Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ Biden remains asleep at the wheel as U.S. struggles with border invasion

00:00:00.000 Oh hi everybody, I'm in Arizona where I had an interview and while I was down here I decided

00:00:05.660 to go to the U.S. Mexico border to see what I could see. I'll show you but obviously you have

00:00:11.340 to have the video version of this podcast to see it. Go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe,

00:00:17.400 it's eight bucks a month. I saw some interesting things, I'd like to show it to you.

00:00:21.400 All right, without further ado, here's today's podcast.

00:00:30.000 What am I doing in Arizona? It's March 14th and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.

00:00:47.240 Shame on you, you sensorious bug. 0.99

00:00:50.520 Oh hi, as you can tell by these prickly bushes behind me, I am not in snowy Canada. I have zipped

00:01:07.020 down to the state of Arizona just for a day. In fact, not even a day. I woke up 21 hours ago in

00:01:14.420 Toronto, got on a plane, made my way to a town called Sierra Vista, Arizona where I was interviewing

00:01:21.920 Betty Carbert. She's the mother of Chris Carbert, one of the four accused Coutts 4 defendants from

00:01:29.680 the blockade that the truckers had there two years ago. We'll have a special show about that that's

00:01:35.760 not for today. But since Tucson, Arizona is just, I don't know, 20 miles away from the border between

00:01:43.780 Arizona and Mexico, we decided to use the rest of our day here to go and look around at the border

00:01:51.360 mess that has seen hundreds of thousands. In fact, I think it's in the millions of illegal migrants just

00:01:58.600 waltz across the border. You may know that my colleagues Lincoln Jay and Alexa Lavoie did some

00:02:04.620 excellent reporting on the subject from Texas earlier this year. You take a look at that.

00:02:09.940 We met with a retired Border Patrol agent named Louis and his nephew, Ethan, who agreed to show us

00:02:19.280 a popular spot for people to enter into Eagle Pass, Texas, illegally from Mexico. This was just miles

00:02:27.860 down the road from Shelby Park. So at one time, this, I don't know, well, you guys have researched all this

00:02:34.080 stuff. We had Title 42. Yeah. It was a COVID measure. Yeah. So that when people came across,

00:02:40.120 we just kicked it back to Mexico. So Title 42, when they did away with it, you know, the hordes of 1.00

00:02:46.520 people came across. Every morning, 700 would walk up this road. 700 aliens early morning, every morning.

00:02:53.620 Well, Lincoln and Alexa had a few days on the ground. They made local contacts and they really spent a lot

00:02:59.640 of time at the border. And wouldn't you know it, they actually encountered some illegal migrants

00:03:05.300 emerging from the bushes. Here's a reminder of how that looked.

00:03:08.680 Well, I simply didn't have the time. I had about four hours of daylight and I didn't want to go out

00:03:35.220 looking for migrants at night because, of course, the people who smuggle them are sometimes desperate

00:03:40.320 and criminal. So I had about four hours of daylight. And what I want to show you today is what I saw

00:03:47.320 during those four hours. The answer is I didn't actually see any people sneaking across the border.

00:03:53.380 I saw a lot of border police. And I want to tell you one anecdote before I throw to some video clips

00:03:59.440 that I recorded earlier today. We actually saw dozens of Border Patrol police vehicles all around

00:04:07.040 wherever we went. And there was even some sort of migrant check stops on the highway. We saw one as

00:04:13.800 we were driving down there. But we didn't stop and look at it. But on our way back to our hotel tonight,

00:04:21.520 we saw one of these migrant police check stops at the side of the highway. We slowed down the vehicle

00:04:27.500 so we could film this migrant check stop that was closed for the night. So we were driving on the

00:04:34.380 highway and we slowed down to about, I don't know, 50 kilometers an hour just so we could film this

00:04:39.940 migrant check stop. And then we sped back up. Wouldn't you know it, there were still so many border

00:04:45.820 agents all around that when they saw our vehicle slow down to take a look at the border migrant check

00:04:53.120 stop? They assumed we were smugglers or something. And they put on their flashers and they pulled us over

00:04:59.120 and we showed them who we were and they let us go. It's an enormous border. And the difference between

00:05:04.960 America and Mexico couldn't be more stark in terms of economic opportunity and freedom and frankly crime. 0.99

00:05:13.280 Despite the fact that there's an enormous deployment of troops, the migrants are still coming. 1.00

00:05:19.280 And when they are captured by these border patrol agents, they're not just deported. Like Justin

00:05:25.200 Trudeau, he lets them stay in the country, Joe Biden. Anyways, without further ado, let me show you

00:05:30.080 some clips that we assembled from my day to day. I don't think it was as successful as Lincoln and

00:05:35.760 Alexis trip to Texas because they were there for many days and there was an enormous migration pouring

00:05:41.920 over the border. We actually couldn't get close to the border. All the roads were closed. You could not

00:05:48.960 get right up to that border fence. But I think it was sort of an interesting journey anyways. And I'd

00:05:55.280 like to show it to you because we did spend the rest of our day on it. So for better or for worse,

00:06:01.520 here's how my day went.

00:06:13.840 As you can see, I am not in Canada anymore. I'm in Naco, Mexico. Through that fence 20 feet is Naco,

00:06:22.880 Arizona. And you can see the border fence stretching for miles actually all the way to the horizon.

00:06:30.080 Um, down here, the fence has been painted in a beautiful, you know, attempt to make it a less

00:06:37.600 ugly barrier than it really is rusted steel. But down there, it's, you know, near the children's

00:06:45.040 park was interesting crossing from the American side to the Mexican side. They didn't ask for any 0.98

00:06:50.960 ID. They didn't ask for any passports. They literally didn't say anything to us. Well, they said a few

00:06:56.160 things in Spanish that I didn't understand. They did look in the car to see if we were smuggling

00:07:00.800 contraband from America into Mexico and they let us go. And immediately you can see the obvious 0.89

00:07:09.600 above us. You can hear a drone, whether it's a police drone or a military drone or a drone of

00:07:17.440 coyotes who are planning to smuggle people across the border because the county on that side of the

00:07:25.280 fence is, uh, where an enormous number of migrants cross over. And in fact, all the way down from Sierra

00:07:34.480 Vista to the border, we saw police vehicles, border patrol vehicles. I'm told that there's often a blimp

00:07:41.200 in the air. So we are in a place where an enormous number of people are smuggled

00:07:48.000 into the US side. I'm slightly alert because although it is bright out and we are, you know,

00:07:54.720 a few hundred yards from a large police presence, I also know that there's a lot of homelessness there.

00:08:01.200 Not only do the smugglers bring people over, but they bring, of course, drugs over. Well, it's five minutes

00:08:06.880 later and we're now on the US side of this border wall. You can see the, uh, US Customs and Immigration

00:08:14.800 headquarters sort of in that adobe style. Uh, this is the, this town on the Arizona side,

00:08:21.040 the American side of the border has the exact same name, Naco. Uh, and it's a little bit run down.

00:08:25.920 It's an unincorporated village, but it's markedly different in every way from the Mexican side.

00:08:32.000 It's enormous security here. I, I mentioned before we had a drone overhead and, uh, we asked the,

00:08:39.520 the border guard what he thought it was. He thought it probably was American border patrol.

00:08:44.560 You know, there's all sorts of sensors. When you come across all sorts of

00:08:48.400 inspections and investigations, you have all this, but in a way it's just for show

00:08:55.120 because when people, and I shouldn't just say Mexicans, because I don't even know if Mexicans

00:08:59.520 would be a majority of them anymore. Anyone from South and Central America, but really

00:09:03.440 everyone from around the world knows if you can make your way to Mexico, you can just march right

00:09:08.880 in and you want to be caught because you're not going to be kicked out. You'll be, well, in New York

00:09:15.120 City, you'll be given a lovely place to live. You'll be put up in a hotel. Now the mayor there wants to

00:09:19.600 give every migrant $10,000. By the way, in a lot of the countries where people come from, $10,000 US

00:09:26.800 is five years income. So it's an enormous magnet bringing hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

00:09:33.920 And of course, these border states have sort of had it, especially Texas, which is shipping

00:09:39.680 a lot of these migrants to these, uh, Democrat sanctuary cities, uh, New York, uh, Chicago,

00:09:46.400 places like that, that virtue signaled about how open borders were a good thing when it was only these

00:09:52.000 border towns that paid the price. But now they're squawking because their own local poor and homeless

00:09:59.200 people are being pushed aside by the world's, uh, illegal immigrants. So here you can see 1.00

00:10:05.120 the border wall going off to the horizon there. It does look impressive. Although I know a little

00:10:09.840 bit about walls. Um, if you don't have people patrolling them, uh, it is true. You can have a 20

00:10:16.080 foot wall. Someone get over it with a 21 foot ladder. You can have a 30 foot wall. You get,

00:10:21.360 you can always get over a fence. The fence, um, is to delay and to detect. You need a fence

00:10:29.040 system. You need patrols. And there are some patrols, but I say again, the craziest thing,

00:10:34.480 and we saw police cars and we saw all sorts of infrastructure, but none of it is actually to

00:10:41.360 keep the migrants out. It's to catch them and then release them, which is the strangest thing I've ever heard.

00:10:55.120 What an extraordinary view behind me. This is Arizona. You can see the border barrier,

00:11:01.280 the border wall between the United States and Mexico. It stretches a great distance down that way.

00:11:07.360 We were at the town of Naco, Mexico, and there was a small Naco in Arizona. I didn't tell you that

00:11:14.720 when we were on the Naco, so the Mexico side, we were driving around and we were filming a little

00:11:19.280 bit in front of the wall. People were stopping to look at us because there's not a lot of, uh,

00:11:24.960 not a lot of tourists from the United States in Naco. There's not a lot to do or see there.

00:11:30.160 And it didn't bother me that people were stopping and staring as we did a little bit of journalism.

00:11:34.480 But one SUV without a license plate seemed to be following us and I didn't, I didn't mind much.

00:11:41.920 And, uh, as we were driving this way, it followed this way and we went that way and it went that way.

00:11:46.720 And I was focused on driving, but our videographer, Lincoln, and he saw this other car and it was

00:11:52.640 someone in that unmarked vehicle, no license plate with a walkie talkie.

00:11:56.080 We were, we didn't know who it was. Who knows? It could have been just some local person. Could

00:12:04.640 have been, could have been a cop or it could have been someone with the cartel. We didn't want to

00:12:09.120 take our chances. Even though we were a few hundred yards away from police, we thought, let's get back

00:12:14.480 to the American side, which is where we are. What's funny is there's all these signs when you head into

00:12:19.040 Mexico weapons, not allowed guns, not allowed. Sure. They're not allowed. I'm sure they're not

00:12:25.120 actually, but there's an enormous smuggling operation of armed gangs and they deal in,

00:12:31.840 they traffic in two main resources. One is people and the other is fentanyl drugs made in China,

00:12:38.400 undermining the United States. This is an absolutely gorgeous area. We drove on this windy road up here.

00:12:45.360 I think this is called the Montezuma Canyon Road. There's a great amount of history here. This is the

00:12:51.520 Coronado National Memorial and I'm not fluent enough with my Spanish American history to know who Coronado

00:12:57.760 was, although I am fascinated by it. It's enormous here. It's a very large territory and it's fairly

00:13:10.000 sparsely populated on the American side. As we drove from Sierra Vista down to Naco and then from Naco to

00:13:17.040 here, we probably saw, I'm going to say, at least 20 border patrol vehicles along the road and as well

00:13:26.640 sort of depots or base camps where you might see 10 parked and five parked. There's towers, which I

00:13:33.200 assume are some sort of observational tower. There are all sorts of warning signs about migrants in the border.

00:13:40.240 In fact, in this beautiful park here at the picnic areas, there's warnings to be careful about migrants. They 1.00

00:13:46.800 have a lot of people dedicated to watching the border and finding migrants, but when they find them, they 0.81

00:13:54.080 release them. And I think the migrants want to be found, to be rescued. It's almost twilight, it's almost 0.99

00:14:02.000 dusk here. The sun is setting and it's getting a little bit chilly during the day. It's very hot at

00:14:06.880 night. It's cool. It's a very difficult journey. I mean, this is, you can see it's a desert. This is an arid

00:14:13.040 place. It's not fun, I imagine, to be an illegal migrant crossing over, just making sure you have enough 1.00

00:14:20.880 water alone. You want to be caught. You want to be caught and brought to a place where you can get

00:14:27.040 medical attention, where you can get food and water, and where you can perhaps get a bus ticket or a

00:14:33.200 plane ticket to New York City. Who wouldn't, I mean, you saw what it looked like in NACO, and I'm not

00:14:39.600 disparaging the place, but the average national income in NACO is a fraction of what it is in America.

00:14:46.880 It didn't feel safe there. Maybe we just were a little bit, uh, on, on pins and needles because

00:14:52.640 we were unused to it. But who wouldn't want to go from NACO, Mexico, into NACO, Arizona, be caught,

00:15:00.080 and you're not going to be sent out. In fact, if you play your cards right, you could wind up in New York

00:15:04.960 City with a $10,000, uh, gift welcome basket, uh, from, from the mayor there. We haven't seen any

00:15:12.080 migrants, but we've seen a great many signs telling us to be alert to migrants. Anyhow, I'll sign off 1.00

00:15:17.440 from the top of the mountain here, and, uh, we'll slowly make our way back down. You know, we didn't

00:15:22.720 have that moment that Lincoln and Alexa had a few months ago where, boom, jumping out of a bush was,

00:15:28.800 uh, a group of migrants. Um, it just didn't happen in the hours we had in town, but it's an enormous 0.95

00:15:36.080 factor. I've, I really have never seen this many police deployed in an area. It felt like a military

00:15:42.240 operation, which I guess it sort of is. I think it's a critical issue for the United States,

00:15:47.200 because if you don't have a border, are you really even a country?

00:15:50.800 Well, as you know, there is an enormous trial on the way in Ottawa. Tamara Leach,

00:16:06.000 the spiritual leader of the Ottawa Trucker Convoy enters her second year in prosecution. She was

00:16:12.320 jailed for 49 days before being released. And, um, the trial is a bizarre, excruciating exercise. It's so

00:16:19.520 clear to me that the process is the punishment. I think the Crown realizes they don't really have

00:16:24.320 a case against her. They'll just use the trial itself as a kind of punishment. As you know,

00:16:29.360 as well, there are trials underway in Lethbridge, Alberta. Trials for the so-called Coutts Three

00:16:35.120 and the Coutts Four, who are down to two, actually. Coutts, of course, being the name of the town,

00:16:40.480 the little village, actually, at the border between Alberta and Sweetgrass, Montana, where there was

00:16:45.520 another blockade. Those are serious trials, and they continue in the weeks ahead. But there was

00:16:51.200 a third location where the truckers had a sensational blockade that made international news.

00:16:57.600 You may recall that the city of Windsor, across the bridge from the American city of Detroit,

00:17:02.160 was blocked as well. And this got great attention in Toronto, because that bridge is an important

00:17:08.160 international hub for the auto industry. Well, many charges were laid over that. And I'm delighted

00:17:14.960 to report to you news from our cousins at the Democracy Fund. Let me read to you from a press release.

00:17:21.520 The Crown Attorney has withdrawn all criminal charges against William LaFramboise,

00:17:26.720 the alleged leader of the winter protests that blocked the Ambassador Bridge

00:17:29.680 in February of 2022. The Democracy Fund litigation director, Alan Haunert, stood beside his client,

00:17:35.520 LaFramboise, as the charges were withdrawn before Justice Campbell this past Wednesday.

00:17:42.080 And here's my favorite part. While the Crown Attorney stated that there were tribal issues,

00:17:48.080 he also explained to the court that it was not in the public interest to prosecute LaFramboise,

00:17:53.280 given the evidentiary challenges of the Crown's case and other serious matters that were vying for trial time.

00:17:59.600 in a backlogged court system. In other words, there was no point in trying the case. There was really no

00:18:05.920 public interest. And there was, you know, that little thing called evidence. Well, what a delight

00:18:10.480 to have the acquittal of Mr. LaFramboise. And I understand that the Democracy Fund, in fact,

00:18:16.160 represented a third of all the people in that blockade. Joining us now in person is Alan Haunert,

00:18:22.240 the acting, sorry, the litigation director, pardon me, of the Democracy Fund. Great to see you.

00:18:27.040 Thanks very much for having me on, Ezra.

00:18:29.200 Well, I think it's pitiful that they went all the way to the end before saying,

00:18:34.320 just kidding. We don't have enough evidence to try it. They didn't have any less evidence today

00:18:40.080 than they had two years ago or two months ago. They just, I think, were in a staring contest with

00:18:45.280 you and Mr. LaFramboise trying to get you guys to buckle.

00:18:49.440 Well, you know, Ezra, it's not uncommon for criminal charges to resolve right before the trial or close

00:18:56.320 to the trial. This particular trial was set for five days and it was going to be heard at the end of

00:19:02.560 April. You know, TDF came on just about two, three weeks ago and within about a week of our getting

00:19:12.160 on to represent Mr. LaFramboise, the charges were withdrawn.

00:19:15.680 I didn't know that. So for the first two years, he actually didn't have, did he have another

00:19:20.800 warrant?

00:19:22.800 He was self-represented, but he was sort of a unique person. He wasn't like the other protesters.

00:19:28.880 All of the other protesters that we represented, they were all arrested on the streets at the

00:19:35.280 scene of the protest. But LaFramboise was different. He was arrested about six months later

00:19:40.160 and he was arrested because, I suppose it's the police, maybe it was the Attorney General,

00:19:47.040 decided that they needed a leader. They needed somebody who could be a bit of a scapegoat

00:19:54.560 for the blockades that happened in Windsor. And like I say, you know, it's not that uncommon

00:20:01.520 for charges to resolve prior to trial. That's when everybody's focused on them. But in this case,

00:20:09.280 you know, Mr. LaFramboise lost his opportunity to, to defend himself in trial. And you know,

00:20:15.760 a withdrawal is a favorable conviction, but it doesn't have that same satisfaction of going

00:20:21.120 before a court and being acquitted. So they waited half a year to charge him. That's weird in itself.

00:20:28.880 He, he was self-represented, which is always risky. Then Democracy Fund comes in and the Crown says,

00:20:34.480 oh, yikes, maybe this isn't going to go how we thought it was. But it's sort of funny that the,

00:20:38.800 the, the, the Crown prosecutors saying, well, it's not in the public interest. You know,

00:20:42.720 there's all this backlog. He knew that all along that there's been a backlog since the pandemic.

00:20:48.400 Courts aren't just jammed because of all these foolish pandemic lockdown tickets. They're jammed

00:20:53.680 because the courts basically went on a one-year holiday. That is not new news. We knew that in 2021,

00:21:00.800 2022, 2023, and it's only been used as the excuse now. I think that the presence of Democracy Fund lawyers

00:21:10.240 was probably the thing that tipped the balance. They thought this is not going to be a cakewalk.

00:21:14.960 Well, you know, Ezra, all lawyers would like to think that, you know, when I got on the file,

00:21:19.440 the charges were withdrawn. And you know, it's a chronological fact.

00:21:24.960 You know, maybe there's some truth to that. But I think, you know, I don't think the facts were there

00:21:31.200 to convict Lafrembois. The facts weren't there to convict a lot of these people who were arrested

00:21:38.560 in connection to these protests. Now, one of the, the interesting things that happened when I was in

00:21:44.080 court with Mr. Lafrembois, he said that the Crown Attorney came in with a prepared statement. It was

00:21:50.400 about two pages long. And I knew he was going to come in with a statement because he had to say

00:21:55.520 something to the judge. He had to explain to the judge why he was withdrawing these charges

00:22:03.200 quite close to the trial date. Judges don't always like that because we have this back

00:22:08.000 court system. And if you, you know, if you resolve something too close to trial, the judge will ask,

00:22:13.200 well, why didn't you do it sooner? I can find somebody else.

00:22:15.680 Yeah. Because they've got this judge now, a week of his life is freed up and he, he's not going to

00:22:20.480 take a vacation, but how can he fill that with real work? We will work it on short notice. So it's,

00:22:26.560 it's a discombobulation to him. It's a discombobulation to the entire legal system.

00:22:30.720 That's right. And as you say, there's a backlog in the court system that existed before COVID,

00:22:34.960 but COVID made it so much worse. Right. And, and so the, the, the Crown Attorney comes in and he makes

00:22:40.560 these comments, which I think are very fair. He admits that the evidence isn't as strong,

00:22:45.200 I guess, Mr. LaFranbois as the Crown would like it to be. So there are real trial issues here.

00:22:50.720 He also mentions the backlog in the court. And one of the things that's happening in the Ontario

00:22:55.040 Court of Justice right now is that the courts are stacking trials.

00:22:58.160 Exactly. Because it means that if you go to court for your trial date, there are going to be other

00:23:03.680 people who are scheduled to have their trials in that same courtroom on that same date. And they're

00:23:09.120 doing this to make sure they're trying to... Like double booking, like double overselling an airline

00:23:13.680 by five seats. So what happens if you show up, your lawyers show up and they say, sorry, we're out of

00:23:18.640 time? Well, that, that, that can happen, right? So you might, it's not, and it's not just a question of

00:23:23.600 being double booked. It can be triple booked, quadruple booked. And the more serious cases

00:23:29.040 are going to be tried before the less serious cases, right? Because we have this backlog and

00:23:33.840 there's some pushback, um, about cases, serious cases, sexual assault cases, um, being stayed because

00:23:42.560 the, the Crown can't get to them in time. You know, um, this is something I've said a lot.

00:23:48.240 There, we, we, we admire the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms. They've done a lot of

00:23:52.640 great fighting during the lockdowns. The CCF, the Canadian Constitutional Foundation,

00:23:57.760 has taken a small number of cases. And the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has been sleeping.

00:24:02.880 But the Democracy Fund has a different approach. Three thousand clients.

00:24:07.920 Really no discrimination, just anyone, any race and religion, every background, almost any fact

00:24:14.080 pattern. Three thousand, not three hundred, not thirty strategic cases. And why? Because to jam the system,

00:24:23.920 to make this exact, to make the judges and the prosecutors actually think, is it worth a thousand

00:24:32.080 man hours to go after these hundred clients? A hundred, uh, suspects who didn't wear their mask?

00:24:38.640 Is that more important than the bank robber or the rapist? And it's precisely because three thousand

00:24:43.680 people stood up and said, I'm going to fight that the three thousand, that so many of them were saved.

00:24:48.160 I think Mr. LaFramboise was saved, not just by himself, but by the fact that so many others stood

00:24:54.560 up and fought. If only a handful of people would have fought, they would have been steamrolled.

00:24:58.560 Jam the system, I say. Well, you know, if any area of law, if it's civil law, if it's criminal law,

00:25:05.760 if the other side, whether it be another lawyer or the Crown Attorney, knows you're going to take

00:25:09.920 something to trial, if you have a reputation for doing that, then they'll take you far more seriously.

00:25:15.760 And the Democracy Fund runs trials all the time. We do run trials all the time. I remember I flew out to

00:25:21.040 the island of Ganges. That's in British Columbia. Where's that? I didn't, I don't, that sounds like it's in

00:25:26.960 India. Look, Ezra, you have to take a plane to Vancouver, you have to take a ferry to Victoria, 0.97

00:25:34.400 then you have to take another ferry to this island called Ganges, drive up to a very small

00:25:39.120 port, smaller than this room we're in right now. I'm sure this wasn't a trick or a practical joke.

00:25:44.480 We, we, we, we fought that trial. We brought a, a charter application that resulted in a 40 page

00:25:50.720 decision. We were partially successful, partially not. There were more rounds of submissions,

00:25:55.200 more rounds of submissions. This was a $600 ticket. We're still fighting it. They know that we're going

00:26:00.960 to fight. You know what? And that's the thing, because so, I think of your ride can app,

00:26:05.440 over $5,000 in fines, plus GSD or whatever it was. It was about, it was almost 6,000 bucks a pop.

00:26:13.440 And you'd have a family of three, four, five landing at, at the airport. They'd all get the

00:26:18.320 fine. So that could be a $30,000 hit. Thing is, most people just ignored it, bad idea, or paid it,

00:26:25.600 worse idea. But hundreds chose to fight it. And there is no way that the, and it was, I think in, in the,

00:26:32.160 in the Toronto Pearson airport, they'd all went to the little court in Mississauga.

00:26:36.320 They were dumped with all these because it happens to be where the airport is.

00:26:39.760 Do you think any judge there said, yeah, I'd like to spend the next two years of my life

00:26:44.080 talking about a ride can app? Or do you think the prosecutor said, yeah, I went to law school

00:26:48.880 so I can day after day prosecute people because they didn't want to fill out a glitchy app on their

00:26:54.560 phone. I think the very fact that people stood up is what saved their freedom. Well, you know, you're,

00:27:00.960 you're probably right. And that goes back to what you were saying earlier about, uh, clogging the

00:27:04.880 court system. Now I'm not saying that we were trying to do that, but if you fight every single

00:27:09.120 ticket, um, the, the court system managed that right. And when you get that reputation, um, those,

00:27:15.600 those charges are going away as most of them did. You know, I think there's a lesson there.

00:27:19.680 It, it reminds me of that old movie, I'm Spartacus. No, I'm Spartacus. No, I'm Spartacus.

00:27:24.320 You can't take them all. And I remember the opposite happening in the case of restaurants.

00:27:29.040 You had in Toronto, you had Adam Skelly's barbecue, Adam's barbecue, just one guy really,

00:27:36.160 who stood up it, you know, without papers, pizza, you had like one restaurant per city.

00:27:42.000 And so the entire police force could be taught. Like they had a hundred police raid Adam Skelly's

00:27:48.240 barbecue place. They had riot horses there. That's what happens when one restauranteur, 0.93

00:27:52.640 if there had been 10 restaurants, it would have been a challenge for the Toronto police.

00:27:56.800 If there had, this is a city of, there's probably 3000 restaurants in Toronto. I'm just guessing,

00:28:02.320 maybe 5000 restaurants in the greater Toronto area. If a hundred of them said, we're not closing,

00:28:09.520 there would not have been enough police resources to go after them. And because only a handful of

00:28:15.360 martyrs stood up, they were crushed. And I think that the, where the restaurants failed,

00:28:21.200 these individual people succeed. Yeah, no, you're, you're right. I mean,

00:28:25.120 some of the restaurants were fine, uh, to some extent, right. They fought back without papers,

00:28:29.920 pizza, um, which will stop in Alberta, but that was an extremely costly trial.

00:28:36.560 Ezra, I've looked at the lease of legal bills. That was a very costly trial, but again, it's part of

00:28:42.240 you need to spend money to fight back sometimes, but you know, it's, it's really interesting. You

00:28:46.720 mentioned Adamson barbecue. Look at that response. Like, I mean, it's, it's just, it's disproportionate,

00:28:53.920 the amount of police you get in. And that's what it was like.

00:28:56.320 It was a real, that was not policing. That was theater.

00:28:58.720 I think you're right.

00:29:00.240 It was shocking on. Well, so I understand that's the last of the pending cases from the

00:29:05.440 Winter Bridge. Is that right?

00:29:06.560 Well, it's, it's the last of the cases that TDF is representing. I mean, I'm talking about

00:29:11.600 protesters who have trials. We have one under appeal. You know, the majority of our clients had their

00:29:16.480 charges withdrawn. We do have one conviction, but we're fighting that in the appellate courts.

00:29:21.920 Uh, but you know what, one thing that really interested me when I was last in, uh,

00:29:26.080 Windsor with Mr. Lafrembois and the, the, the Crown was giving his speech, uh, to the judge and

00:29:32.080 to the courtroom. And he said, well, you know, we've, we've had 44 trials or 44 matters, 44 people

00:29:37.600 who were arrested in Windsor, and here's how they resolved. And you know, that the thrust of his,

00:29:43.840 his speech was to say, well, look, we've achieved a general, uh, objective of deterrence.

00:29:50.480 But what he didn't say is, he didn't say that a lot of these people who were arrested in Windsor

00:29:57.040 were arrested on the sidewalk or were arrested on private property. Those people had their

00:30:02.960 charges withdrawn. And, you know, maybe they, maybe they were expected to quietly go away,

00:30:08.800 but that's not happening because I know that at least five of those people have launched civil

00:30:14.480 lawsuits. Those lawsuits have been served on the opposing police forces. And four of those, uh,

00:30:21.200 those people who have launched lawsuits against the Windsor police and other police forces are

00:30:25.520 actually former TDF points. Yeah. Well, I'm glad to hear it. And, uh, I think putting the police on

00:30:31.120 the back foot is an important thing to do. I think the police very obviously engaged in politics. They

00:30:36.880 were used, like I said, for theater in the case of Adamson's barbecue. I think that, um,

00:30:44.320 so much of the COVID enforcement was terrified to terrified people, to make things so, uh, scary to

00:30:50.960 normal Canadians that normal Canadians would voluntarily not fly, not leave their house,

00:30:55.200 not go to restaurants. Like the, the absurdity of the airport quarantine hotels, I think on purpose,

00:31:00.800 they were made awful. So just the word of mouth, people would say, oh, I don't want to go through

00:31:04.880 that. So I think the police should answer for their brazen partisanship. I'll never look at

00:31:09.360 police the same way again. I mean, I was starting to have my doubts about them because the politicization

00:31:14.400 before 2020, but from 2020 onwards, I realized that they were too many police were happy to be, uh,

00:31:22.080 instruments of politicians as opposed to law enforcement officers. Well, listen, congratulations.

00:31:27.600 Congratulations to William LaFramboise. It sounds like he pronounces it a little bit differently

00:31:32.560 than I'm doing here. Uh, folks, you can help the Democracy Fund at thedemocracyfund.ca,

00:31:40.560 where the battle continues. I mentioned three important battles, the Coutts 2, the Coutts 3,

00:31:45.680 the Coutts 4, Tamara Leach, and actually Arthur Pawlowski is having his appeal heard later this year

00:31:51.840 in Alberta. All those cases funded by the Democracy Fund. Stay with us. More ahead.

00:32:05.280 Well, that's our show for today. You know, we didn't have that moment that Lincoln and Alexa had a few

00:32:10.480 months ago where, boom, jumping out of a bush was, uh, a group of migrants. Um, it just didn't happen in

00:32:17.840 the hours we had in town, but it's an enormous factor. I really have never seen this many police

00:32:24.560 deployed in an area. It felt like a military operation, which I guess it sort of is. I think

00:32:31.440 it's a critical issue for the United States because if you don't have a border, are you really even a

00:32:37.120 country? For Rebel News, I'm Ezra LeVance.

Rebel News Podcast - March 14, 2024

EZRA LEVANT ｜ Biden remains asleep at the wheel as U.S. struggles with border invasion

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