Ezra LeVant: Late night comedians are really the worst political propagandists in the U.S. And they have been doing it for a reason. And it s still gross to see them try and control the psychology and political outlook of their audience.
00:14:59.680I mean, you know, it might be interesting for Jimmy Kimmel to have on Joe Rogan or someone who used to be a Democrat.
00:15:05.400Joe Rogan used to support Bernie Sanders, the socialist, who's come around.
00:15:10.000Imagine if Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel actually interviewed a Republican, not to attack him or do a gotcha, but to say, tell me what happened.
00:15:19.600And don't be mean about it, but explain to me how I got it so wrong.
00:16:06.600You know, the speechwriters that write speeches for Trump, you can tell when he leaves the prepared remarks behind and starts kind of riffing because he's annoyed and a bit bored by his prepared remarks.
00:16:16.320Because I do find, like, the kind of high-dudgeon, kind of like, Deutschland, Uber Alice vibes, blood and soil.
00:21:01.600How do you make anything better, Howard, if you pack yourself with fealty over people who are just good at it and can work with the other side and give you different ideas?
00:21:12.300How do you get anywhere better than where we are right now?
00:21:14.480So you think it's trouble in 80 million Republicans to pick rock stars.
00:21:19.500I promise you, it is easy to pick rock stars from either side.
00:22:15.920Not in an emotional sense, although we see absolutely pitiful, performative videos and statements by every Canadian liberal about how they're bracing for this.
00:22:27.660Let's be grown up for a minute and say, what will this actually do to the Canada-U.S. relationship?
00:22:52.900And thank you for articulating some of the feelings that I had on election night.
00:22:57.900I, too, had wanted, if he was going to win, which I hoped he would, I wanted him to win bigly because I was also very afraid of what would happen if it was a very close call.
00:23:12.420And, you know, the tensions could have erupted into the streets.
00:23:17.780And I thought that would be the worst possible outcome.
00:23:21.260So the fact that it was definitive and that it showed that the entire country really was, you know, shifting red, even places where the state actually went Democrat, they went Democrat by lower margins than they had in the past, as you say.
00:23:43.060And, yes, let's talk about how it will affect.
00:23:46.480I'm actually, my column this week touches on, more than touches on, it's about two issues that I had that I think are going to have an effect on Canada.
00:23:57.340And one of them is something that, you know, because you published our book, is the field of gender ideology.
00:24:07.500Trump, Harris made a big mistake in assuming that the only thing women care about is abortion rights.
00:24:15.980She just, that was her one big policy push, her platform, you know, unfettered abortion back to we're going to put Roe versus Wade, we're going to change all that.
00:24:26.420And she never, she never addressed another gender issue at all.
00:24:30.640Trump, of course, one of his great assets is his ability to read the room long before it becomes evident to everybody else what's on people's minds.
00:24:43.140And back in 2022, he saw that gender ideology was getting way out of hand and that that could be a good election issue for him.
00:24:52.740And he started talking about the unfairness of males competing in women's sport back then.
00:25:01.640And he said, when I'm elected, I'm going to not allow men to be competed against, you know, in women's sport.
00:25:11.320And then when he was elected, he said, he was asked, what are your day one priorities?
00:25:20.740He said, I'm going to ban male athletes competing against women.
00:25:24.600And I think this is going to have a big effect if he if he does manage to do that.
00:25:28.660And the NCAA changes so that, you know, no biological men in women's sport, that's going to have a big effect on sport in Canada.
00:25:39.640We've been hoping for a long time to have something very definitive come along to force Canadian Canada, you know, Athletics Canada to look.
00:25:49.900This is, you know, we've got to move on this because it's every year it gets worse.
00:26:02.520You know, it's a question of both safety and fairness, blah, blah, blah.
00:26:06.100So that's one aspect that I think will have an effect on Canada.
00:26:10.360Another is is going to be the Foreign Affairs Department and the he is going to be farm.
00:26:23.500He's going to he's going to be very different in terms of his management of the Middle East conflict and other conflicts, but certainly in the Middle East.
00:26:31.760And I think that's going to have an effect on how Canada is forced to deal with UNRWA, terrorism, you know, all these things that that our prime minister has been slow to act on and to to to, you know, recognize the the the necessity for.
00:26:56.860And I think that will have an effect on on on that as well.
00:26:59.920So those those those are my two big issues.
00:27:03.520And certainly there are many other fields in which he's going to have a very, very powerful effect on Canada.
00:27:09.380It's incredible how quickly the foreign affairs landscape has changed.
00:27:56.460So, of course, Canada will change, too.
00:27:58.780And I know that Canadian politicians like to virtue signal how different they are from Trump.
00:28:03.540And Trudeau and his team have insulted Trump personally.
00:28:07.040But I got to tell you, Barbara, it's nothing like the insults that the British Labour Party have hurled at him over the years.
00:28:14.080I don't know if – I mean, I follow the UK a little more closely than maybe I should because I'm interested in the case of Tommy Robinson.
00:28:20.200Listen, I just got to play for you this clip of their new foreign secretary.
00:29:04.300Donald Trump has been tearing up all of the accords that we maintained on climate change.
00:29:11.780If you care about climate change, you care about the future of this world, then you must stand against Donald Trump.
00:29:20.160This is a man that is someone who thinks it's OK to describe women in the most horrendous of ways, their body parts, to speak about them in a misogynistic and deeply offensive fashion.
00:29:36.680This is the Donald Trump that we are rolling out the red carpet for.
00:29:41.060And, you know, we don't always give a state visit to American presidents.
00:30:03.320Why is Theresa May putting Donald Trump in this position, this pivotal position, having him alongside the Queen and all the great dignitaries across the country
00:30:14.860and in the Corporation of London, sitting alongside him and lording him for this shameful behavior on the international stage?
00:30:24.200We stand with the American people, but we absolutely say that our democratic values are opposed to the misogyny,
00:30:32.020opposed to the racism, opposed to Steve Bannon and the horrible white supremacy that he seems to stand for.
00:30:41.920But listen, you can you can agree with David Lammy and all the policy positions.
00:30:45.640A lot of people believe in global warming, but calling him a misogynist, a white supremacist in various tweets, he called Trump a neo-Nazi.
00:30:52.920I just I mean, you got to be a bit of a grown up.
00:30:56.120If you're going to be the top diplomat for the UK, you should be slightly diplomatic.
00:31:01.280I suppose I shouldn't have shown that because we're talking about Canada.
00:31:43.040You know, the mass deportation policies that Trump was elected on could potentially send people north or it could reroute fentanyl trafficking and other things coming from the southern border into Canada.
00:31:55.540Well, when it comes to migration, I think that people clearly want us to have a strong system and they want us also to make sure that people are confident that they trust our immigration system.
00:32:09.060And that's why we decided to lower the the basically the targets, the immigration targets by 20 percent.
00:32:17.820I think that was a really important decision.
00:32:19.620Actually, also, that was highlighted by Trump himself while he was campaigning at the same time.
00:32:25.880But this sounds, Minister, like it could be a surge like Roxham Road, but on a much larger scale.
00:32:30.220Right. I take the ambassador's words is that I hear you.
00:32:36.500It was myself and the former minister of immigration and, of course, the prime minister that work on a deal to make sure that we would have a renewed safe country, safe third country agreement,
00:32:46.880which was a but we were able through that agreement with the U.S. to close the Roxham Road and address this issue.
00:32:55.880And of course, we'll work with the administration.
00:32:57.860But we need to bear in mind that, yes, indeed, President-elect Trump has said that migration was a key priority for him.
00:35:52.240But to give her, to be fair to Jolie, the one thing that she could not possibly do would be to say something that would stir up fear of exactly, you know, people rushing the border and to say, yes, that's a legitimate fear and we don't know what we're going to do about it.
00:37:19.200And I think it'll be much more – it won't be all at once.
00:37:22.820Like it's not going to be – they're all going to be rounded up on the same day and, you know, put on 5,000 buses or anything like that.
00:37:28.560So I think we should – knowing Trump as we do, and we know him very well by now, I think we should take it with a grain of salt when he makes these pronouncements.
00:37:39.360I think that's a wise – that's a wise observation.
00:37:41.960I mean he – and he's publicly said this.
00:37:44.900You're right in his book, Art of the Deal.
00:37:46.160He talks about making a shocking offer just to mix things up and to change the whole paradigm.
00:37:55.440But I've also met with a number of people who I believe have been with his sort of deportation squad before and are expected to get the – be tapped for that position again.
00:38:09.440I think they will be – first of all, I think they're going to put in the wall and they're going to stop the catch and release.
00:38:15.780So I think it's – they're going to turn off the tap, first of all.
00:38:33.860I think that they believed in their heart of hearts that Kamala Harris, of course she's going to win.
00:38:39.840I mean they're so deeply connected with the U.S. Dems and Kamala Harris in her own way was not just like Melanesia Lee, but she was like Justin Trudeau.
00:38:55.400But by the way, I saw the – I was at a gig on election night early in the evening.
00:38:59.620I was on a panel discussing, and one of the panelists was from Leger Polling, and he was giving us some stats here, there, and he gave us the stats on Canadians, who they favored.
00:40:14.080And garbage in, garbage out, if that's all you know about this man.
00:40:17.380And I have to say one of the little pleasures I had on Tuesday night, Barbara, was following the Twitter accounts of Canadian pundits who, you know, were going through performative emotionalizing.
00:40:31.240But I think what they really revealed is how little they knew about real life America.
00:40:36.560And because they looked through the prism of The Washington Post and New York Times and thought themselves very, you know, very worldly and thoughtful.
00:40:47.760Yeah, well, that was the Wall Street Journal's opinion.
00:40:51.800Their editorial today was, or their reportage of the election was, the big observation they made was that they just, they never went, they never understood small town America.
00:41:04.600They never understood rural people's feelings.
00:41:09.840He went, Trump went to counties they never even heard of and listened and talked to these people.
00:41:16.020They don't have, they really are in a bubble.
00:41:18.120The Dems are really in their own salons, highly educated, you know, all from the top universities.
00:41:28.600And they just do, they are not in touch with a huge swath of the American public.
00:41:37.020And that, and to their credit, a lot of them, I noticed there were, I was on Twitter too today on X.
00:43:01.880They're just regular people who get up and go to work every day and are trying to make a better life for their kids.
00:43:06.860And they feel like they have been told to just shut up when they have complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives.
00:43:14.980I also feel like this election, as we sit here and pour over this tonight, is something of an indictment of the political information complex.
00:43:24.920I mean, we've been sitting around here for the last couple of weeks, and the story that was portrayed was not true.
00:43:31.820I mean, we were told Puerto Rico was going to change the election.
00:43:34.420Liz Cheney, Nikki Haley voters, women lying to their husbands.
00:43:38.120Before that, it was Tim Walls in the camo hats.
00:43:40.920It was night after night after night, we were told all these things and gimmicks were going to somehow push Harris over the line.
00:43:50.140And we were just ignoring the fundamentals.
00:43:52.860Inflation, people feeling like that they were barely able to tread water at best.
00:43:57.900That was the fundamentals of the election.
00:44:00.600And so I think that both parties should always look at the results of an election and figure out what went right and what went wrong.
00:44:06.740But I think for all of us who cover elections and talk about elections and do this on a day-to-day basis, we have to figure out how to understand, talk to, and listen to the half of the country that rose up tonight and said, we've had enough.
00:44:20.840Barbara, we're having fun chewing over the election, but we do.
00:44:23.920Let me try and get myself back on track.
00:44:50.840Part of the reason why the world fears Donald Trump is because he's so blunt and he just does things.
00:44:57.840And unlike sort of the slow-motion, diplomatic, deep state, but of course the main reason is because he's the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force ever known to man.
00:45:11.940And he's really the global hyper-power.
00:47:00.820And the president knows well, as well, that Canada has been there for every NATO deployment.
00:47:06.240We have consistently stepped up, sent our troops into harm's way.
00:47:11.020We're leading in Iraq, we're leading in NATO, in Latvia.
00:47:15.400We continue to step up, like most of our allies.
00:47:20.740There are some countries that, even though they might reach the 2%, don't step up nearly as much.
00:47:25.980And I think it's important to look at what is actually being done.
00:47:29.300And the United States and all NATO allies know that Canada is a solid, reliable partner that will continue to defend NATO and defend our interests.
00:47:37.880And we do have tremendous coordination with radar, with all of the different things that, you know, technologically, we have tremendous coordination between Canada and the United States.
00:47:47.240You know, Trump was actually being a little bit gentle there, but he could tell Trudeau was BSing.
00:48:26.680We have not refurbished our equipment.
00:48:28.500So everything Trudeau said there was untrue.
00:48:32.940I think the only blessing we have is that Trump thinks so little about Canada, as in so rarely about us.
00:48:41.460He doesn't care about us, so he doesn't pay attention to us.
00:48:45.080And I noted on election night, Trump never actually visited Canada once, except for with multilateral gatherings, which he was doing there.
00:48:53.860Like, I think there was a G7 meeting and something like that.
00:48:56.240But Trump never came to town just one-on-one to meet Trudeau.
00:48:59.920In his entire term, he never thought that was a valuable use of his time.
00:49:03.960And I think that will continue to be the case.
00:49:06.120And lucky for us, because holy mackerel, are we behind when it comes to military participation?
00:49:13.160Well, let me ask you about foreign affairs, because I think Canada has, frankly, disgraced our history as a peace-loving and freedom-loving country, more and more supporting terrorism, Hezbollah, Hamas, the UN Relief Works Agency.
00:49:31.800Do you think, and I was going to say Angelina Jolie, do you think Melanie Jolie and Justin Trudeau will lean into the difference and say, we're not like Trump?
00:49:43.280Do you think they're going to try and campaign against Trump in the election expected in 2025?
00:49:48.520Like, one approach would be, okay, there's a new sheriff in town.
00:49:51.880Let's do our best to make this a win for Canada.
00:49:55.280The other approach is, we're 20 points behind.
00:50:33.640If a culture is in the mood for a change, scaring them is not going to help.
00:50:39.520And by the way, by the time our election comes around, it could be that there have been so many advances made in the Middle East towards peace that he won't be able to do that.
00:50:53.940Because Trump does know, I agree with you, he doesn't want to be the world's cop, but he doesn't want to also be the world's fall guy either and look stupid.
00:51:02.340He does believe in sometimes the best way to stop a war is tough love.
00:51:11.820I noticed, maybe it wasn't a coincidence that the Houthis declared that they were stopping their operations in the Red Sea at the same time as Trump was being elected president.
00:51:21.500So maybe they know something that we don't know.
00:51:24.100But when he was when he was president before, he was the one that took out Soleimani, you know, Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard in Iraq.
00:51:37.860And everybody said at the time, oh, you're going to inflame the regional war.
00:51:42.780No, on the contrary, it made Iran back off.
00:51:45.620And I think unlike, look, I think the Biden and Harris would have continued.
00:51:53.080It was Obama's policy that has been one of the one of the reasons I'm glad Trump won is because it denies Obama basically a fourth term.
00:52:00.740He Obama has basically been running both Biden and Harris on their Middle East policy.
00:52:07.260They are they are loyal to his vision of Iran being the the the hegemon in the Middle East.
00:52:16.900He has this vision of of a rational Iran kind of keeping things stable in the Middle East.
00:52:23.320They hated the Abraham Accords because the Abraham Accords took a completely different direction.
00:52:29.320And because the Arab states that are in the Abraham Accords are anti Iran.
00:52:34.760So they've tried to scupper the Abraham Accords.
00:52:38.880They don't even by the way, you never at once in four years did you hear Biden utter the words Abraham Accords.
00:52:44.640He wouldn't even say them because it's Trump's it was Trump's achievement.
00:52:49.740Anyone else in the world would have won a Nobel Peace Prize, by the way.
00:53:15.080And I think that Trump and both of them will figure out a plan that is tough, fair in terms of, you know, what what they're entitled to do.
00:53:27.140And it will set Iran back on its heels that we've seen that Iran is in some ways a paper tiger.
00:53:33.140And I think that Trump is the right president to to nail down that fact and to make it clear to Iran that if if the U.S. gives Israel license to do greater damage than they've done so far, that Iran will regret it.
00:53:51.660And so, I mean, maybe I'm I'm off base here.
00:53:57.520But I see that Trump will be a force for definitive and good action in that region.
00:54:03.660And it gives me greater hope that there will be peace, that the Abraham Accords, the Saudi Arabia will come on board and that this is going to be a fantastically positive four years for the Middle East because of Trump.
00:54:17.500And maybe he'll get that Nobel Prize after all.
00:56:52.360Well, when you say, when you note that Hamas is waving the white flag, the Houthis have unilaterally announced they're not going to attack ships anymore.
00:57:01.660Vladimir Putin says he's eager to talk about a peace proposal.
00:57:22.140I don't want to sound like more partisan than I am, but I think it is going to be a golden age for American industrial policy, foreign policy.
00:57:30.880And because he has only one term, he said he – this is it.
00:57:37.140He – I think he will make decisions that perhaps someone looking out for a second term might be too shy to make.
00:57:45.880And Elon Musk, I really think, is going to help unlock and unblock the economy.
00:57:52.020I mean, he has proved himself to be the indispensable citizen, not just through his engineering, but how he gets things done and cuts through the clutter.
00:58:00.480Listen, when he took over Twitter, he fired like 80% or more of the people working there because there was so much dead wood in there.
00:59:08.620But if I had to sum up what we said, that transgenderism, I think by fixing American sports, that will have a knock-on in Canadian sports.
00:59:17.020Because, of course, every sports team in Canada, when they go on tour, they love to go to America.
00:59:20.940It's the easiest, friendliest place to visit.
00:59:22.860So I think that will have a tremendously positive effect.
00:59:25.640I think immigration is going to be massive.
00:59:28.600You know, Haitians alone is a huge issue.
00:59:31.760It was in Springfield, Ohio, that one town alone.
00:59:36.320And if Canada doesn't watch out, we're going to have 50,000 Haitians come to this country to get away from Trump.
00:59:42.600I think the military, Trudeau's answers in that clip five years ago have all been false.
00:59:47.280And I think you're going to see the U.S. put real pressure on Canada.
00:59:51.540And finally, and most hopefully, I think America is in control of global policy, global foreign affairs now, not this blob of left-wing, laborite, Macronite losers.
01:00:04.400I think the world – I am optimistic about the world again.
01:03:03.680And, by the way, the gains in Republican support from minority groups, especially Latinos but also black people and even Jews, suggest that DEI is popular in woke circles but not normal places.
01:03:19.540I mean, we don't have a large Latino community in Canada.