00:00:00.140Hello, my friends. Very interesting. Donald Trump has a new executive order banning desecration of the American flag, but it only applies in certain limited circumstances, including to foreigners in America, which I think is the whole point. I will take you through that executive order. Very interesting stuff.
00:00:21.380And then an interview with Chris Dacey on the clashing rallies in the streets of Ottawa, the Gay Pride Rally and the Palestinian Rally. Which one do you think won? That's ahead. But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus. That's the video version of this podcast. Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe. It's eight bucks a month. I want to show you what happened on the streets of Ottawa. And for that, you need to see the video. So please sign up at rebelnewsplus.com.
00:00:48.860Tonight, what flag do you wave? What flag would you never wave? What flag would you burn? Are you even allowed to burn it? It's August 25th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
00:01:06.420You know, Donald Trump is still issuing executive orders at a furious pace. I started putting together this monologue in the early afternoon, and he had already signed four executive orders just today.
00:01:27.280And he was also meeting with the new president of South Korea. I mean, he's doing a lot of important things. It's not surprising to me that Mark Carney in Canada are lower on his list. He's so busy. He's doing it all at once.
00:01:42.080I don't think I've mentioned the fact that he has used his federal powers to take over policing in Washington, D.C., to supplement them with the National Guard and actually stop the crime in that city.
00:01:54.480I don't mean to understate things, but it didn't even look that hard for him to do. It's just that no one had actually tried it in 50 years.
00:02:03.680Look, D.C. is a miracle what's happened. I mean, they can come up with fake numbers like the mayor's doing. Oh, no, it was going down for 20 years. You didn't live here. You know, have you been mugged? OK, D.C. was a hellhole and now it's safe.
00:02:19.040And in fact, I put out this morning, I said, I hate to say this because it doesn't sound very good, but there have been no murders in D.C. in the last week.
00:02:27.400That's the first time in anybody's memory that you haven't had a murder in a week. And I think the mayor has to get on the ball because we have a situation.
00:02:37.760She's a nice woman, but I'll tell you what, she's got to get on the ball. We have I don't I don't want to see phony numbers.
00:02:43.740D.C. hit an all time high last year of absolute total crime.
00:02:50.500And it continued pretty bad. And then we put some strength, some strength into it, got the numbers down a little bit.
00:02:56.680But we brought in the D.C. National Guard and we coupled them with the police. And it has been amazing.
00:03:04.060I think we're at 10 days now with no murder in a row. Violent crime way down. People walking on the streets again.
00:03:10.940People going out for dinner and restaurants again. You can't say that for everywhere in Toronto, by the way.
00:03:17.280Just look at these two tweets from just 15 minutes separated. A couple of stabbings in two different neighborhoods.
00:03:24.860I wonder if Donald Trump could come rescue us, too. I understand he's going to do this in Chicago next in all of these cities.
00:03:32.580It's not that the local criminals outgun the police. They obviously don't.
00:03:37.140It's that the police and more frequently the prosecutors and judges simply choose not to fight crime.
00:03:43.880They don't arrest certain offenses. They don't impose bail. They don't impose strong sentences.
00:03:50.260They let crime become normalized. If that happens for years and even decades, it can feel hopeless.
00:03:56.740And that's just the state of things, the way things always are.
00:04:00.180Trump has proved in Washington that really all you have to do is decide you don't want to live that way.
00:04:06.240In 10 days, he's revolutionized the city. It's great for Americans in those big cities.
00:04:10.480The one side effect I don't like, but it's a small price to pay to make America safe again,
00:04:15.960is that all of these Democrat mayors and Democrat governors are having their crime problems fixed by a Republican president.
00:04:23.660And so life is going to improve in those blue states, and people will perhaps ascribe their improved life to the Democrats.
00:04:33.380They voted into office for mayor or governor, as opposed to the guy who's fixing the problem, Donald Trump.
00:04:39.240There's a U.S. liberal named Ezra Klein, not to be confused with Ezra Levant.
00:04:44.020Klein points out that all of the places run by Democrats are awful places to live when measured by crime,
00:04:51.860drug use, homeless encampments, taxes, etc.
00:04:54.780And that at the end of the day, that's a reason people don't want to vote Democrat, because they see what life is like.
00:04:59.900I mean, you can have all the campaign slogans and ads you like, but really, would you rather live in a city run by Republicans or Democrats?
00:05:07.520Where do you think crime is going to be better? Where do you think taxes are going to be better?
00:05:10.520San Francisco and L.A. and Portland have lovely bones, those cities.
00:05:15.380They're beautiful nature. New York is still an amazing city, too.
00:05:18.940But everything is so much worse than it could be or should be because of their politics.
00:05:23.980I mean, Detroit was once one of the leading cities in America.
00:05:27.580Only politics undone. Donald Trump, paradoxically, is going to fix that for Democrat politicians, even though they'll likely make a fuss about it.
00:05:39.900Anyway, forgive me for that very long detour. I just really want to talk with you today about flags.
00:05:44.540But I couldn't help mention that Trump was tackling big city crime, even though he's president.
00:05:50.540In some ways, this will likely make more of a difference to more people than most of what goes on in politics.
00:05:57.480I don't care what you think of Trump personally.
00:06:00.400He's going to go down in history as one of the greats.
00:06:02.500But back to the flag executive order, which was one of the four that Trump announced today.
00:06:08.600It criminalizes the burning and, well, really the desecration of American flags in certain circumstances, which surprised me because Trump is a free speech enthusiast.
00:06:19.460And banning the desecration of flags is a kind of expression, sorry, the desecration of flags is a kind of expression in many cases.
00:06:28.680But let me read it to you because it's actually, the headline goes a lot further than the substance, but it's quite clever.
00:06:35.000I'm not going to read the whole thing.
00:06:36.440You can find it pretty quickly on the White House website.
00:06:38.760Our great American flag is the most sacred and cherished symbol of the United States of America and of American freedom, identity, and strength.
00:06:47.980Over nearly two and a half centuries, many thousands of American patriots have fought, bled, and died to keep the stars and stripes waving proudly.
00:06:55.340And he goes on at some length about how important and beautiful the flag is, and it's very poetic.
00:07:00.220But then he remembers, well, this is one of the things that makes America so great is freedom.
00:07:04.540So he says, notwithstanding the Supreme Court's rulings on First Amendment protections, the court has never held that American flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action, or that is an action amounting to fighting words, is constitutionally protected.
00:07:46.860The Attorney General shall prioritize the enforcement to the fullest extent possible of our nation's criminal and civil laws against acts of American flag desecration that violate applicable content-neutral laws while causing harm unrelated to expression consistent with the First Amendment.
00:08:05.540This may include, but is not limited to, violent crimes, hate crimes, illegal discrimination against American citizens, or other violations of American civil rights, and crimes against property and the peace, as well as conspiracies and attempts to violate, and aiding and abetting laws to violate, others to violate such laws.
00:08:27.800So it really is focused on where the flag, it's not the content of the flag and the desecration of the flag, that's the point, but it's other things like discrimination and violence.
00:08:40.480So it's exceedingly narrow, the application here, because otherwise this would be struck down by the Supreme Court, by both Democrat and Republican judges.
00:08:50.520I'm not going to read, it's a very lengthy and very interesting executive order.
00:08:54.000They hand off some of the prosecutions to local authorities.
00:08:56.860They say that the feds, the Department of Justice, may have some test cases to, quote, clarify the scope of the First Amendment exceptions in this area.
00:09:06.520So basically the first chunk of this executive order is saying we love the flag, we super love it, we love it more than anyone else.
00:09:15.660We're going to ban desecrating the flags where it's constitutionally permissible, which is probably going to be, and this would be so rare, I think,
00:09:24.820where desecrating the flag was done in concert with a violent act or with discrimination against Americans.
00:09:31.720I don't know if that would even happen once a year in the United States.
00:09:37.580But really this executive order, the first chunk of it admits the First Amendment protects any substantive content, any expressive content.
00:10:00.820The Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting within their respective authorities, shall deny, prohibit, terminate, or revoke visas, residence permits, naturalization proceedings, and other immigration benefits,
00:10:17.720or seek removal from the United States pursuant to federal law, whenever there has been an appropriate determination that foreign nationals have engaged in American flag desecration activity under circumstances that permit the exercise of such remedies pursuant to federal law.
00:10:36.560Now, this is not about Americans having their free speech stripped from them.
00:10:41.660Really, this executive order repeats the First Amendment's protection several times.
00:10:46.520This is about foreigners burning the U.S. flag.
00:10:59.860The left are the people who prosecute you if you scuff your feet on a pride-colored rainbow flag sidewalk, if you don't bow down to the trans flag.
00:11:11.760You're prosecuted for that all over America.
00:11:18.840You know, one of the most incredible deployments of a flag was not the American flag, but a Mexican flag.
00:11:26.180When Donald Trump announced he was going to go ahead with the mass deportation of illegals, there were actual street riots in Los Angeles.
00:11:35.220And the flag of choice by these people in America was not the American flag, but Mexican flags at anti-deportation riots, which sort of proves the point.
00:11:45.740You're flying a Mexican flag in America because you don't want to go home to Mexico, but your flag of choice is a Mexican flag.
00:11:53.600Now, Soros activists quickly saw how that was backfiring in terms of PR, and they tried to get anti-ice, that's the immigration police, anti-ice protesters to wave U.S. flags to sort of make Americans think that they love America.
00:13:58.020I love the flag wars because you really sum up what you stand for in your flag.
00:14:02.340In the U.K., the flag called the Union flag, or sometimes the Union Jack, if you look at it carefully, I don't, I mean, I'm sure Brits know this off by heart, but Canadians might not know.
00:14:13.320It's actually flags put on top of each other.
00:14:15.940There's the English Cross of St. George, there's the Scottish flag, and, you know, there's the four constituent countries of the U.K., England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
00:14:25.100You can fly your country's flag, the Welsh flag, for example, or you can fly the Union flag, which was also the flag of the empire.
00:14:33.240But people would often get in trouble for flying not only their national flag, especially the English flag, which is the red cross on the white background.
00:14:49.040I visited a man in the city of Sunderland in the U.K. who said police came around and told him to take down the Union flag, the Union Jack, the British flag.
00:14:58.740It was considered hostile by foreigners.
00:15:02.800Police would enforce taking down the British flag.
00:15:07.300But something amazing is going on right now.
00:15:10.000The flag is becoming a rallying point in the U.K. by British people who are against mass illegal immigration.
00:15:20.340And all across the U.K., sometimes as many as 20 different protests in a day, outside these hotels that have been set aside for foreign migrant men, men, women, and children are protesting.
00:15:41.960They're being set up all across the country.
00:15:45.260People are in the dead of night taking up their ladders, climbing up lampposts, and affixing flags, either the Union flag, the Union Jack, or the English flag.
00:15:55.320And I've seen a Scottish flag also all over the place.
00:15:59.680And you know those roundabouts, sort of a circular intersection?
00:16:04.480They're painting the center circle of that in the English colors of a red cross on a white background.
00:16:11.640I don't know if you remember a few months ago I showed you this phenomenon in the U.K. called blade runners, where people would very quickly go down and use a steel-cutting saw to knock down spy cameras that were enforcing those 15-minute cities.
00:16:28.400Those people called themselves blade runners.
00:16:30.280And they would run out with a saw, and in often less than 30 seconds, they would knock down these CCTV systems, sometimes for the 10th time in the same location.
00:16:41.160It's the same spirit of sort of sneaking around in the dark.
00:16:46.940But instead of cutting down these spy cameras, they're putting up British and English flags, and it's breaking out everywhere, and it's sort of amazing.
00:16:57.580And the thing is, some city councils run by leftist UK-hating politicians are vowing to take down the British and English flags.
00:17:07.700But these are the folks who have abided, or in some cases even put up, Palestinian flags in the U.K.
00:17:15.780I think these are very interesting days.
00:17:17.880And I love watching these flag vigilantes in the U.K.
00:17:26.820There's a U.S. chain called Cracker Barrel.
00:17:29.400We don't have it in Canada, unfortunately.
00:17:31.280It's sort of Southern-style, home country cooking, comfort food, and it's sort of an old-fashioned vibe, fireplaces, sort of almost a garage sale kind of junk store at the front.
00:17:47.940Well, they hired a new DEI CEO, and her first move was to absolutely denude the Cracker Barrel logo, to take out the picture of the old white guy sitting near her barrel.
00:18:32.800So I think the company's going to survive just because the food's so good.
00:18:36.120But I tell you, these companies that try and destroy their meaning, like Bud Light or Jaguar, it's not because people really care about Jaguars or Bud Lights.
00:18:47.280It's because those companies have tried to embody values that we have as people.
00:18:54.780And then when those companies decide they hate those values, isn't that another way of saying they hate the people?
00:19:00.980If you liked Bud Light and suddenly you're under attack and you're not good enough for the brand, if you like Cracker Barrel, but suddenly Cracker Barrel doesn't like you, doesn't want you, wants you written on the picture, it's sort of humiliating.
00:19:14.800You say, well, if they hate me, why should I give them any of my money?
00:19:34.840And I think the government, especially here in Canada, has forgotten that.
00:19:39.160That's why people love football, both U.S. style football and in the U.K. they call soccer football, because sometimes that's the only way for old stock Americans, Canadians, Brits to fly their flag.
00:19:52.720It's why both British and U.S. football have been targeted with political correctness, along with our Canadian hockey, don't you think?
00:20:32.200And if you doubt me, look at the recent B.C. court ruling giving the land back.
00:20:38.160My point is, you can only fly a flag for so long that's not your flag, that you don't believe in, before people say, well, no, you've been saluting that false flag for long enough that actually is you.
00:20:50.620What I'm so excited about in both the United States and the U.K. are from Donald Trump down to the ordinary Brit.
00:20:57.460They're reclaiming their flags and their meanings, and with it, their history and their culture.