Rebel News Podcast - December 15, 2021


EZRA LEVANT ｜ Should we call people unclean, if they don’t get vaxxed？

Topics
forced vaccinations malignant minority
Mentioned
Donald Trump David Frum George W. Bush Sarah Palin Stephen Harper John McCain Linda Frum Biden Preston Manning Joe Sixpack Barack Obama Ron DeSantis Dead Right Doug Ford Trudeau Harvard Indi
EZRA LEVANT ｜ Behind the scenes in the government’s dumbest tweet! EZRA LEVANT ｜ The National Post announces a “capitalist manifesto” — brought to you with a $35M government grant

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

165.61

Word count

2,306

Sentence count

183

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

David Frum was a Never-Trumper before it was cool. He was a Canadian who went to the U.S. to the finest schools there, and then went on to become a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. But soon, he became disillusioned with the establishment, and joined the Democratic Party.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, my rebels. Today, I have sort of a personal story about someone who used to be a friend of mine.
00:00:04.840 I haven't talked to him in over a decade, so I can't say he's still a friend.
00:00:08.500 I'm talking about David Frum, and he was sort of the original never-Trumper.
00:00:12.520 He was a never-Republican 20 years ago before it was cool.
00:00:17.420 But he's just been given her on Twitter, and I want to analyze a series of tweets he made.
00:00:23.860 I don't know, maybe it's too much of a personal indulgence, but I think there's a public interest in it.
00:00:30.000 Before I do that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
00:00:33.200 That's the video version of the show.
00:00:35.220 Just go to rebelnewsplus.com and click subscribe.
00:00:38.060 It's $8 a month. You get the video version, plus three other shows we do.
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00:00:48.100 All right, here's today's show.
00:01:00.000 Tonight, should we call people unclean if they don't get a vaccination?
00:01:09.680 It's December 14th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
00:01:12.280 I have a bit of a personal story today. It's fused with the news. I don't know. You'll have to tell me if you think it's not appropriate.
00:01:38.280 I used to be friends with David Frum. I'm talking about back in the 90s.
00:01:44.040 He was a Canadian who went to the United States to the finest schools there, and then to follow his ambitions.
00:01:51.040 He wrote a series of books about politics with names like Dead Right.
00:01:56.340 I was in law school, and he was a rising star amongst conservative pundits.
00:02:00.020 It didn't surprise me when he was hired as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush,
00:02:06.160 and it especially didn't surprise me when he came up with the phrase,
00:02:09.780 the axes of evil, for Bush to use to describe the enemies during the Gulf War.
00:02:16.500 Alas, David's wife was proud of him and let the world know that he had written that iconic phrase,
00:02:23.280 and whether or not it was related, David was soon no longer working at the White House as a speechwriter.
00:02:29.820 I think speechwriters for politicians have to be very discreet.
00:02:33.060 It takes away from the key man if you know that the words were written by someone else.
00:02:38.620 It makes a politician look more like an actor reading lines written by someone else,
00:02:43.700 which has some truth to it, except that actors are told to read their lines and are fired if they don't,
00:02:49.820 whereas politicians can and should get help marshalling their ideas and arguments.
00:02:55.860 But at the end of the day, it's their decision what they say and what they don't,
00:03:00.020 and what they mean and what they don't.
00:03:01.300 So the privilege of a speechwriter is to help great men and women.
00:03:05.620 The punishment is that you must be a ghostwriter and do it quietly.
00:03:10.320 David wasn't down for long, though.
00:03:12.040 He soon wrote a book about George W. Bush called The Right Man, about his tenure.
00:03:17.880 It's been a while since I looked at it.
00:03:20.100 I seem to recall it was generally a friendly book towards Bush,
00:03:23.760 but I also seem to recall in emerging that David actually only met the president once in his whole time there.
00:03:30.660 You can say you work at the White House and you can be a speechwriter, one of many,
00:03:35.240 and that's enough to write a book, but I don't think it was anywhere near the inner circle.
00:03:40.540 And fair enough.
00:03:42.500 But soon David broke with the Republican Party over health care.
00:03:46.620 Maybe it was his Canadian roots.
00:03:49.900 But he supported Barack Obama's government-run health care project,
00:03:54.620 a most un-American or certainly unconservative idea.
00:03:58.900 He was dumped by his conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute,
00:04:03.960 and that began what's become two decades of being an anti-Republican Republican,
00:04:09.800 sort of like the never-Trumpers under Trump, but long before Trump was a thing.
00:04:14.240 Of course, David Frum is an anti-Trump or two, it goes without saying,
00:04:20.160 but it sort of lacked the intended effect since he had effectively left the party decades earlier.
00:04:25.680 There's a phrase in political journalism, strange new respect, that makes me laugh whenever I hear it.
00:04:32.100 Preston Manning received strange new respect from the media when he was deposed as party leader
00:04:38.680 and was therefore harmless.
00:04:40.380 And he had strange new respect even more once he endorsed a carbon tax.
00:04:45.800 Strange new respect.
00:04:47.060 Yeah, that's because he was no longer an anti-Kyota protocol Western populist that the media hated.
00:04:54.100 He became a man of the establishment.
00:04:56.220 He no longer threatened the status quo.
00:04:58.440 Strange new respect.
00:04:59.420 Doug Ford enforcing lockdowns.
00:05:01.680 Strange new respect.
00:05:02.960 It's not strange at all.
00:05:04.420 There's nothing the media like more than a conservative who turns against conservatives.
00:05:09.000 It's sort of gross.
00:05:11.420 It's like when a hockey player accidentally scores on their own net.
00:05:14.880 You wouldn't really want that guy on your own team,
00:05:17.820 but you're glad that he's putting the puck into his team's net.
00:05:22.160 I used to like David when I was a youngster.
00:05:24.700 He once came to speak at my law school in Edmonton.
00:05:26.960 When I was in charge of the visiting speakers committee, he was always very nice to me.
00:05:32.000 I visited him once at his home in Washington, D.C.,
00:05:35.040 where he lived in one of the most elite neighborhoods, not in neighboring Virginia or Maryland,
00:05:40.060 but in a really lovely area, not far from embassies.
00:05:44.040 I remember walking with him to a nearby restaurant for dinner.
00:05:48.740 And simply in that short walk, we bumped into so many of what I call masters of the universe,
00:05:53.720 like the bureau chief of a network or something,
00:05:57.220 or senior political organizer with some lobby group.
00:06:00.020 We met a few folks like that.
00:06:01.040 I don't remember their names now.
00:06:03.120 And the restaurant itself was packed with these real insiders, movers and shakers.
00:06:07.720 And each of them stopped for a chat for a minute with David Frum.
00:06:12.380 And I remember that at the time, I think this was around 2008, it must have been,
00:06:17.920 Sarah Palin had just been chosen as John McCain's running mate for the Republicans.
00:06:22.640 And she had that accent and that look. 0.99
00:06:26.740 She didn't go to an Ivy League school like David did.
00:06:30.300 I think he went to both Harvard and Yale.
00:06:32.020 She went to some community college in Idaho and she lived in small town Alaska.
00:06:36.720 And she had that Western accent that the cool kids at Saturday Night Live just ate up. 0.98
00:06:43.820 Governor Palin, would you like to respond to Senator Biden's comments about John McCain?
00:06:48.620 No, thank you.
00:06:49.620 But I would like to talk about being an outsider.
00:06:52.120 You see, while Senator Biden has been in Washington all these years, I've been with regular people,
00:07:00.780 hockey moms and Joe six-packs.
00:07:03.400 And I'd also like to give a shout out to the third graders of Gladys Woods Elementary,
00:07:08.520 who were so helpful to me in my debate prep.
00:07:12.900 You get it, right?
00:07:14.360 The joke is that she's low class, blue collar, not our kind, dear. 0.97
00:07:17.980 And here's what I observed, because David was a Republican and really the only fancy Republican
00:07:23.280 in that fancy neighborhood.
00:07:25.320 And these establishment liberals, he was the only Republican that they knew on a friendly basis.
00:07:31.820 And each of them had something to say about Sarah Palin.
00:07:34.360 And they raised it with David, very friendly-like, but they also sort of hung it around his neck.
00:07:41.100 They weren't asking him for his arm's length opinion of Sarah Palin.
00:07:45.380 It was more like they were holding him personally accountable for her, asking him to defend her,
00:07:50.220 associating her low class idiosyncrasies with him.
00:07:55.820 Surely you don't like her, do you, David?
00:07:58.680 It was a matter of taste and class and wealth and aesthetics and insiders versus outsiders.
00:08:05.280 And I could just feel it myself, how unbearable it would be to try to live in that zip code,
00:08:12.100 in that industry, in that high stratus of society, but to be associated with working-class schleps,
00:08:19.480 the deplorables, people who said words like nuclear,
00:08:23.440 which is funny because George W. Bush himself was even more like that than Sarah Palin.
00:08:29.260 That's why I attempted an explanation for why David Frum broke with the Republican Party.
00:08:34.320 Seriously, the guy who wrote Dead Right, warning about embracing big government,
00:08:39.320 he embraced Obamacare, the biggest government program in history,
00:08:43.140 not because he had an ideological epiphany, in my view, but because of peer pressure.
00:08:47.700 You can't be a cool kid if you don't sign on to the official narrative of the establishment.
00:08:52.980 You can be permitted a few little deviations from the liberal orthodoxy,
00:08:56.880 if you're their House Republican, their token Republican,
00:08:59.320 but you can't really disagree with him fundamentally.
00:09:02.860 You can't be a dissonant. You just can't.
00:09:04.760 Anyway, that's my theory.
00:09:06.260 I have fallen out of touch with him years ago,
00:09:08.660 and I've fallen out of touch with his sister, Linda Frum,
00:09:11.580 who was appointed to the Senate by Stephen Harper.
00:09:14.280 She was actually a lot more politically loyal than he was.
00:09:17.680 She was one of Stephen Harper's lieutenants in the Senate,
00:09:21.460 big supporter of the Conservative Party.
00:09:23.620 I'm not sure what Linda Frum is doing now, 1.00
00:09:26.140 and I deliberately tune out David Frum because I don't want to be mad.
00:09:29.600 At him, I prefer to think of him as I did when I was a young kid in college,
00:09:33.900 and he was a slightly less young man in a hurry in the big leagues.
00:09:37.760 I block him on Twitter, not because I'm mad at him,
00:09:40.000 but because I don't want to be mad at him,
00:09:42.000 and I'm sure I would be if I read his stuff.
00:09:44.940 Because I did manage to come across this.
00:09:47.560 Someone took a screenshot of it and posted it,
00:09:50.200 and it did upset me, partly because of what it says,
00:09:52.640 but largely because David himself wrote it,
00:09:54.880 and I know he knows better, or at least he used to.
00:09:59.320 It's not that I just disagree with him.
00:10:01.280 I do.
00:10:02.300 But it's how he says what he says.
00:10:04.620 There's something new here that I find troubling.
00:10:07.160 Let me read it to you.
00:10:08.800 Unless the U.S. moves to vastly stricter vaccine mandates,
00:10:11.920 which I would favor, but which is plainly not going to happen,
00:10:15.460 the U.S. will stall at present vaccination levels.
00:10:19.460 Now, that's true.
00:10:20.300 People didn't get the jab by now.
00:10:21.960 It's not because they didn't hear about him or they forgot about him.
00:10:26.260 They obviously have made a conscious choice.
00:10:29.000 Unless you force them, they're not going to do it if they haven't done it by now.
00:10:33.000 That's actually true.
00:10:34.040 I agree.
00:10:34.900 What's surprising here is to see the guy who wrote against big government calling for people,
00:10:40.560 you know, the anti-big government guy calling for people to be forced to have medical procedures
00:10:44.260 that they don't want.
00:10:45.240 That's above the biggest that big government can get.
00:10:47.940 But like I say, he left the Republicans a long time ago.
00:10:51.400 This isn't the tweet that bugs me.
00:10:54.520 Indi does the next one in his series.
00:10:56.200 He said,
00:10:57.620 So the practical political choice is keep schools and businesses on the present hobbled footing
00:11:02.340 indefinitely or return fully to normally as boosters become available to all,
00:11:08.180 accepting the inherent risks of normal in a 30% unvaxed society.
00:11:13.840 Again, I think he's wrong.
00:11:15.160 Ron DeSantis of Florida and Texas and South Dakota, places like that.
00:11:20.120 I think they prove him wrong.
00:11:21.740 He sounds more like Bill de Blasio than a Republican or maybe a Pfizer salesman.
00:11:25.780 But that's fine.
00:11:26.920 Listen, that's just a normal establishment pundit.
00:11:29.960 It's this next one that gets me.
00:11:31.800 Look at the word that caught me.
00:11:33.220 You can probably guess which one. 0.99
00:11:34.300 You want to fulminate against the dumbass malignity of the anti-vaxxers and their quietly, personally 0.96
00:11:43.480 vaxxed media and political enablers? 0.98
00:11:45.680 Go ahead.
00:11:46.480 I do it myself almost every day right here in this space. 0.99
00:11:51.440 Dumbass. 0.99
00:11:51.960 I don't care. 1.00
00:11:53.640 That's a childish insult.
00:11:55.000 Mr. Harvard and Yale shows that he has a big vocabulary.
00:11:58.380 I think he's just trying to sound hip or something.
00:12:00.960 But it's the next word, malignity, malign.
00:12:04.940 That just means the opposite of benign.
00:12:06.940 It means evil.
00:12:08.420 But look at this next one.
00:12:09.520 He's warming to his phrase.
00:12:10.700 He likes that word malignity.
00:12:12.300 He said, but the malignant minority is not yielding to reason anytime soon. 0.99
00:12:20.420 And even such seemingly basic mandates as no jab, no fly seem beyond the enforcement capability
00:12:26.140 of the U.S. federal government.
00:12:27.520 So what now?
00:12:29.960 The malignant minority. 1.00
00:12:33.340 Put aside his call for ghettoization and segregation. 0.58
00:12:36.140 That's gross.
00:12:36.740 Of course it is.
00:12:37.400 We're calling people a malignant minority. 1.00
00:12:42.220 A malignant minority. 1.00
00:12:44.320 Malignant.
00:12:44.900 You know, that's a word we use to describe cancer.
00:12:48.140 Malignant cancer.
00:12:49.200 Malignant minority. 1.00
00:12:50.040 It reminds me.
00:12:50.600 I'm sorry to say this.
00:12:51.900 It reminds me of Nazi propaganda against the Jews.
00:12:54.700 Here is a Nazi poster from occupied France in the 40s saying that the Jews are like large 0.98
00:13:01.160 human fleas that spread tuberculosis, syphilis, even cancer. 0.99
00:13:07.400 David ends his rant this way.
00:13:10.860 He says, seems the best option is one, keep encouraging vaccines and boosters.
00:13:16.520 Two, impose vaccine mandates where it can be done.
00:13:20.960 Three, otherwise return to normal as fully as we can, especially the schools.
00:13:26.300 And four, let hospitals quietly triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last. 0.96
00:13:32.620 So he's done using the word malignant minority, but he hops straight to his prescription, his 0.89
00:13:39.760 solution.
00:13:41.620 Sell the vax, force the vax where you can.
00:13:44.880 And if someone gets sick, they're unvaxed.
00:13:47.020 Don't have one. 0.95
00:13:48.500 Leave them to die if there's a lineup. 0.99
00:13:50.480 Now, I am not going to compare David Trump to a Nazi because that's... 0.99