EZRA LEVANT ｜ Trudeau the Terrible can't stand Trump's humour
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Summary
My theory about why Trump's comments about Canada being the 51st state hit so hard with some people, and why I think Trudeau is actually to blame. That's today's show on The Ezra Lee Vaynermedia show.
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. I want to share with you my theory about why Trump's jibes and jokes and
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trolling comments about Canada being the 51st state hit so hard with some people. I want to
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show you some video clips of different reactions to it. I want to tell you why I think Trudeau
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is actually to blame. That's today's show. To see the video of it, I'd like to show you some
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clips. So make sure you get the video version of the podcast. Go to rebelnewsplus.com. Click
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That's Rocklink with a C, info at rocklink.com. All right, here's today's podcast.
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Tonight, why are so many Canadians so sensitive about Trump's 51st state comments? I'll give you
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my theory. It's January 9th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
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So why are Trump's 51st state comments resounding so loudly in Canada? I mean,
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Well, I think the Prime Minister said it right. There isn't a chance in hell it's going to happen.
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They'd have to find us on a map, but it'll take them maybe a few years.
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Look, I said a couple weeks ago, this is like an episode of South Park. I'll start to get worried
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when they confirm Eric Cartman as the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Like, this is, it's silly. It's
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unbecoming, frankly, of a president, any president that would say that. But we do have to take it
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seriously. Well, I know under my watch for Ontario, I'd never be for that at all. We have the greatest
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country in the world. We have the greatest province anywhere. Any subsovereign nation
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is Ontario and the rest of the provinces as well. You know something to the president? I'll make him
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a counteroffer. How about if we buy Alaska? And we'll throw in Minnesota and Minneapolis at the
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same time. So, you know, it's not realistic. I know he likes making these comments and he likes
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joking around. I take that seriously. He may be joking, but under my watch, that will never, ever
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happen. Hey, Donald, have we got a deal for you? You think we want to be the 51st state? Nah, but maybe
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California would like to be the 11th province. How about it? California? Oregon? Washington? You've got
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geography and commonwealth. And not only that, we've already got a carbon trading system between
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California and Quebec. We've got some strong alliances on our west coast from British Columbia.
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There's been a lot of academic papers on the idea of Cascadia. So California, Governor Newsom and
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Washington State, Jay Inslee, and newly elected governor of Oregon, Tina Kotak. How about it? Want to put a
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referendum to your citizens? Because this is what you deal. Have we got a deal for you? This is what you get.
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Free health care. Universal free health care. No more one-year-olds who suddenly fall off the
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Medicaid list and their parents are in the news because they're trying to do a GoFundMe so they
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can get their daughter to a doctor. Universal free health care. And guess what? Those gun laws that
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your Congress is too afraid to pass because of the national gun lobby, we already got our strict gun
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laws. That's why we have the safest streets around the world, or at least in the United States,
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by the way, the worst recent stats, 5.9 out of every 100,000 people is killed in a fatal gun incident
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versus 0.88 per 100,000 in Canada. That's because we have strict gun laws. California, citizens, Oregon,
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Washington, Washington, safer streets. Here we already have good gun laws, and women have a right to an
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abortion under our universal health care system. But, you know, we don't have to stop there. Donald,
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think about it. You could get rid of all these states that always vote Democrat. You know what else
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we'll take Bernie Sanders off your hands? Proud new Canadian citizen of the great province of Vermont.
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Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, we'd love to see you. Our maritime provinces already have deep, deep links and ties.
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Well, enough kidding around. But honestly, President Trump, get used to it. Canada is a sovereign nation full of,
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guess what, proud Canadians. We're not jingoistic. We don't boast a lot. That's one of the things we kind of
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have in common with Jimmy Carter. We're not a big nation for braggarts and bullies. We actually like to
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think we're of service in the world. We could do better. We can always do better.
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But we love our country. And it's a country. It's a nation. And we do not aspire to be
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51st state. So let's not hear that anymore. If it was a joke, it was never funny. And it ends now.
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Elizabeth May was my favorite. She talked about an ex in California. I think part of the reason why we're
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so sensitive, or at least our ruling class is so sensitive about this, by the way, about a third
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of Canadians, I think, would welcome this. I think Trudeau himself is to blame, actually. When Justin
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Trudeau first won election in 2015, he told an American newspaper, not a Canadian newspaper,
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he told the New York Times, and I quote, there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.
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He said we're, quote, the first post-national state. Where did you get off saying that? It wasn't
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true. But since then, he's gone about making that true, hasn't he? He's taken our founding prime
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minister off the $10 bill and generally purging Sir John A. MacDonald from all public discussion other
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than calling him a racist. Trudeau has altered our national anthem. Who let him do that? He's accused
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Canada, and therefore Canadians, of committing a genocide against our indigenous people. But,
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you know, he won't say that same word about China and its treatment of the Uyghurs, even though they
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have a million of them in a concentration camp. Trudeau has removed historical symbols from
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our passport, just little symbols, just to tell us to forget who we are. Trudeau regularly accuses
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Canadians of being racist and sexist and transphobic, even though he's the one who dressed up in
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blackface and he's the one who sexually assaulted Rose Knight in Creston, B.C. He just said he
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experienced it differently than she did. Remember that? It's not just one side of the story that
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matters. That the same interactions could be experienced very differently from one person to
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the next. And I am not going to speak for the woman in question. I would never presume to speak for her.
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But I know that there is an awful lot of reflection to be had as we move forward as a society on how
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people perceive different interactions. Like I said, I do not feel that I acted inappropriately in any way.
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But I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently. And this is part of
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the reflections that we have to go through. Trudeau has devalued our citizenship, giving millions of
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foreigners unvetted access to Canada. Did you see that little social media video circulating in the
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The world's laughing at us. It didn't used to be that way. Trudeau actually says we have lots to learn
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from returning ISIS terrorists. Remember that? There's a range of experiences when people come
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home. And we know that actually someone who has engaged and turned away from that hateful ideology
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can be an extraordinarily powerful voice for preventing radicalization in future generations.
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Some immigrants probably really want to know more about Canada and how to be Canadian. Trudeau is a
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part of the United States. As opposed to that, he scrapped the Canadian citizenship test for new
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Canadians. You don't have to know anything about Canada anymore. Other national symbols? Well, he's
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denuded our military to the point where we can't even participate in NATO war games because we lack
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modern equipment to fly along next to our allies. But he can afford tampon dispensers in male bathrooms
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on Canadian forces bases. You bet. You know, Canada's Veteran Affairs Department now
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constantly recommends assisted suicide to vets with PTSD. They claim it's a mistake every time, but they
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keep doing it. I could go on. In short, Justin Trudeau has done everything to demoralize Canada,
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to denature us, to deracinate us, to cut us off at the roots. That's why Trump's statements about
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becoming the 51st state sting. That's why they hit home. Because for a decade, Trudeau and every
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institution in the country, the regime media, they've been awful, the universities, the courts,
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the parliament, worst of all, school for young people. They've said Canada means nothing. Actually,
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if it means anything, it means bad things. Colonialism, settlers, climate crimes.
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Every one of Trudeau's actions says Canada means nothing. Canada's just a hotel. Well,
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Donald Trump knows a little bit about hotels, doesn't he? Why wouldn't he try to buy one,
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especially one that's for sale cheap? It's dilapidated. You know, we really should rehabilitate
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Sir John A. MacDonald. Think about it. Think about when he was prime minister. He understood why Canada
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was not America. We could be friends. We could be best friends, but we were different. It's one of
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the reasons why he built the Canadian Pacific Railway. He saw America eyeing Western Canada.
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Remember, they had just bought Alaska from the Russians. And if you think, BC is disconnected
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from Ottawa today. Imagine what it was like back then. No railway, no telephones. That's why they
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called it. They called it the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was his way of bolting the country
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together so America didn't take all the land all the way up. Call it manifest destiny. And look at
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that name, CPR. Canada's different now. I think the CPR is actually owned by Americans. Isn't that
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symbolic? Now, some of the differences between us and Americans, they're not that big. I mean,
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we're more passive than them. I think we can admit that. We don't fight for our freedoms as hard as
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they do. I mean, remember, they were born in a revolution, a military revolution. We sort of had
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an evolution or a devolution. You could say we were created by the British North America Act,
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an act of parliament, weren't we? That's right. We still have the king. That's why we, you know,
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by the way, there's a lot to be said for it. After the U.S. Revolutionary War, people who were loyal
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to King George, they moved north in big numbers. They were called the United Empire Loyalists.
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They came to Ontario mainly. That was 250 years ago. But it's still in our blood, you know.
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I wish we had more American weather up here. I don't think we can ever change that. But
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many of the other reasons to love America are things that we used to have here but have been
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taken away from us. We used to be more prosperous. I don't know if you remember this, but under Stephen
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Harper, we actually reached the point where the average Canadian was earning more than the average
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American. It's hard to even believe that because now we're as poor as Mississippi. Our Canadian dollar
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actually, I don't know if you remember this, used to be worth more than a U.S. dollar. So going to the
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U.S. was cheap and fun. I remember people were buying cars in the U.S. and driving them up because
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they were so cheap given our dollar. Canada was always smaller than America, but we were proud,
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weren't we? I mean, Stephen Harper made our voice heard on everything from Israel to Russia to Ukraine
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to China to India. And there were Canadian values that he projected around the world. Trudeau flipped
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that around, didn't he? We don't project Canadian values to the world anymore, do we? We have imported
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foreign values. As Trudeau panders to every foreign diaspora here, especially the pro-Hamas extremist,
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he's brought in by the million. That's where we are now. After 10 years of getting poorer and getting
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more alienated and more demoralized in our own home, can you blame someone, especially someone
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who can't make ends meet, someone who's been called a racist by Trudeau? Can you blame someone who says,
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yeah, maybe we should be part of the U.S.A.? For one thing, under Donald Trump, at least,
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they're proud again, aren't they? They have hope again. They're patriotic again. Trudeau turned the
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flag and the anthem into hate symbols in Canada. They really did after the trucker convoy. Trump loves
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patriotism. I don't think we need to be taken over by the United States, though. I say that as someone who
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is patriotic, but I say that as a matter of common sense. I mean, you can have your best friend live
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right next to you as your neighbor, but you wouldn't join your houses together. You'd still have doors and
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probably a fence between your properties. It could be your best friend, but you don't actually join your
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houses together. I believe in selling our resources to the U.S. as our best happy customer. Trudeau does,
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and he cut off all sorts of pipelines, didn't he? I like having an ease of travel between us.
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I like having a military alliance with America. They protect us from the bad guys. I like being next
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to the freest, safest country in the world as opposed to being in a rougher neighborhood like
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Israel or Taiwan or even Australia. That's just dumb luck, though. Trump is angry with Canada. More to
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the point, I think he's angry at Trudeau. He's angry that illegal migrants and illegal drugs come across
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our border into the States. Not as much as on the Mexican border, but we were supposed to be good
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buddies, weren't we? Again, good neighbors have good fences. Trump is angry that we're pro-Hamas and
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pro-China and that we've neglected our military. I'm angry about those things, too, by the way,
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and I'm not an American. The great irony is that Trump is demanding that we do things that we ought to
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do in our own interests, not his interests. Fix our borders. Stop the drugs. Stop the illegals.
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Trudeau literally won't. He needs a foreigner to tell him that. As I've said before, Trudeau actually
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wants a trade war with Trump. Trudeau wants to be the hero defending Canada against the foreign menace.
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And everyone cool hates Trump, right? Well, not quite so much anymore, actually. I think a lot of
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Canadians sort of like Trump these days. And everyone hates Trudeau. I saw him at 16% in the polls.
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Trump is ahead of Trudeau in Canadian polls, believe it or not. But Trudeau wants the tariffs
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so he can blame Trump and blame the bad economy on Trump instead of the last nine years of Trudeau's
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own budgets. By the way, it's not 100% certain that Trudeau is gone. He said he will resign,
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but he didn't give a specific date, now did he? And maybe he'll change his mind. His father,
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Pierre Trudeau, resigned in 1979. Then Joe Clark won and was a disaster. And Pierre Trudeau decided to
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come back again in 1980. And he did his worst work in that last bonus term, including the National
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Energy Program. You don't think that Justin Trudeau knows that history? Trudeau Jr. isn't necessarily done.
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And he might even ask the governor general to end the prorogation and call a snap election. I don't
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know. It could happen. It's just nuts that we don't have a working government during this crisis.
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Here's Trudeau storming out of a liberal caucus meeting earlier today. Just take a look. He left
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after 30 minutes. It was a six-hour meeting. Take a look.
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Yikes. You left after half an hour. He probably spoke for 25 minutes of that.
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We know it wasn't pretty. I'd love to hear what actually went on in there. But back to the United
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States. Look, I love America very much. I love Italy. I love the United Kingdom. I love Israel.
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There are other countries that I love. I love Japan. But I wouldn't want to move there or live there or
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be citizens of there. You know, Canada is my home. My family's been here since 1903, which is a long
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time in Canada. I want to be able to visit the U.S. and enjoy the economic prosperity of being their
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neighbor. And I want to be under their security umbrella, don't you? But I don't feel the need to
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join their country to do that. We just need to fix our own country up a bit. It's amazing to see
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liberals and the regime media who have disparaged our country for 10 years suddenly find their
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nationalism again just because Donald Trump has questioned it. Isn't that something? I think Pierre
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Polyev will be the prime minister before the end of the year. And I think he'll end the circus. I think
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he'll be Canadian first, but he won't taunt Trump or take the bait. I think the two countries will be
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partners. By the way, I don't know if you saw the video in a press conference yesterday. Donald Trump
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referred to the conservative leader of Canada. He didn't even know Pierre Polyev's name. And he said
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Polyev might win or might not win. That tells me that Polyev and Trump have never spoken.
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And the conservatives of Canada have deliberately stayed away from Donald Trump,
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I think because they're afraid of being labeled pro-Trump or MAGA. North, you know, the liberals
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tried out that maple MAGA slur. It didn't catch on. I think that Donald Trump simply doesn't know
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that the cavalry is coming, that Pierre Polyev is coming to liberate us from Justin Trudeau. He
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doesn't know that. I think if he knew Pierre Polyev, I think he would have a different tone. And I think
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If you were under the assumption that you're serious about making Canada the 51st state of
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the United States, the leader of the Conservative Party in Canada said, under no circumstances,
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Maybe he won't win, but maybe he will. I don't know.
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To Dave's point, you had suggested that you're considering...
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But, sir, real fast, you said you were considering military force to acquire Panama and Greenland.
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Are you also considering military force to annex and acquire Panama?
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No. Economic force. Because Canada and the United States, that would really be something.
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If I were Greenland, I wouldn't be so sure of an amicable ending. But really, if you look at
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Greenland, it's a nearly empty landmass, largely covered in snow, where the U.S. already has a major
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military presence. Same with the Panama Canal that Trump is talking about. America built the Panama
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Canal, and incredibly, 38,000 Americans died building that. I couldn't believe that number.
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I looked it up. It's true. A lot of them died from malaria building it.
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I think Donald Trump is going to get the Panama Canal back by any means necessary, including
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military, by the way. But obviously, that doesn't apply to Canada, and Trump admitted as much.
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Trump is talking tough, and Trudeau literally has no idea what to do with it. The Canadian who does,
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the best at least, is not a federal politician, not an ambassador, but the Premier of Alberta.
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Let me show you Danielle Smith's entire interview the other day. Just masterful.
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This is from about a week or so ago, but she's just nailing every point. I want to show you the
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It's wonderful to have you on the program today. Thank you for being here. We've seen Canada already
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shift more officers to patrol the border in preparation for a new administration. We also
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know these Canadian ministers are in Florida having conversations. What do those conversations look
00:21:42.140
like, given what we've seen over the course of the last four years?
00:21:46.520
Well, I think that they've been very positive. I know that we had started in our province,
00:21:51.020
in our province borders Montana, we had started the process realizing that we needed to do more
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work on the border and addressing the issue of fentanyl. So we had already started identifying
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some specialty teams so that they could go to the border, do special commercial vehicle checks,
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have dogs so that they can sniff out drugs, make sure that we have a band on the border so that
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if people are coming and going, not on an official border crossing, they're probably up to no good and
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they're going to be stopped. And we also have a plan to put in some aerial vehicles, whether it's
00:22:20.680
drones or some other kind of aerial surveillance. And I think you're going to see that that is going to
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be built out over the rest of the country. The federal government announced $1.3 billion to be able to do it.
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And I think they're going to hammer down some of the details when Dominic LeBlanc and Melanie Jolie
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Danielle, we know that you know Kevin O'Leary through some business partnerships. We spoke with
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him yesterday and he said that half of Canadians actually favored Trump's proposal for Canada to
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join the US. Well, you know, we've watched the European government, which hasn't turned out very
00:22:56.560
well. In fact, you've actually seen it now begin to bust apart, as the UK say, that it's not working for
00:23:01.900
them. So I would say that we have a really solid, strong relationship as two sovereign countries.
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We've got this wonderful partnership that we've had since 1993. There's always going to be trade
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tensions. But I would say that if we could work on that relationship and also work on some of the
00:23:17.460
border issues, have the Americans know that we really do want to be a partner in addressing not
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only our cross-border security issues, but also more internationally, the threat of China,
00:23:27.560
the threat of Russia, being able to help our allies. We think that Canada and Alberta in particular can
00:23:33.260
be a really strong partner in that and as two separate sovereign nations.
00:23:37.480
I've got to ask you about Wayne Gretzky because President Trump obviously floated his name. He had
00:23:42.580
a meeting with the great one there. And he mentioned that Wayne Gretzky should run for prime minister of
00:23:50.040
Canada. I think it was kind of said in a playful manner. But do you think there'd be any interest there
00:23:56.020
from Canadians and Wayne Gretzky himself? I can tell you, we call him the great one
00:24:01.000
in Canada for good reason. And I have always been such an incredible Wayne Gretzky fan from when I
00:24:07.060
was a kid. But one thing I would say about Gretzky, he always said, don't go where the puck is,
00:24:12.640
go where the puck is going. And I can tell you in our country, the place the puck is going
00:24:16.460
is conservative leader Pierre Polyev. He is going to, I think, win the next election. And I think he's
00:24:22.400
going to be an incredible partner for the U.S. on reducing taxes and trying to get our trade
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relationship back on track. So I think it may have been a playful comment, but I think the name
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people need to start hearing about is Pierre Polyev. Madam Premier, I just want to circle back to
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something you said, because you're talking about how the United States and Canada can partner and
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have strength moving forward. But I'm still wondering where the deficit was over the last four
00:24:47.400
years. Why did more fentanyl come over the border? Why did illegals cross the border from the north
00:24:52.980
into this country? That's something we've talked about with Congresswoman Claudia Tenney
00:24:56.640
in New York specifically about. I'm just wondering why Canada didn't do its part to just say,
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you know what, we're going to continue and keep our standards the same,
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keep the border safe and not go along with this.
00:25:10.080
Well, I think you've seen it in the U.S. I mean, I've been watching all the shows about Purdue Pharma
00:25:14.200
and all of the lawsuits that have been happening. We have lawsuits in our country as well
00:25:17.680
about what started off as I think the big lie that you could have a safe supply of opioids
00:25:22.100
caused a lot of addiction. And then when we started trying to cut that off, people turned to street
00:25:26.960
drugs. And then, of course, with COVID, I think what happened is that that population of organized
00:25:33.120
crime and criminals ended up taking over our large centers. So when we emerged after COVID, we ended up
00:25:38.200
with a big problem. So we've all been trying to play catch up after that. Also in our country,
00:25:42.600
we used to have pretty strict visa requirements of people coming in through the airports. And some
00:25:49.800
of those visa requirements were relaxed. And we ended up with way more people coming into the
00:25:54.920
country than we expected. So we brought those visa requirements back. And so I think there's just
00:26:00.080
been a couple of mistakes that have been made, but I think they're all correctable. And I think
00:26:04.140
there's a will on the part of Canada and the U.S. to work together to make sure we're not causing
00:26:09.340
problems at each other's borders. Madam Premier, we so appreciate your time today. We'd love to have
00:26:13.920
you back in the new year. Thank you. I thought she did great. Positive, upbeat, pro-Canadian,
00:26:19.800
but respectful of Trump, showing friendship, the exact opposite of Trudeau. Danielle Smith,
00:26:25.880
frankly, is going to save our relationship with America if anyone does. So yeah, Rebel News is for
00:26:31.860
an independent Canada. Now, I love America as much as you do. We absolutely understand why Trump is
00:26:38.340
furious with our broken border, our lack of military commitment, our pro-China, pro-Hamas foreign policy,
00:26:43.780
the fact that Trudeau is such a loser generally. You don't think I get that? I get that. But we can
00:26:50.080
fix those things. A lot of those things get fixed immediately in the next federal election. We can get
00:26:54.880
back to a time when Canada was America's best friend, but independent. I've been doing some American
00:26:59.680
interviews. I say it's like Batman and Robin. You know, I mean, we're our own person. We can be the
00:27:05.460
junior partner, but we're our own person. That's the way to be. By the way, if you want to turn an
00:27:11.460
American off of this dream of a nix in Canada, in about 30 seconds, just remind them that there are
00:27:18.980
9 million Canadians in Quebec who expect bilingualism in French. And then follow up with, you know,
00:27:26.860
you'll have another California on your hands when it comes to the electoral college. I mean, Canada
00:27:31.360
will likely vote Democrat. I don't know for sure. I mean, Alberta, Saskatchewan might vote Republican,
00:27:37.280
but I mean, what's Doug Ford other than a left-wing Democrat? I think if you remind people in America,
00:27:44.380
you're going to have this electoral block in the presidential vote, I think it cools them off
00:27:48.660
pretty quickly of annexing Canada. Look, I love America, but I love Canada more. It's hard to love
00:27:54.640
Canada right now because it's so broken and we are literally being invaded by Trudeau's migrants. But
00:28:01.040
I haven't given up on it just yet, and I don't think you should either.
00:28:06.640
Stay with us for more. Up next, an interview I recently did with Mark Milkey.
00:28:10.640
I'm really excited about our next guest. He really is a Renaissance man. He's a scholar,
00:28:26.440
he's a builder, a founder of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. And of course,
00:28:32.640
at heart, he's an ideas man. He is a writer and he's got a new book. It's called The Victim Cult,
00:28:38.880
How the Grievance Culture is Wrecking Civilization. What a pleasure to be joined now by our friend,
00:28:45.280
Mark Milkey, who joins us from Calgary. Mark, great to see you again, and congratulations on the new
00:28:49.580
book. Ezra, thanks for having me. And, you know, I'm happy to have this new book out. So it's great
00:28:55.280
to be interviewed on it. You know, it is so easy emotionally to give up and say, I'm a victim.
00:29:01.820
I am not the captain of my own ship. Bad things that happen to me. It's someone else who did this
00:29:07.460
to me. Therefore, I don't have to take responsibility for it. I can mope and there's sort of a misery
00:29:12.780
loves company thing. There is some satisfaction in moping and blaming others. And, but that's not
00:29:19.800
the right way to be for people. It's not the right way to be for, for entire nations, is it? Tell me
00:29:24.420
more about your thesis behind The Victim Cult. Sure. Well, the reason I wrote this book,
00:29:29.920
and it took a very long time to write, about seven years in total, is because I've done a lot of work
00:29:34.440
on indigenous issues over the years. And there are some tremendous examples of indigenous leaders
00:29:39.420
who say, look, obviously some harm and some discrimination was rife in Canadian history.
00:29:46.160
But the person who wrote the foreword to The Victim Cult, Ellis Ross, former First Nations elected
00:29:51.660
chief in British Columbia, on the coast of British Columbia with a high slumation, set the tone for the
00:29:56.180
book, in that you can't allow the past to trap you as a person or as a group of people in the past,
00:30:04.460
because that's no way to create a better future without being flippant about it, right? And Ellis
00:30:09.240
is not, and I'm not in the book. The danger is, is when people concentrate on the past and the
00:30:13.700
victimization, sometimes it's imagined and sometimes it's real. And we shouldn't deny the latter. When you
00:30:19.040
concentrate on the past to a great degree and blame everything in the present on the past,
00:30:23.940
you really go in circles. And you see flourishing cultures around the world in history, which is
00:30:29.000
part of what this book did, that even when they were heavily discriminated against, as indigenous
00:30:33.780
Canadians were in the past, as Asian Canadians were between 1850 and 1950, literally in law and in
00:30:39.660
policy, and Jewish people, as you all know, also discriminated against in institutional ways before
00:30:47.540
the 1950s, 1960s reforms. Nonetheless, they were able to progress and push back. And so part of the
00:30:55.400
message of the victim cult is, without denying the wrongs of the past, you better look at what leads
00:31:02.560
to successful outcomes for peoples and entire groups today. Otherwise, you end up not making any
00:31:09.360
progress. And Palestinians, by the way, vis-Ã -vis Israel, are a great example of this. And I profile them
00:31:15.220
an entire chapter in the victim cult. Yeah, I think it was Henry Kissinger who said the Palestinians
00:31:20.520
never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And it's almost as if they, at least their leadership
00:31:26.960
chose not to have a happy ending to their story because they loved the process of grievance more
00:31:33.320
than they loved the outcome. You know, I saw a tweet from Elon Musk the other day when he was talking
00:31:39.400
about racism and slavery. And he said, I'm paraphrasing, he said, everyone in the world
00:31:44.940
is descended from a slave. And I think he's probably right. And I think he had another line
00:31:51.080
about, and many of us are descended from slave owners. And he wasn't talking about in the last
00:31:56.020
generation or even the five generations. I think he's talking about maybe over the course of thousands
00:32:00.740
of years. Because it's true that even in the medieval feudal systems, there were indentured
00:32:07.280
servants and people tied to the land as peasants. And if all you do is try and relitigate the past
00:32:15.440
and either blame someone whose great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was a slaveholder
00:32:20.940
or seek victim status because your great-great-great-great-grandfather was a slave, you're never going to
00:32:28.140
break free from that oppressor-oppressed dichotomy. You never, it's like an endless feud with the
00:32:35.540
Well, it is. And there are a number of things. When you think about slavery and the arguments
00:32:39.120
these days about restitution or compensation, there are a number of things to point out. Number one,
00:32:43.620
look, I'm in favor of compensation and restitution where wrong has been done in recent history. So for
00:32:48.660
example, if you're sitting in 1950 and you're looking at Japanese-Americans or Japanese-Canadians,
00:32:53.740
it was absolutely the right thing to do to provide restitution for the property they stole and for
00:32:59.140
the time they spent in internment camps. That makes sense. It was a theft of property, a theft of years
00:33:04.740
of their life. Likewise, in the late 1700s, Quakers actually compensated their slaves that they freed
00:33:11.300
because they realized a great wrong of it done. But that's a pretty short cause and effect timeline.
00:33:15.800
If people now want to go back 200 years and say, you should compensate me because my family was
00:33:20.260
enslaved, that really kind of stretches, I think, the timeline for, you know, and basically who's to
00:33:26.260
blame. So the closer you are to an event, sure, there's some argument, and I point that out in
00:33:30.360
the book, for compensation. In the short term, if I step on your foot, Ezra, and I break it, maybe I owe
00:33:35.340
you a medical bill or whatever. But the further you go back on slavery, what's really fascinating,
00:33:39.900
when I researched the victim cult, one of the chapters in there is all about slavery. And people
00:33:45.160
forget this. It was such a worldwide phenomenon, and, you know, regrettably taken for granted that
00:33:50.540
people were naturally unequal and some should be slaves. But even white Europeans and white Brits
00:33:55.920
were slaves. A lot of the Moorish, you know, and Muslim ships from the Mediterranean went all the way
00:34:03.180
even to, like, southern England and captured slaves off the coast of England for centuries,
00:34:10.020
between the late 1500s all the way up to the 1700s. This was a problem. More, you know, ships that came
00:34:16.720
and enslaved Europeans to the degree of a million people. Now, a million people is not as great as
00:34:22.300
the Arab-African slave trade or the Atlantic slave trade between the Americans, the Americas, and Africa.
00:34:29.220
Nonetheless, people forget that even, you know, Arabs and, you know, others were enslaving
00:34:35.060
Europeans. And in fact, the term slavery even, you know, that's where slab comes from initially
00:34:39.820
slaves in Europe. So unfortunately, it was a tragic worldwide phenomenon, which the British and imperial
00:34:45.440
power, the colonialists that everyone likes to beat up on today, who are the ones that really ended
00:34:50.100
slavery in human history. And there was a reason for that. And so why I wrote the victim cult, one of the
00:34:55.540
reasons is to say, it doesn't do much good to say your ancestors beat up on my ancestors. It goes
00:35:00.740
around, you know, and everybody's ancestors beat up on everybody else's ancestors, to put not too
00:35:06.280
fine a point on it, if you go back far enough in human history. So again, the question people have to
00:35:11.320
ask themselves is, again, beyond tight cause and effect links that are provable and recent, what kind
00:35:17.700
of a country do you want going forward? And it's not a good idea to have one based on historic
00:35:23.300
grievances. I mean, that's why so many of our ancestors left Europe. We were tired of the fighting.
00:35:28.500
You know, I just can't help but mention, you talked about slave trades of people we don't think of
00:35:33.680
when we think of slaves. And I visited Ireland a few times in the last year, and I discovered that an
00:35:40.140
entire town called Baltimore, the entire town was raided by slaves. And one or two, I think, had their
00:35:49.220
freedom, they were ransomed. The rest were taken to a slave market in North Africa. An entire town, I
00:35:55.060
guess it was more like a village. So... Well, this is one of the reasons, by the way, the Americans in
00:35:59.640
the late 1700s began to set up a navy, because they couldn't protect their commercial shipping. This
00:36:04.280
literally was why the Americans set up a navy. People forget that their ships were being picked
00:36:09.080
off in the Atlantic and in the wet terrain. I think the idea of the victim cult is so appealing
00:36:14.740
because it's so easy. You don't have to work hard. You don't have to pull yourself up by your
00:36:18.600
bootstraps. You don't have to force your mind to be productive and positive to get over a grievance.
00:36:24.160
Everyone in the world has a grievance. Every single person in the world has a grievance. And it's hard
00:36:28.020
to overcome that. But if someone says, you don't have to overcome that, you are the oppressed person.
00:36:34.240
You didn't do this to yourself. And by the way, I can get you some goodies. Like, I think of what
00:36:40.460
our schools teach. Everything, you know, cultural Marxism, which includes critical race theory.
00:36:46.540
I would say that critical gender theory and transgender theory, it's all... There's a group
00:36:52.400
of terrible people who we can judge stereotypically, call them all bad. And you're one of the all good
00:36:59.680
people. I mean, that's... You can see that narrative in the pro-Hamas protests. They're saying,
00:37:04.240
any resistance to Jews or Israel is justifiable. So they're justifying even horrific terrorism,
00:37:11.360
and they're justifying their own hatred towards Jews who have nothing to do with a particular
00:37:16.780
political quarrel. I just... I think it's so deeply rooted in all our institutions of learning.
00:37:24.680
If you ask me the number one thing being taught in universities in 2025, it's not math or science
00:37:30.660
or history, it's cultural Marxism. It's think of yourself as either a victim or an oppressor.
00:37:36.440
That's what land acknowledgements are at the beginning of any meeting. That's just saying,
00:37:40.960
we're oppressors and sorry for existing. They're not actually serious about giving back the land yet.
00:37:47.420
I don't know. I just... I think this is a much bigger problem than...
00:37:50.660
Well, you know... Yeah, it's shot through our culture. Look, in the victim cult, I write about... I'm not sure
00:37:56.660
there's both sides in this, or that the left-right specter makes any sense anymore. It's been messed
00:38:02.060
up for years then. But when Donald Trump claims to be a victim of election fraud in 2020, and he
00:38:07.120
knows better, and he knows he's not, and some of your listeners are going to disagree, I know,
00:38:11.020
but I don't care because he wasn't a victim of election fraud. So I pick on both sides of this,
00:38:15.900
but you're right. The cultural Marxists, you see everything through the lens of victimhood,
00:38:20.400
are perhaps part of the bigger problem here. I mean, they've set the stage for this nonsense.
00:38:25.940
Also, it's a faulty view of the economy. If you go back and think, look, your ancestors beat up
00:38:31.000
on my ancestors or vice versa, and that somehow there was just this pot of money that someone
00:38:36.620
stole centuries ago, it kind of overlooks the growth of the capitalist economy in much of the
00:38:43.280
world over the last two or three centuries, which had nothing to do with plundering other people's
00:38:47.820
cultures. It came from creating something new as an entrepreneur, for example. So there's been a
00:38:53.800
great development in the world economy, and you can't blame much of what, you know, the inequality
00:38:58.500
you see today, or the remaining poverty, which hasn't been wiped out by markets for various reasons,
00:39:04.200
due to some event that happened 200 to 300 years ago. It usually has to do with more, you know,
00:39:09.520
banal things today, like regulation that prevent people from moving forward, or inflation, or that
00:39:14.440
sort of thing, which creates inequalities. So part of the problem of thinking like a permanent victim is,
00:39:19.820
let's go back to the Palestinian issue, it prevents you from progressing. If you look at other Arab
00:39:24.320
nations, Qatar, if you look at Hong Kong before the Chinese regime took it back and had made a mess
00:39:30.220
of it in the last 10 years, you will see that cultures can progress with the rule of law, property
00:39:34.980
rights, a free economy. And that's what makes people progress. It doesn't help to focus on the past
00:39:41.420
at infinitum. And the Palestinians have made the mistake, they could have been Singapore by now,
00:39:46.700
they could have been Hong Kong, if, you know, since the early 1970s onward, after the Israelis held the
00:39:52.520
West Bank in Gaza, they produced leaders that said, look, we're going to work within the system for now,
00:39:57.660
and prove that we're not out to kill everybody on the other side of this border. But it had bad
00:40:02.160
leaders time and again, including Yasser Arafat. One of the examples I give in the victim call as a
00:40:06.380
comparison to Yasser Arafat is Jerry Adams and Marty McGinnis, Martin McGinnis, Sinn Féin and provisional IRA
00:40:13.740
leaders, you know, respectively. They did a deal with the British and got to the Good Friday Accords
00:40:19.220
in 1998. And it's not because they weren't terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists in both
00:40:24.540
cases. It's because they wanted to get to a peace treaty more than they wanted dead breasts. And they
00:40:30.280
eventually came to that conclusion. And they would crack down on their own side in those negotiations,
00:40:35.480
including one author, I quote, you know, basically says they probably fed information to the British
00:40:41.140
to try and crack down on some of the more even more radical cells than the ones they are involved
00:40:45.420
with when they wanted a peace treaty. The Palestinian leadership has not done this. And the Palestinians,
00:40:50.880
unfortunately, are a great example of they've suffered from poor leadership that has wanted
00:40:56.180
dead people on the other side of the border rather than more than they wanted a peace treaty in all
00:41:01.520
these decades. Whereas Israel has proved in its deals with Egypt, Jordan, and the Abraham Accords more
00:41:07.060
recently, they will do peace trees if they can find a partner on the other side. But a lot of
00:41:12.100
Palestinians, I regret to say, are so enmeshed in the victim narrative, they can't get beyond it.
00:41:18.280
You know, let me close with one more thing about Marxism, because Marxism in its original form was
00:41:23.160
about the working class and the means of production. It was about prosperity. It was about who gets the
00:41:28.760
stuff. And you can imagine when people were so poor in general, and the Industrial Revolution was
00:41:35.320
fairly new. There was spectacular wealth amidst great poverty. And that was on people's minds.
00:41:41.040
These days, we're so wealthy and so luxury, we have to invent new luxury grievances about gender or race
00:41:49.220
and these fine degrees of things to complain about. Because, you know, the working class in 2025 would be
00:41:56.300
astonishingly rich 100 years ago. And a fun way to look at that is things like that movie by Matt Walsh,
00:42:04.180
what is a woman? He goes to very poor third world countries and asks them, what is a woman? And they
00:42:10.780
laugh and they answer clearly, because they're so worried with basic level prosperity questions,
00:42:17.580
they haven't had enough idle time to worry about cultural Marxism, what is a woman? And I think that
00:42:24.380
in a way, the victim cult is a proof that we have so much free time, and so much luxury and so much
00:42:30.760
excess wealth and so few real problems that Karl Marx himself would have identified as real problems.
00:42:38.400
So now we've had to apply that oppressed oppressor narrative to the rest of the world just to keep
00:42:44.240
ourselves revved up. I think it's actually quite sad. Folks, we've been talking to Mark Milkey. He's
00:42:49.820
the boss of the Aristotle Foundation. His new book is called The Victim Cult. You can get it at
00:42:55.360
amazon.ca. Last word to you, Mark. Tell us what the Aristotle Foundation has coming up in 2025.
00:43:02.620
Well, lots of stuff on anti-merit, anti-individual, the liberal DEI policy, right? This notion that
00:43:09.240
everything is due to racism. It's not. So we've got more work on that coming out. We've got a book on
00:43:13.600
John Diefenbaker coming out in a couple of months by author Bob Hommenden, looking at the Freedom
00:43:17.960
Fire. That's the subtitle of the book. So look for that. It's not available yet. The Victim Cult is
00:43:22.880
available now, but a book on John Diefenbaker will be coming out in, will be coming out in
00:43:27.740
several months from the Aristotle Foundation, along with some work in anti-Semitism and radicalism
00:43:32.960
within Canada. Sounds great. There is Mark Milkey. Stay with us, Moorhead.
00:43:38.400
Hey, welcome back. Your letters to me. Rebecca Baer says, I don't care. I'm not returning to
00:43:56.400
Facebook. Hey, fair enough. It's tough to overcome a decade worth of antipathy towards Mark Zuckerberg.
00:44:05.000
I think Alan Bakari was right yesterday when he said to me that Zuckerberg is just being
00:44:10.580
pragmatic. He's going which way the wind blows. And if that blows him back to freedom, that's a
00:44:15.780
good thing. You know, I don't know if we have to forgive. We shouldn't forget. But I'm happy that
00:44:22.980
freedom is on the march. And the most important thing I took away from the Zuckerberg video is that
00:44:28.920
he implied that Facebook intends to be free around the world, too. And he's going to rely on the U.S.
00:44:34.980
State Department to help him overcome local governments around the world that are censors.
00:44:40.360
That gave me some hope. Bruce Acheson says, this is a start, but the war isn't over. We must fight
00:44:47.580
lies and bullying wherever it happens. Leftist bullies have been pushing people around for far too long.
00:44:52.740
Like in Revenge of the Nerds, people will come to our side when we speak the truth. Leftist jocks will find
00:44:57.960
themselves to be a small minority of losers if we keep on fighting their tyranny. Well, there have
00:45:05.060
been some forces for freedom in social media. Rumble, which is the YouTube competitor, has always
00:45:10.600
been great. Telegram has resisted censorship, too. But Facebook is the biggest of them all. And YouTube,
00:45:18.180
Google, actually, in some ways, that's even bigger. So those are the ones that really count. That's why
00:45:22.880
I'm so glad Facebook has come over. So far, Google and YouTube are atrocious. YouTube
00:45:27.820
demonetized us over the course of time. I think YouTube has knocked. Like if we would have stayed
00:45:34.360
on YouTube monetized over the course of our life as a company, we would have had $10 million worth of
00:45:42.020
ad revenues based on our traffic that we could have hired more staff, opened up more offices,
00:45:48.320
done more good work. YouTube almost destroyed Rebel News. That's a fact. Well, that's our show for
00:45:54.600
today. Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home,