We know that because they did not. Even Trump himself

00:09:17.040 didn't use the power of the prosecutor to go after not just his enemies, but those enemies committing

00:09:22.580 crimes. I think part of it is that conservatives respect the rule of law. They don't want to

00:09:28.160 weaponize it. They want to follow the rules, whereas the left will do anything for power.

00:09:33.280 I think this whole circus, and that's what it is, is to demoralize America. But it's also a

00:09:41.020 distraction from terrible things that are happening right now. Xi Jinping is in Moscow visiting Vladimir

00:09:49.580 Putin. They are teaming up against America and the West. You know, that was a major strategic

00:09:56.620 victory during the Cold War to break China away from Russia. It was an enormous accomplishment

00:10:03.440 because those two together could have, the thinking goes, overwhelmed the West. And now

00:10:09.240 they're forged as a union, as allies. That's on the foreign front. There's the Ukraine war and the

00:10:15.820 hundred billion cent over there. Then there's the bank failures, the runs on the banks. And then

00:10:21.300 there's the domestic drug crisis, the open border with Mexico, which is related. Arresting Trump,

00:10:29.040 we'll take those stories off the front page. We'll keep an eye peeled for that story. It's an incredible

00:10:34.760 one, and I feel very bad about it. But back to Canada, I want to talk a little bit about

00:10:38.620 the speech or a couple of speeches that Justin Trudeau gave.

00:10:43.000 I've watched too many speeches from Trudeau, and I really find it hard to pay attention to them

00:10:50.000 because really it's like listening to a substitute drama teacher. He used to give speeches for $20,000

00:10:57.720 or $30,000 a pop, almost always to teachers unions or some government-oriented group. They

00:11:04.260 weren't really paying for him to give a speech. It was like he was reading a bunch of cliches. It was

00:11:08.500 really a form of money laundering. Pay $30,000 to Trudeau to spend an hour with him. Buy influence

00:11:14.520 with him. You're not paying to listen to what he has to say. You're paying to pay him, and the speech

00:11:19.720 is just the legal way to give him a tip. But I saw part of this, and I certainly would never

00:11:26.320 suggest that anyone watch the whole hour-long video. You'll lose 10 IQ points just listening to it.

00:11:32.520 But just the tone deafness of Trudeau who enforced the brutal lockdowns, the demonization of the

00:11:40.740 unvaccinated, who enforced banning the unvaccinated from planes and trains, who said, should we even

00:11:48.880 tolerate them? This is the Trudeau who's talking about protecting minority rights and stopping the 1.00

00:11:54.920 tyranny of the majority. Listen to this guy. Does he even have any self-awareness?

00:12:01.220 One of the challenges in democracies is known as the tyranny of the majority. When you say,

00:12:09.780 well, it's a democracy. We'll vote on it, and we'll do the right thing as we move forward.

00:12:15.460 That's the principle we run with. Democracy, the majority is always right. Except, of course,

00:12:19.840 when it isn't. If you were to imagine a scenario in which someone proposed to pass a law that said,

00:12:27.940 people who are right-handed will pay fewer taxes, and they'll be compensated by people who are

00:12:34.180 left-handed. Because, you know, left-handed people keep cutting themselves with the wrong-headed

00:12:37.460 scissors, and they open doors the wrong way, and there's more addition to... Sorry. One lefty appreciates

00:12:43.780 that. You know, it's a ridiculous thought, right? But imagine for a second, people decided, okay,

00:12:52.020 I'm going to vote with my self-interest. And you had a bill pass, 80% that was unfair to people who can't

00:13:04.100 help the fact that they're born left-handed, no matter how many nuns wrapped on their knuckles when 0.96

00:13:08.820 they were in school, to try and force them to be right-handed. They're just left-handed. You can't

00:13:13.380 change anything about that. That wouldn't be fair, even though you can imagine right-handers voting

00:13:20.260 massively, and therefore, hey, it voted on it. It's a democracy. That's decided. Well, no. It doesn't

00:13:25.700 work that way. And that's why most, if not all democracies, have some sort of recognition of

00:13:33.060 fundamental inalienable rights that can't be taken away by governments making laws that please the

00:13:41.140 majority. This is the prime minister who campaigned in 2021. Should we tolerate them? Should we even

00:13:49.620 tolerate them? If you're not vaccinated, you cannot sit on the... This is the guy who's talking about the

00:13:56.500 tyranny of the majority, the one who demonized the minority for his own political benefit.

00:14:02.020 You deserve better. You deserve a government that's going to continue to say, get vaccinated.

00:14:08.340 And you know what? If you don't want to get vaccinated, that's your choice. But don't think

00:14:14.100 you can get on a plane or a train besides vaccinated people and put them at risk.

00:14:19.220 You know, it's incredible. And I wonder if he even listens to himself or if he's just playing some

00:14:24.740 message track that he memorized. And then there's this substitute teacher-level lecture. Oh my god,

00:14:30.340 take a listen to this. We increasingly live huge parts of our lives online. We get our entertainment.

00:14:38.340 We talk to our friends. We learn new things. We share stories. We engage in politics. We shape our

00:14:47.140 communities. The connectivity and the access to information that you will have all your life is

00:14:55.460 going to be incredibly empowering. But at the same time, it comes with real risks as well. Because

00:15:08.500 there is a lot of bad stuff out there on the internet. And we have laws against hate speech,

00:15:16.420 and we have laws against incitations to violence, and we have laws that are out there to try and

00:15:23.220 protect kids and protect people from the bad things on the internet. One of the things about the internet

00:15:28.580 is you can have access to just about anything, everything, all the time.

00:15:35.940 And any government that wants to try and limit what people can access on the internet has to be very,

00:15:41.780 very, very, very careful. Because in a free society, and there are places around the world where the

00:15:48.180 internet is very carefully controlled, a place like China or Russia, where it's very, very difficult

00:15:54.740 for someone to actually find out anything that is critical of the government. Not the case in Canada,

00:16:02.500 really easy to find things critical of the government on the internet in Canada and in other democracies.

00:16:08.580 But we need to make sure people continue to be able to have access to their freedom of speech,

00:16:14.100 their freedom of expression, the freedom of information. But there are real challenges around that,

00:16:19.860 in terms of keeping you safe, in terms of keeping your community safe.

00:16:23.060 He was asked by someone in the crowd about internet harms, and he immediately says that China 0.97

00:16:28.100 and Russia are bad, apparently, because they make it hard to find criticism of the government. But

00:16:32.980 that aspect is specifically in legislation that Trudeau himself is introducing in parliament,

00:16:39.860 the power for Trudeau to alter the discoverability of news that he doesn't like, to force YouTube and

00:16:47.300 Facebook to hide critics of his regime, like Rebel News, and make it so if you type in Rebel News into

00:16:53.300 Google or YouTube or Facebook, you go through page and page and page and page of CBC and CTV and

00:16:58.180 global news before you get to Rebel. That is literally in the legislation that he's imposing

00:17:03.540 in parliament. He's criticizing China and Russia for making it hard to find their critics online

00:17:09.140 while he is copying them.

00:17:11.140 Here's another excerpt from the same town hall.

00:17:13.700 Right now with the internet, people can find themselves in little corners where all they hear

00:17:22.420 is what they want to hear. And they're surrounded by people who think exactly the same of them,

00:17:29.460 and they get spun up into a world that is increasingly disconnected from the world.

00:17:34.980 I remember a few years ago, before the pandemic, before much of this, I got fascinated with the

00:17:44.020 idea of flat earthers. Now, this is an entirely new phenomenon. There wasn't really any moment back

00:17:54.580 in recorded history. Not the ancient Greeks or the ancient Babylonians or the Incas or whoever else,

00:18:03.620 who actually wondered whether the earth was actually flat or not.

00:18:07.780 And Christopher Columbus, they knew the earth was round. There was no danger he was going to fall off

00:18:12.100 the edge of the world. That wasn't what people worried about when he was setting off to discover

00:18:16.100 the Americas or discover a shortcut to India. There are a whole bunch of people out there who have

00:18:21.300 decided that the earth is flat. And they hang out with each other and they find different ways of

00:18:28.740 proving to themselves that the earth is flat. Now, that may not seem like a very serious thing,

00:18:34.660 because someone who believes the earth is flat is not going to necessarily cause tremendous harm to

00:18:41.060 everyone else. But the ability to start to believe something that simply isn't true,

00:18:47.300 because enough people are telling you and reinforcing that around you,

00:18:53.220 actually starts creating real problems.

00:18:57.060 I think he's just telling old stories that he used to tell at those $30,000 speeches. There's no

00:19:04.500 flat earth ever in history. People always knew the earth was round. He's just, what an awful

00:19:10.500 substitute teacher he would have been. But flat earthers, that's his new name for people who disagree

00:19:15.700 with him on the vaccine. The vaccine, as we now know, does not stop transmission, does not stop you from

00:19:22.180 getting COVID. The vaccine has more side effects than we're known. And yet he dares call skeptics

00:19:28.260 the flat earthers. Never him. He's the guy who thinks if you raise the tax when you buy gas,

00:19:34.500 that will make the weather cooler by raising a tax that will change the weather. But you're the flat

00:19:39.380 earther. He knows the truth. You don't know your place. But listen to him when he talks more about

00:19:45.940 censorship plans. Take a listen. It's a reality. Our job is to keep you safe. And we're working

00:19:51.780 on it as a government. One of the challenges though, and this will be my last thought,

00:19:56.740 one of the challenges is governments used to have the ability to protect people. If a shipment of

00:20:06.660 Nazi propaganda was coming over to Canada, well, border guards could stop it at the border and make

00:20:16.100 sure that it wasn't distributed in bookshops across the country. We had an ability to make sure that if

00:20:24.420 someone walked up to someone else and said terrible things and were spewing hatred or taking a swing at

00:20:32.820 someone in the public square, we had tools and structures and police officers and rules that

00:20:39.620 could respond to that. Governments could keep their citizens safe. But now the internet means there's

00:20:48.420 a lot of people spending a huge amount of time in places that governments have no ability to keep you

00:20:55.140 directly safe from. Internet companies, specifically the web giants like Facebook and Google and others,

00:21:05.540 have a huge responsibility on how we shape our democracies, how we get along, what we see. They

00:21:12.660 are using algorithms that pick the right YouTube videos for you. They show you the cat videos or the

00:21:20.340 baby videos that you love to watch to make you giggle. I mean, there are really, really

00:21:24.820 powerful choices going on every single day in terms of what you're seeing when your homepage pops up,

00:21:30.420 when you're surfing the web, and it's learning constantly what is going to distract you better.

00:21:38.820 There is a responsibility we all need to start having and that those companies need to have for the

00:21:43.700 impact that they have over your lives. Right now, we're seeing a moment where both Google and now Facebook

00:21:52.500 are threatening to prevent Canadians from being able to access the news

00:21:58.180 because they don't want to make sure that journalists are properly paid for the work they do.

00:22:04.500 That's the fight we're having right now with the big internet giants.

00:22:09.540 Our job is to keep you safe. You know, I don't think that's his job. That's certainly not in the

00:22:17.220 constitution. In fact, the word prime minister does not even appear in our constitution. But what does

00:22:21.940 he mean to keep us safe? To keep us safe from, from ideas? I suppose part of the job of a government

00:22:28.980 is to keep us safe through a military and a police. But he's not talking about keeping us safe from crime.

00:22:35.060 He's not talking about keeping us safe from foreign marauders. He is specifically talking about ideas 0.99

00:22:41.700 that you get on the internet. Well, who chooses which ideas he's going to keep us safe from? Well,

00:22:49.540 him, of course. And look at him lie. It's so weird. Take a look at this clip.

00:22:53.060 The journalist who wrote this article should receive compensation if you're going to share

00:22:58.820 that article on your platform, that journalists should be paid for their work. It seems pretty

00:23:04.820 obvious to me that that's something we have. But the internet giants are so worried about having to

00:23:11.220 actually pay our journalists for the professional work they do, they'd rather remove people from having

00:23:19.780 access to the news. These are the kinds of things that we're struggling with as a country. And we're

00:23:24.340 going to have to have really important debates about because access to news and information

00:23:30.420 is that foundation that we can all build a better society from.

00:23:35.380 No, Facebook and Google are not mad that they're being asked to pay for showing some journalist work.

00:23:43.860 That's not what the law says. The law that Trudeau refers to is a law that would require Google and

00:23:49.380 Facebook to pay for even linking, just for a link to someone's story, which makes no sense because

00:23:55.780 every journalist and every media company loves being linked to on Google and Facebook. It's how you get

00:24:01.060 traffic. I think there's a reason why Trudeau is lying about his bill because it makes no sense. And

00:24:05.780 if he describes it in a way that it is not, maybe it's more appealing. I think that Justin Trudeau

00:24:13.380 and his substitute teacher level blather, I think he's hypnotized the media who have never been

00:24:21.220 critical towards him before. They're just trying it out now with this China stuff and it looks good

00:24:25.460 on them. I hope they keep it. I think Justin Trudeau is just as corrupting a force in our democracy

00:24:33.140 as the New York D.A. is. Stay with us for more with Janine Younis next.

00:24:38.900 Well, there has been an enormous amount of information that has been publicly released

00:24:56.660 by Elon Musk since he bought and took private Twitter. It reminds me in some ways of when the

00:25:02.980 Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union and its allies tumbled down and a lot of material was shredded or

00:25:10.740 burned, but a lot of it was preserved and later studied to prove the diabolical nature of the

00:25:18.340 Soviet regime. There are to this day museums dedicated to the KGB and the Stasi so people know

00:25:25.700 what happens and learn and try not to forget about it. That's the feeling I get when Elon Musk

00:25:33.060 takes secrets from deep within Twitter and reveals them, which is fascinating because he owns the

00:25:39.780 company and at first glance you would think, what is he doing? He's destroying the reputation of

00:25:45.700 Twitter. No, it's the opposite. He's showing what he bought and one of the reasons he bought it and

00:25:50.340 he's showing that he is not like that. Well, even before Elon Musk was voluntarily revealing what

00:25:59.700 Twitter had done, one of the friends of the Ezra LeVant show was going to court to prove it on her own

00:26:07.380 with people who had been silenced and censored by Twitter at the behest of the government. You know

00:26:14.340 who I'm talking about, Janine Younis, staff lawyer at the new Civil Liberties Alliance in Washington, D.C.

00:26:20.500 She joins us now via Skype from that city. Janine, it's great to see you again. It's wonderful to

00:26:25.540 have Elon Musk willingly disclose and declassify, so to speak, internal Twitter documents, but you

00:26:33.220 went to court to prove the same thing, not just with Twitter, but other social media companies too, right?

00:26:38.580 Yeah, that's right. So this case, the allegation is that the government was basically co-opting

00:26:46.100 private industry, in this case the tech companies, in order to censor the voices of Americans that

00:26:50.900 didn't like on topics ranging from COVID to the elections, but our clients were all about COVID.

00:26:57.540 And the judge granted discovery a while ago, back in June, in relation to an early motion in the case.

00:27:04.820 So we obtained a lot of information from the companies showing that the government has been

00:27:09.380 coercing and pressuring them to censor in accordance with its own views.

00:27:14.980 Yeah, I mean, if companies do that on their own, it's very frustrating that there are strong arguments

00:27:20.340 about private property, private companies. I mean, there are arguments that they are the new public

00:27:25.300 square and they should have some First Amendment, you know, requirements. But when the government

00:27:33.060 is threatening, cajoling, pushing, carrot and sticking those companies, then they become agents,

00:27:38.820 they really become de facto bureaucrats when a private company does the bidding of

00:27:44.900 the federal government. And whether or not they're sympathetic to begin with,

00:27:48.580 when the President of the United States or when senior officials ask you to do something,

00:27:52.340 there's an implied coercion because they have the power to hurt you, right?

00:27:55.460 Right. And to be clear here, it wasn't merely asking. They were actually making threats,

00:28:00.900 saying, you know, we're going to look at repealing Section 230, which gives companies liability for

00:28:07.220 the content that people post on their platforms. So Section 230 is really important to the tech

00:28:12.100 companies. They, you know, said things like, we'll make sure they're held accountable. We're going to

00:28:16.260 find out, you know, we're going to find ways to make sure they're held accountable. So these are

00:28:20.100 actual threats. And the case law is pretty clear in our country that the government can't use private

00:28:25.620 companies to do what it can't do directly. And the government can't punish people or censor them

00:28:31.380 for expressing certain viewpoints. And that's exactly what's going on here. They're using the

00:28:35.700 companies to establish, sorry, to accomplish what they can't do themselves. And so that's a First

00:28:40.660 Amendment violation. Now, I understand that the other side of this battle went to court with a motion to

00:28:49.380 dismiss this whole lawsuit. In Canada, I don't think that those motions to dismiss are as commonplace.

00:28:58.980 But there's a lot more costs for frivolous lawsuits. There's some differences between our systems.

00:29:05.700 I think the American way, you correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not an American lawyer, is that

00:29:12.660 in shakedown lawsuits, in political lawsuits, in hopeless lawsuits,

00:29:17.220 there is a lot of screening at that very first stage. Am I right? And that's what the defendants

00:29:22.900 try to do here. They try to say, oh, this is a fishing trip. This is a political battle. There's

00:29:27.460 no real case. But the judge said, no, no, there's enough here to warrant a full hearing. Have I described

00:29:32.580 both the US system and what the judge said in the motion to dismiss here? That's about right. Yeah.

00:29:37.780 So motions to dismiss are filed in nearly every case, and certainly constitutional law, which is the

00:29:44.100 area I practice in. So they, you know, the government just always tries to see if it can get the case

00:29:48.660 dismissed. So yes, here, the judge said, you know, nope. You know, they've stated a claim that

00:29:54.260 a valid claim, the allegations in the complaint substantiate those claims. And so we're not throwing

00:29:59.780 it out. And he said he used a lot of language that was very good, I think, you know, indicates

00:30:04.580 that he may be on our side, you know, for the for the long haul, not just the motion to dismiss.

00:30:10.020 And I mean, the crucial part is the state action theory that I was discussing earlier,

00:30:15.300 because the government's defense is, oh, no, no, these companies want to do this. This is what they

00:30:19.860 had, you know, COVID misinformation policies, other misinformation policies before, they were just

00:30:25.540 asking the government for advice and help, which they can do. And I acknowledge that they can do that,

00:30:29.940 if that's what was going on. But I think, you know, the emails and other communications that we've got,

00:30:33.940 combined with the public threats, make clear, that's not what was happening. The companies weren't

00:30:37.780 seeking input to enforce the policies that they wanted to have, they were being coerced

00:30:42.100 by the government first into adopting certain policies, and then into enforcing them along

00:30:46.420 the lines, and sorry, the way that the government wanted them to do, which it can't do.

00:30:50.580 That's incredible. So the judge who ruled in your favor on this motion to dismiss is seized

00:30:56.020 with this matter all the way, it'll be the same judge who'll be hearing the substantive case?

00:30:59.700 Yes. Now, I do think there's going to be a, it's kind of, these cases are very complicated. So

00:31:06.660 on a separate track, we had filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, that's emergency relief.

00:31:12.260 That was actually filed some time ago. So there's going to be a hearing on that in May.

00:31:16.500 And that, I think, the losing party there will appeal to the Fifth Circuit, that's the Court of Appeals.

00:31:22.660 So, and that will be a very important, what happens in the Fifth Circuit is going to be very important.

00:31:28.340 So this is certainly not a quick lawsuit, and you wouldn't think it would be. You've got,

00:31:31.460 on the one hand, tech companies with bottomless pockets, and you've got the government, which is

00:31:36.980 limited, literally unlimited resources. So they're certainly not going to make it easy for you. But

00:31:43.060 so far, you've had some surprise, I don't know if surprising, but pleasantly surprising,

00:31:48.340 let me put it that way, successes. I feel like it's going well.

00:31:52.420 Well, yes, it's going very well. I mean, it's a pleasant surprise in some ways, because

00:31:57.780 it really establishes that, you know, we have a strong case. It's unfortunate, on the other hand,

00:32:03.940 because it was sort of beyond my wildest dreams in terms of what it turned out the government was

00:32:08.340 doing and the expansiveness of these efforts. So it turned out there were, so far that we know of,

00:32:14.660 over a dozen federal agencies involved in these efforts, up to 100 federal officials that we know

00:32:21.140 of now, we keep finding out more. So, and the coercive tactics that were employed behind the

00:32:26.500 scenes, you know, sort of backdoor tactics, aggressive tactics to get these companies to

00:32:31.380 do what they wanted, were really surprising to me. I didn't, I actually didn't expect it was going to

00:32:36.420 be that bad. So that's disappointing to see that we really have an administration and

00:32:41.460 a lot of agencies that don't expect, sorry, don't respect Americans' First Amendment rights.

00:32:46.820 You're in the United States, a different court system. And of course, your First Amendment is

00:32:50.100 very robust. In Canada, we don't have the same freedoms. And we don't have as strong a public

00:32:59.220 interest law firm tradition in this country. Our version of the ACLU basically snoozed for two years

00:33:05.860 during the pandemic and the lockdowns. And I, I really don't see the kind of public interest

00:33:10.900 litigation that you're doing up here in Canada. But I have to say, Janine, I am most certain that

00:33:16.420 the same sort of censorship that you are discovering in the United States, how could it not be happening

00:33:23.140 in Canada, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, and especially in continental Europe, countries where,

00:33:30.180 in some cases, like Germany, they're proudly pro-censorship, at least on certain issues.

00:33:36.420 They say it's their historical legacy from the Holocaust, frankly. If you ask Germany about

00:33:41.780 freedom of speech, they have large carve-outs for censorship. I think that what you are revealing

00:33:47.060 in your lawsuit surely is happening around the world. What do you think of that theory?

00:33:52.660 Oh, I think that's almost definitely true. And I mean, in Canada, for instance, I think,

00:33:56.980 you know, we've even seen pretty overt efforts to silence doctors and other people who dissented on

00:34:03.220 COVID. So it's not even a secret. They don't have to keep it a secret because they're not violating

00:34:07.140 the law because, you know, you have as robust free speech protection.

00:34:11.540 Now, the Twitter files, as they're being called when Elon Musk releases tranches of these internal

00:34:18.580 documents. And by the way, it was incredible for me to learn that there were FBI or other government

00:34:24.020 affiliated staff who remained with Twitter after Elon Musk bought it and beavered away within new

00:34:32.260 Twitter to try and quash some of the release of this information. I thought that was amazing.

00:34:39.780 And I think it it caught Elon Musk by surprise if we're to take him at face value.

00:34:44.820 I think it's amazing what he's doing. I think I now look at Twitter and other social media is really

00:34:52.020 just a giant intelligence agency. You know, we can say that easily about TikTok being spies for China.

00:34:57.700 But I think that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google really were the same for the and again,

00:35:04.820 I don't want to sound like I got a tinfoil hat on, but really was government agencies from the CIA to the

00:35:09.940 FBI to health agencies. Like it really was a government operation to filter information in and

00:35:16.820 out. I think free speech was the least of its purposes. It was it was all about control and

00:35:23.700 propaganda and filtering. I mean, it's it's just so clear to me now. Elon Musk bought himself a digital

00:35:30.580 digital FBI, digital CIA. Yeah, I think I think that's right. And what we're seeing now, I think sort of

00:35:38.580 exemplifies or illustrates why we have a First Amendment and why free speech is actually the way

00:35:43.460 to go rather than these censorship regimes, like as you mentioned in Germany. So I mean, the way this

00:35:49.060 actually started was the fear of Russian propaganda, Russian disinformation interfering with elections.

00:35:55.300 And OK, that sounds reasonable. Yes, sure. The FBI should be able to make sure that Russians aren't 1.00

00:35:59.540 infiltrating Twitter and Facebook and convincing Americans to vote a certain way based on false

00:36:05.380 information. One can sort of understand that or Russian bots who are just, you know, basically

00:36:10.260 spreading propaganda. But then what happens is that starts to filter in to censoring the views of

00:36:18.340 Americans who just disagree and think Trump won the election or Trump should have won the election.

00:36:23.220 And so I think this sort of shows why we don't want the government making these decisions. We don't want

00:36:27.140 them involved in this. The best way to deal with bad ideas is to let good ideas come out. And you do that

00:36:34.100 through more free speech, not less. You know, a related weapon besides censorship

00:36:39.940 are these government backed so-called fact checkers. I recently learned, for example, that NewsGuard,

00:36:48.180 which purports to be a fact checking agency, it's actually hardwired on some on some web browsers,

00:36:54.100 that they got a major government contract from the Pentagon. And and I'm not sure if I've ever told you,

00:37:01.300 but Rebel News, we learned that defense contractors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock,

00:37:08.580 nothing to do with Canada. I've never been to Arkansas. We have no connection whatsoever. But

00:37:13.060 the U.S. Navy hired defense contractors at in Arkansas to work up a memo on Rebel News.

00:37:24.100 Were we a foreign psyops information op? It was the craziest thing I ever saw. 0.85

00:37:31.460 I don't understand it. In my mind, I'm thinking, well, maybe Trudeau wanted to do that, but he

00:37:36.420 asked his American counterparts to do it for him in case it would violate Canadian law. And maybe

00:37:41.940 America asked Canada to spy on. I mean, I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole. I was,

00:37:46.580 I got to tell you, I was completely shocked to see that the U.S. Navy was spying on Rebel News. We

00:37:51.780 don't even have any boats. I got to tell you. And it was so bizarre. And we started doing access to

00:37:57.940 information requests. Our viewers know this because it was quite a story when it happened. And I learned

00:38:04.820 just how much of this so-called fact checking of domestic political conversation. And by the way,

00:38:12.900 we're critical of China. Like we are on America's side on the China issue. It's the military that's 0.65

00:38:19.300 fact checking us. I find that super creepy. And I bet you 99% of people do not know that it is the

00:38:25.380 Pentagon financing and in some cases commissioning these so-called fact checks. I think that's crazy.

00:38:32.020 And I wonder if it's related in any way to the kind of stuff you're doing in court.

00:38:36.740 Yeah. I mean, it is, you know, nobody's brought a case yet, but there's some other relatedly,

00:38:41.140 uh, this, and this just came out last month. Um, there's the U S state department has been funding

00:38:47.620 what the organization called the global disinformation index in Britain. And that, uh,

00:38:52.980 organization rates news outlets by how reliable they are. So risky, you know, it's considered

00:38:58.740 misinformation, not risky, not misinformation. Now, if you look at the list of organizations

00:39:03.460 deemed risky and not risky, it's, it's laughable. It's just conservative are the risky ones.

00:39:07.860 Um, liberal are the non-risky. I mean, they have Huffington post, which is

00:39:13.140 a ridiculous in the, you know, in the, in the non-risky because it's liberal, obviously.

00:39:17.700 So what you, I mean, what you have going on there is it's effectively a government

00:39:21.540 censorship regime. They're just doing it through the third party. So I think these cases are all

00:39:25.460 going to be very interesting. Um, and how they come out will really impact things for a long time.

00:39:30.100 Well, I tell you, if there's ever an action against some of these fact checkers,

00:39:34.100 we were taking Facebook's fact checker in Australia to court. And I don't know how that's going to go,

00:39:40.180 but, uh, we're doing that on behalf of our Australian correspondent.

00:39:44.420 You know what? I, I'm, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's very hard to do that when in court,

00:39:48.740 they say, Oh no, no, no. We're just offering our opinion. Oh, hang on. I thought you said you were a

00:39:53.060 fact checker. It's quite a defense for a fact checker to plead. Oh, it's just our fair opinion.

00:39:57.940 You can't censor us. Um, if ever there is action against these so-called fact checkers for being

00:40:04.660 government agents, boy, we'd love to get a piece of that as a plaintiff. I just thought I'd throw

00:40:08.740 that your way. Hey, you know what? It's been great to catch up with you on this very important case,

00:40:12.660 but I want to leave on sort of a, and I don't know if this is a fun note or amusing. I found it

00:40:18.900 fulfilling, satisfying, entertaining. Um, it's a, it's a video. I think it was taken a couple of years

00:40:27.460 ago. Like, I don't think this is very recent. This is Anthony Fauci, St. Fauci walking through

00:40:34.100 the neighborhoods of Washington DC with a DC mayor and just encountering regular folks. And

00:40:41.700 he had his camera crew in tow. I think this was a PBS documentary and he was going to be,

00:40:47.540 of course, the star in this. I can't believe this footage was released. And he encounters a lay person 0.70

00:40:53.700 who I'm going to call severely normal, obviously not a scholar, obviously not a

00:40:57.940 researcher, a journalist, but someone who's got more common sense in his pinky.

00:41:02.420 And they go back and forth, they spar. And then finally, Fauci just sort of

00:41:07.940 sulks away. And the last scene of it, if we have the right version, he's in his car putting on lots of

00:41:13.220 hand sanitizer after this grubby encounter. Janine, I'd love to watch this clip with you for a minute and

00:41:19.300 then get your feedback because this was one of the most interesting, entertaining,

00:41:24.260 and revealing videos I've seen about Fauci in a while. Let's take a look and then I'd love your

00:41:29.380 thoughts on it. Here we go. People in America are not settled with the information that's been given

00:41:35.860 to us right now. So I'm not going to be lining up taking a shot on a vaccination for something that

00:41:43.220 wasn't clear in the first place. And then you all create a shot in miraculous time. It takes years

00:41:50.740 to create vaccination. Well, it used to take years. You know how many years we're invested in this

00:41:59.060 approach? About 20 years of science to get us to be able to do it. 20 years is not enough. And nine

00:42:04.820 months is definitely not enough for nobody to be taking no vaccination that you all came up with.

00:42:09.700 The only reason I'm talking to you right now, as close as we are, is that I've been vaccinated.

00:42:14.580 Right. But if a lot of thousands of people like you don't get vaccinated, you're going to let this

00:42:20.020 virus continue to percolate in this country and in this world. Something like the common flu then,

00:42:24.340 right? It's much more serious than the flu. Well, the flu kills a lot of people.

00:42:29.940 You know how many people died of the flu the last year? I mean, not this year, virtually none,

00:42:35.380 but the previous year, about 20 to 30,000. You know, how many people have died from COVID-19 in

00:42:40.580 the United States? 600,000 Americans. Well, you, well, that, well, the number that you all

00:42:46.660 given that died, that's, that once again, that's you all's number. You're going to pass. Yeah,

00:42:51.460 definitely. All right. Because when you start talking about paying people to get vaccinated,

00:42:56.020 when you start talking about incentivizing things to get people vaccinated, there's something else going

00:43:01.220 on with that. Something else, something else going on. It is something going on. You're right.

00:43:05.780 But I'm glad millions of people like me and most everybody here didn't get an incentive. You know

00:43:10.820 what their incentive was? Protecting their health and protecting the city. But I won't keep you

00:43:15.460 anymore. It's okay. My, my, my, my, my campaign is about fear. It's about inciting fear in people.

00:43:21.780 You all attack people with fear. That's what this pandemic is. It's a fear. It's fear,

00:43:26.500 this pandemic. That's all it is. Oh, I just love that ending. He, he ran away. Like he walked away

00:43:34.900 mid conversation. He didn't even say goodbye or thank you or agree to disagree or you're very,

00:43:41.140 he, he, he just sort of stomped away and then he put the hand sanitizer on. That's just wonderful

00:43:47.780 editing. I can't believe that that video was released. I'm, I'm shocked. He didn't say

00:43:52.740 delete that video right now. Let me ask for your reaction to that clip.

00:43:59.060 Well, I, I love that guy. I think he's been reading our Twitter feeds.

00:44:04.580 He just, I mean, he was, he knew so much more than them. He made so many good points. I mean,

00:44:08.740 you typically test a vaccine for much longer than this one was before you start to widely distribute

00:44:13.380 it. Um, it's pandemic of fear. He just, he, you know, he was so much more knowledgeable,

00:44:18.660 uh, had so much more common sense than those two. And they, it showed Bowser and, uh, Fauci both

00:44:23.620 treated him with contempt and the things that they were saying were anti-science. You know,

00:44:27.140 she's, she's saying, uh, the only reason I I'm going to talk to you now is because I'm, um,

00:44:32.420 I'm vaccinated, you know, as though he's just a disease vector. Well, first of all, he had no

00:44:36.180 symptoms. So unlikely to spread it. They're outside unlikely to spread it. And the vaccine also doesn't,

00:44:41.300 uh, protect you from getting it. So that doesn't actually make any sense. So I don't know. It's

00:44:46.580 just a very telling clip. Oh, there was. And, and even his comment, you, I think you heard him say

00:44:51.460 you were in, why do you have to incentivize people to take such a miracle drive? I thought that was a

00:44:56.740 clever point, very succinctly said. Um, and even just challenging the authority of this,

00:45:04.340 I am science. Oh, well that's your data. Remember when they were arguing numbers and, and, and the

00:45:10.820 fella said, no, that's your, your numbers. Right. Right. Right. So an inherent skepticism.

00:45:17.140 And I don't, I don't know what neighborhood that was. I'm going to guess that was a lower

00:45:22.420 income neighborhood in Washington DC. I'm going to guess that that fellow there has had a hard

00:45:26.660 knock life. And this is just, that's just a pure prejudice on my part and stereotype. And I hope I'm

00:45:30.820 not off base there. But the reason I say that is because he had so much common sense because I'm

00:45:37.220 guessing he has to be skeptical in life, uh, because he, he's deals with bamboozlers all the time. 0.56

00:45:43.620 And here's a bamboozler who's got a, you know, a lab coat and a clipboard and the mayor and, and 1.00

00:45:50.660 unlike the, uh, you know, the media party, unlike the, the woke elite, he's got a built in skepticism

00:45:58.260 in life as opposed to an automatic trust and conformity. Uh, and, oh, well, this is the new

00:46:05.060 thing. Everyone's going along with this. I will obediently accept this. I think that that

00:46:09.860 gentleman had a natural skepticism that, you know, as Orwell said, it's the proles who will save us.

00:46:17.620 And that ordinary working class man had more common sense in those two minutes than, and,

00:46:23.220 and better questions succinctly put. And he wasn't rude. Was he, there was no reason for

00:46:28.100 Fauci to run away. He didn't swear. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's my point. They ran away. He didn't

00:46:34.020 swear. He didn't call them names. They came to his house. He didn't come to their house.

00:46:38.980 And I thought that was just so perfect. I I've watched that clip several times and I see online

00:46:46.180 it's had 10 million views in a day. That just made me feel good. That gave me hope for America.

00:46:52.580 Really? I know that sounds a little bit much, but that gave me hope that people like that are out

00:46:57.140 there. Janine, great to see you again. Uh, thanks for your, uh, for making time for us and thanks for your

00:47:02.020 great work fighting for freedom and standing up for the first amendment in America. Hopefully

00:47:06.500 some of that will splash over to us up here in Canada. Thank you so much, Ezra. All right.

00:47:11.620 There you have it. Janine Yunus with the NCLA. That's a new civil liberties alliance in

00:47:16.740 Washington, DC. Stay with us, Moorhead. 1.00

00:47:18.660 Hey, welcome back. Your letters to me. Jane says, hi, Ezra. It's terrible. What has been happening

00:47:34.900 in women's sports? These athletes worked so hard for years. My heart goes out to April. I think there

00:47:39.700 is a big money behind the trans agenda. And I do believe it's part of the globalist agenda to mess 1.00

00:47:44.580 with the roles and relationships with people in our society. There's obviously big money behind it.

00:47:49.300 I remember when Hollywood rolled out a show called Transparent with Jeffrey Tambor,

00:47:54.020 and I thought, who's watching this? Who's financing this show? I don't believe that broke even. I think

00:48:01.700 that was a bought and paid for propaganda film out of Hollywood, which is what Hollywood's so good at.

00:48:07.700 Daniel Charles Films, probably one of the only men lifting professionally in the women's event and has

00:48:17.140 the Alberta bench and deadlift record already. The faster we can get more men into the women's 1.00

00:48:22.660 events, the faster people will realize. I think it's only a matter of time before the entire podium,

00:48:32.020 first, second, and third place is men. I mean, why not? If you see one guy beating two gals, 0.97

00:48:38.260 every other guy could say, oh, I can do that too. I could get praise. I could get attention.

00:48:43.620 And a bulletproof vest, if you dare say the word against me, you're transphobe.

00:48:47.780 I'll get media coverage. I'll be important. I can't compete against the guys, but I can crush

00:48:53.700 those girls. Clone 42 said, ever heard of tides? Unless the photos were taking in identical times of

00:49:00.900 day, conclusions cannot be drawn about sea level change. Photos taken at low tide, then high tide,

00:49:05.540 could equally be contrasted to construct a doomsday narrative. And I think climate hysteria

00:49:09.460 is psychotic and that higher CO2 concentrations have potential to increase human flourishing

00:49:14.020 by increasing crop yields. But I still know what tides are and recognize that presenting a

00:49:18.020 comparative argument using these photos is flawed reasoning. Yeah, that was the point made by all

00:49:24.100 those fact checks is that we did not know resolutely what the tide level was. Okay, so you don't know.

00:49:33.140 That doesn't mean it's wrong. There's still some value in seeing the two photos. And you raise a point

00:49:40.100 which is we cannot conclusively, based on that photo, not knowing when the tide, what you're talking about

00:49:45.300 that photo of Fort Dennison in Seattle. See, you're saying it correctly, which is we don't know

00:49:52.660 how high or low the tide was when that photo was taken, so we actually don't know precisely

00:49:59.700 if the water levels are higher or lower. Okay, fair enough. But every single fact check I showed you

00:50:05.300 called it a lie, propaganda, meant to deceive. And they resolutely said it's false instead of,

00:50:11.380 well, we don't really know because what was the tide at then. I think, and we talked about it with

00:50:16.500 Janine today, all these fact checkers are government propagandists. They're all on the government dime.

00:50:22.340 That's our show for today. Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters,

00:50:27.140 to you at home, good night, and keep fighting for freedom.

00:50:41.380 We'll see you next time.

Rebel News Podcast - March 21, 2023

EZRA LEVANT ｜ Are they really going to arrest Trump like they do in banana republics？

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