Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ U.S. AI labs want to “pace the frontier,” citing safety fears. The fine print tells a different story.

00:00:00.000 Hello, my friends. I paid attention to an essay written a few days ago by Dario Amodey.

00:00:06.020 That's the name of the CEO of Anthropic. And that is the name of one of the largest AI,

00:00:12.980 artificial intelligence companies in the world. Weirdly, he called for the government to step in

00:00:18.140 to regulate him and the whole industry. But is that just his way of keeping out competitors?

00:00:23.540 We'll go through it line by line. But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to

00:00:27.960 Rebel News Plus. It's the video version of this program. Just go to rebelnewsplus.com,

00:00:32.480 click subscribe. And not only will you be supporting Rebel News, well, I mean, you get

00:00:37.540 the great content, but you will allow us to continue our 11-year tradition of not taking

00:00:42.680 a dime from the government. And it shows.

00:00:57.960 tonight two artificial intelligence oligarchs agree that ai should slow down

00:01:07.000 or at least their competitors should it's september 14th and this is the azure levant show

00:01:12.260 shame on you you sensorious bug

00:01:18.540 dario ammo day is the name of a man who runs anthropic it's one of the two or three most

00:01:35.720 important artificial intelligence companies in the world on thursday he published an essay

00:01:41.900 called we must pace the frontier which means we got to slow down his argument in one sentence is

00:01:49.420 we're at the point where the machines are now building the next machines and they're getting

00:01:54.460 better faster than human engineers can keep up this is what he said he says there was recently

00:02:00.460 an incident where a swarm of artificial intelligence agents that is little ai robots

00:02:06.880 who were commanded by a senior AI robot broke out and started running cyber attacks that nobody

00:02:13.380 authorized. So he wants the whole industry to slow down on purpose. And here's his plan. Step one,

00:02:21.760 outside inspectors working inside the AI companies permanently with employee-like access.

00:02:29.660 Anthropic is doing that unilaterally, he says, starting now. Step two, the big labs in democratic

00:02:35.920 countries should agree on common standards with washington the politicians brokering the deal

00:02:42.840 and handing out an antitrust waiver so these competitors can work together now normally that

00:02:49.060 would be illegal it would be like if coke and pepsi had a meeting where they agreed to carve

00:02:54.180 up market share and have a joint marketing plan or something that's why he needs the waiver on

00:03:00.560 antitrust step three which i think is the biggest fantasy of all is a treaty with china here's sam

00:03:09.660 altman of open ai who says i agree with dario that we need to pace the frontier he promised to let

00:03:17.840 inspectors into open ai also now look i don't dismiss the risk if the guy who builds the thing

00:03:26.460 says it scares him, I'll listen to him, but I've been around long enough to notice something.

00:03:33.000 When the biggest players in an industry agree that the industry needs more rules, it's a good

00:03:39.900 time to ask, well, who would benefit from those rules? And if they really want to limit companies,

00:03:45.400 why don't they start by limiting their own? I mean, is it possible that the CEO of an AI company

00:03:52.240 coming up with terrifying stories about ai this is just potentially possible that he's doing this

00:03:59.620 for his own gain and not in the service of mankind i suppose it would be a little bit like pfizer

00:04:04.900 saying this is the worst pandemic ever and boy we have to bring in tough regulations and

00:04:11.580 one of the regulations is that everybody has to buy a pfizer vaccine does that ring a bell at all

00:04:17.540 because none of these tech leaders are proposing to slow down on their own.

00:04:21.300 They don't seem to be following their own advice.

00:04:23.960 No one of them has said, well, we're pausing.

00:04:27.720 What they said is there should be a system, there should be inspectors,

00:04:31.480 standards, checkpoints that a model has to pass before it can ship,

00:04:37.160 and a government to run it all.

00:04:40.720 Translation, we're leaders in this industry.

00:04:43.240 can you now make it really hard for anyone else to catch up to us? That's what monopolies do. 0.92

00:04:52.220 Now, the sharpest answer came from David Sachs. He's co-chair of President Trump's Council

00:04:57.960 of Advisors on Science and Technology. He said, Dario has written that we need to pace the

00:05:04.740 frontier. Just to be clear, that means slow down the leading edge of AI. And Sam has agreed. People

00:05:11.260 may be surprised by my response. Go ahead. You guys are the frontier by any reasonable metric,

00:05:18.660 market share, revenue growth, model capability. The two of you have a duopoly on frontier

00:05:24.600 intelligence. The easiest way not to build super intelligence is for you to agree

00:05:30.460 not to build it. And this, demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that

00:05:38.100 will look like blackmail of the public and the political system if you don't we'll know this was

00:05:44.780 just another bid for regulatory capture as in dario and sam if you really are so worried

00:05:53.580 why do you need anyone else to agree with you to shut things down and do the right thing i mean

00:05:59.100 in his warning dario amade wrote this quote given the accelerating rate of ai capability development

00:06:07.460 And it's my worry that in six to 12 months, such a swarm could be capable of taking over

00:06:13.340 the entire internet with a persistent botnet, potentially causing hundreds of billions of

00:06:18.960 dollars in damage.

00:06:21.280 Well, if you really believe that, if you believe there's a real chance of blowing something

00:06:26.740 up and harming all of humanity, why do you need anyone else involved before you stop

00:06:32.180 what you're doing?

00:06:33.040 or are you scaring people so that heavy rules come in that benefit you as opposed to newcomers

00:06:41.200 or competitors a startup can't afford permanent resident inspectors with badges and desks

00:06:47.380 anthropic and open ai can a checkpoint that a new model must pass before being released as a

00:06:54.440 government regulation like a license and licenses are always cheapest for the big companies that

00:06:59.720 already have lawyers and lobbyists in place who can shape those regulations to benefit themselves

00:07:05.760 and a pace set jointly by the incumbents blessed by Washington with an antitrust waiver that's a

00:07:12.640 cartel just with a safety label on it I hate the fact how Amadei is talking about safety and that

00:07:19.900 we have to do this for the safety of society boy that rings a COVID bell for me and then there's

00:07:26.740 the I suppose the veto on this whole thing the biggest obvious point China Dario Amadei admits

00:07:33.760 it himself he writes that if democracy slow down and then China defects as in if it breaks this

00:07:40.540 deal well then Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party end up with the most powerful technology in

00:07:45.540 history his own step three let's make a treaty with China you know how they honor their agreements

00:07:50.880 has in his own word stark limits think about the nuclear analogy for a second if i may the manhattan

00:07:59.400 project didn't pause i mean russian spies handed the blueprints to moscow anyways and the soviets

00:08:06.680 tested a bomb in 1949 the arms control treaties came after both sides already had the weapon

00:08:12.700 and they those treaties stuck only because you could count warheads from a satellite but

00:08:18.640 really it's not even that it's the mutually assured destruction that stopped each side

00:08:24.300 from shooting at the other you can't count a computer file you an ai model is just a file

00:08:29.560 it gets stolen it gets copied it gets imitated so pace the frontier that's what they're calling

00:08:34.960 slowing things down turns into two things an honor system that binds only the honorable and

00:08:41.200 a permanent government job of keeping everyone else behind but here's the part that should worry

00:08:48.160 you more than any botnet, because the danger in AI was never only that the machine gets too smart.

00:08:56.160 That's a worry, I'll tell you, I'm worried about that. But I think the bigger worry is who holds

00:09:01.900 the leash on this new creation. And look at who's asking to hold the leash. Alan Barkhari was on our

00:09:11.060 show last month. He spent a decade covering big tech censorship. He's the one who got the internal

00:09:16.360 google documents and the facebook blacklist and he told me something i haven't been able to shake

00:09:21.040 when he was on the show a few weeks ago he said the trust and safety people the ones who ran the

00:09:26.600 censorship at twitter and facebook during covid during the 2020 election also um in the states

00:09:32.760 they didn't disappear when elon musk bought twitter and fired them all they got new jobs

00:09:40.100 in the ai companies in the safety departments same people same word safety it's the safety

00:09:48.720 that's so dangerous i mean what does safety mean to them alum's point was that at these companies

00:09:54.920 it has very little to do with stopping botnets or rogue ais taking over the world the safety

00:10:01.700 they are focused on is a discipline called machine learning fairness that's the actual term and it's

00:10:08.720 about making sure the machine never says anything that notices a difference between men and women

00:10:14.040 or between one group or another it's it's critical race theory for computers and they call it safety

00:10:20.340 so when Dario Amadei says he wants safety inspectors living inside every AI company

00:10:26.740 with the power to publish what they find ask who the inspectors will be will they be engineers

00:10:32.800 checking for rogue bots will they really or will it be the same class of people who decided

00:10:38.620 you couldn't say the vaccine didn't stop transmission who decided you couldn't miss

00:10:44.020 gender someone that's the kind of safety we're used to david sacks by the way has said this

00:10:50.400 before about anthropic more bluntly last year he accused the company of quote

00:10:54.980 running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering and of trying

00:11:02.160 to backdoor woke ai through blue state laws in places like california and that happened to me

00:11:09.820 i think i told you the other day i went out to new brunswick to look into this church fire

00:11:13.560 and anthropic i use claude that's uh the name of their ai system it simply refused to answer my

00:11:22.260 question about the background of the arsonist in fact it gave me a bit of a lecture i think i told

00:11:26.980 you this it gave me a bit of a lecture about not being bigoted that's what the ai said to me that

00:11:31.660 was AI safety. Here's the tale. Allum wrote this in the American Conservative last month. There was

00:11:38.100 an industry letter this summer in favor of what they call open weight AI. That's when a company

00:11:44.060 publishes its model as a file that anyone can download and run on their own computer for free

00:11:49.000 without asking permission. Meta does it. The Chinese AI company DeepSeek does it. Anthropic

00:11:56.360 wouldn't sign think about why an open model that anyone has is one that you know can't can't be

00:12:05.040 licensed can't be leashed it's on your hard drive no safety deposit department in san francisco can

00:12:11.460 reach in and change its answers and the amaday essay has a line on that too he wants a crackdown

00:12:17.460 on distillation that's another technical word it means a simple thing the smaller company trains

00:12:22.860 its own model by asking the big model millions of questions and learning from the answers it's how a

00:12:27.820 startup with 50 people catches up to a company with 5 000 it's also how china's deep seek caught

00:12:35.440 up it stole ideas from the west now amaday wants it stopped which is a strange priority for a man

00:12:42.200 who says his fear is a rogue botnet and a very natural priority for a man who has a duopoly to

00:12:49.800 protect now he did say anthropic is letting the inspectors in starting now without waiting for

00:12:55.280 anyone else but notice he's the one uh who's choosing these inspectors and it's one step

00:13:01.220 that costs him nothing because he'd be the you know he's in control of what these inspectors see

00:13:05.640 steps two and three in his plans the one that would actually bind him require the approval

00:13:11.920 of politicians in washington and beijing which means they require time which means they require

00:13:18.680 everyone else to wait and there's another player here i haven't mentioned bernie sanders he just

00:13:23.720 announced a bill for a permanent ban on super intelligence and a pause on development in the

00:13:28.900 meantime so the socialist and the two billionaires are now on the same side of the argument slow it

00:13:34.040 down put the government in charge make sure you're careful about safety meaning dangerous ideas the

00:13:42.420 only one disagreement amongst them is who gets to sit on the safety commission that's the shape of

00:13:48.400 every censorship regime I've ever encountered. It starts with a real danger, terrorism, a pandemic,

00:13:56.600 a botnet, robots. But it always ends with a committee deciding what you're allowed to read

00:14:01.960 and hear and say and think. And the committee is always staffed by the people who ask for it,

00:14:07.220 isn't it? So here's where I land. If the machine is dangerous, well, one of the answers is product

00:14:12.820 liability. As David Sachs said, if your product enables a cyber attack, you're going to get sued

00:14:18.760 into the ground. And open AI and Anthropik are worth hundreds of billions, even a trillion

00:14:24.500 dollars. It's got a lot to lose if it goes rogue. That's a rule that binds everyone, including

00:14:30.340 China's customers, and it doesn't need a government regulator. If the machine is powerful,

00:14:35.860 is the answer more of them in more hands as opposed to two companies with government-approved

00:14:41.720 inspectors deciding what's safe for the rest of us. And if the word safety starts showing up in

00:14:47.680 the mouths of people who've used it before, remember what it meant the last time they said

00:14:52.220 it. They say the machines need to slow down. Okay, look closely. It's not the machines these guys

00:14:59.720 want to slow down. It's you. And anyone who might build something, they don't control.

00:15:08.280 Stay with us for more.

00:15:11.720 You know, one of the funniest things about the debate over the power of the courts versus the power of the legislatures is about the so-called notwithstanding clause.

00:15:27.420 That's part of the Constitution that says notwithstanding other rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution, this law will come into force.

00:15:35.940 as in it's a kind of exemption from the courts for certain freedoms that last about five years

00:15:43.260 before it has to be renewed. The funny thing about the debates is that people often say

00:15:48.360 that undermines the Constitution or it erodes the meaning of the Constitution, to which I say,

00:15:55.700 well, it's literally part of the Constitution. Section 33, it is part of the Constitution,

00:16:02.240 a kind of fail-safe, a kind of check and balance to the power of unelected judges.

00:16:09.080 That's what I think, which is why I'm so excited to see a new report out about this very subject.

00:16:14.840 It's by our friend Nigel Hannaford at the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.

00:16:19.720 And joining us now to talk about this is the boss of the Justice Center, John Carpe.

00:16:24.440 John, good to see you again, by the way.

00:16:26.080 I saw you recently at the Vancouver George Jonas Awards Gala for Candace Malcolm.

00:16:32.460 So it was nice to see you and all your supporters in Vancouver.

00:16:35.420 Tell me a little bit about this report by Nigel Hannaford.

00:16:39.480 So a lot of people hate Section 33, the Notwithstanding Clause, and say that it should be scrapped.

00:16:46.560 There's a case before the Supreme Court right now arising from Quebec, and it'll be interesting to see what, if anything, the Supreme Court tries to do with it, because I suspect that they are not fans of Section 33.

00:17:01.160 But what it does is it allows legislatures to opt out of a court's interpretation.

00:17:07.280 A lot of people say, well, this clause helps you to opt out of Charter Rights and Freedoms.

00:17:13.460 more specifically more accurately it helps you to opt out of court's interpretation so for example

00:17:20.840 in Alberta a year or two years ago the Smith government introduced policies to protect

00:17:27.120 teenagers from transgender ideology and said you know you can't get surgery under 18 and you need

00:17:35.680 you know parental consent for this or that or parents have to be informed blah blah blah

00:17:40.620 And so activist LGBTQ group went to court, got it before a progressive woke activist judge who said that this Alberta legislation violates the charter right of children to keep their parents in the dark about what's going on at school and with their own bodies and so on.

00:18:00.120 And so the Smith government responded and said, well, notwithstanding, you know, the court's interpretation, we're moving ahead with this legislation.

00:18:11.700 Another example in Ontario, and you'll know this, Ezra, the Ford government reduced the number of city council seats on the Toronto City Council from 55, 57 down to 25.

00:18:25.720 you could agree or disagree with that but they went to court and the court ruled that reducing

00:18:31.400 the number of seats on toronto city council violated freedom of expression and violated

00:18:36.480 the right to vote is absolutely insane now that was eventually overturned by the ontario court

00:18:42.140 of appeal but in the interim the ford government said well we're using section 33 to opt out of

00:18:47.180 this court ruling we are moving ahead with reducing city council seats down to 25 so that's how it

00:18:54.320 works and that's the gist of the report is just to explain that it's a valid part of the constitution

00:18:59.540 yeah i mean it's it's so weird that people say it erodes the constitution it undermines the

00:19:04.400 constitution not only is it part of the constitution deliberately so but in fact the founders the

00:19:10.740 sign the original premiers who signed the document back more than 45 years ago it was essential to

00:19:19.400 get their opt-in because the idea of transferring power centuries in the Canadian system and the

00:19:28.140 British system before it, Parliament was supreme. So the idea that no, nine unelected, unaccountable

00:19:35.300 judges will now replace the wisdom of Parliament was shocking. And the only way it was acceptable

00:19:41.580 to so many of these premiers is with this notwithstanding clause of button, sort of like

00:19:46.920 a five-year delay button. It doesn't forever exempt you. It just sort of says, for the next

00:19:51.940 five years, we're going to ignore the judges on this one. And, you know, in five years, let's see

00:19:56.740 how it goes. So it's not surprising that judges would want to remove that. So when you say that

00:20:02.660 the Supreme Court is going to review it, that seems a bit of, I don't know if conflict of

00:20:06.860 interest is the right word, but of course judges don't want that restraint on them.

00:20:12.400 And it would be quite some chutzpah if they actually try and change the Constitution to fit their image of Canada, as opposed to the framers of the Charter themselves.

00:20:25.580 I was at a conference in 2007. It was the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms being added to our Constitution.

00:20:35.520 So a big constitutional law conference, McGill University, Montreal.

00:20:38.940 And they had some of the people that were around in 1982, 35 years later, and many of the speakers said unequivocally that without Section 33, without the Notwithstanding Clause to protect us from juristocracy or judicial tyranny, without that, the charter would not have been added to the Constitution.

00:20:59.340 and it is about protecting democracy because you can get uh unelected unaccountable judges

00:21:07.260 there's been a big problem in in israel as an aside where you have an activist court

00:21:12.540 that starts to review every government decision as to whether the court thinks it's reasonable

00:21:17.240 this is huge overextension there and you know there's a role for the courts but

00:21:22.780 like anything else they can they can go too far and if you have these unelected unaccountable

00:21:28.300 judges you know ruling on whether we have a charter right to bicycle lanes uh you know it's

00:21:35.280 there's got to be a good thing on it so it's it's a good part of the constitution because it um it

00:21:41.460 does prevent that judicial tyranny that might otherwise exist and that's not to say that the

00:21:48.620 use of it is always good i mean you've got uh quebec language laws that uh the supreme court

00:21:55.240 has said that these laws are an unreasonable, unjustified violation of free expression that

00:22:02.420 English language rights, and Quebec has used the notwithstanding clause to opt out of the

00:22:07.280 Supreme Court ruling, that would be an example. I would never suggest that the legislatures are

00:22:11.900 always using it correctly. That's not the point. The point is that it's available for use, so we

00:22:17.540 don't have the tyranny of the judiciary. Yeah, and I haven't looked at this section in a little

00:22:22.040 while but it does have that five-year provision doesn't it so it's not a forever suspension and

00:22:27.620 so in the case of Quebec every five years it has to be reasserted and the fact that pretty much

00:22:34.060 every party or most of the mainstream parties in Quebec support it that is an indication of

00:22:40.440 the political characteristic of the province if both you know if I guess there's three main

00:22:46.440 parties there now if all of them support this and there's no real demand for something different

00:22:51.460 Maybe there is something inherently different in Quebec when it comes to language and culture.

00:22:55.660 And I think that's precisely what the section was made for.

00:22:58.680 There is one remaining premier who was alive in these sessions many years ago.

00:23:04.880 And it won't surprise you that he was a very young premier for him to still be alive and kicking.

00:23:11.040 And it's our friend Brian Peckford, who I know has spoken at Justice Center events.

00:23:16.160 He was one of the, I think he's the only surviving premier from that era.

00:23:19.320 and he's still sharp as a tack and he remembers every iteration of the debates there and he he

00:23:27.740 could tell you adamantly that it wasn't just him but it was essential for basically all the first

00:23:33.200 ministers this thing would never have happened without the notwithstanding clause by this thing

00:23:37.720 i mean the charter of rights yeah that's that's entirely correct it was an integral part of this

00:23:45.160 Now, the other aspect that's interesting is that some of these people that, you know, they wish that Section 33 was not part of the Constitution.

00:23:54.380 They think it should never be used.

00:23:56.420 And they will bang their fist on the table talking about rights and freedoms.

00:24:01.340 And yet we have another part of the Charter, Section 1, that allows governments to trample on our Charter rights and freedoms.

00:24:08.500 And courts can and often do approve of that.

00:24:12.620 And we saw this over and over again.

00:24:13.960 that was horrible during the lockdowns, mandatory vaccination policies, all of these utterly

00:24:18.540 unscientific measures, which the supporters of these measures will never debate publicly.

00:24:26.900 These were, in most cases, the judges upheld them. They disregarded evidence before the court. I can

00:24:33.520 give you specific examples of that. And they said, yes, these lockdowns do violate our

00:24:42.460 freedoms of conscience and religion and association, peaceful assembly, freedom of

00:24:46.860 expression, all of our charter rights and freedoms are being violated, but that's okay because the

00:24:51.540 government has declared that there's this very scary virus and the government has declared

00:24:55.820 that these measures are really effective at saving lives. Therefore, so courts generally,

00:25:03.800 we had a few victories here and there, but by and large, the courts just rubber stamped

00:25:08.060 using Section 1. So if you want to pound your fist on the table about rights and freedoms being

00:25:14.000 violated, then you cannot direct all of your ammunition at Section 33. You also have to direct

00:25:19.540 some of your ammunition at Section 1, which allows judges to trample on rights and freedoms by

00:25:26.880 upholding government measures that do that. Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point. I remember a few

00:25:32.520 decades ago, Professor Ted Morton, he was a professor at the University of Calgary, then he

00:25:37.300 went on to a political career he wrote a book i think he might have coined the term also the court

00:25:43.380 party i occasionally use the phrase the media party these days i say the regime media i mean

00:25:49.400 the same thing by the the media party i mean it's a kind of club where they have similar world

00:25:55.360 worldviews they rebreathe each other's air they give each other awards they they're sort of a

00:26:01.100 clique they're culturally typically from the same places they go to the same schools live in the

00:26:06.940 same neighborhoods. And so although there's not an official party line, there sort of is. And

00:26:12.560 although there's not official party discipline, there sort of is. And you can see that we're

00:26:18.640 sort of around the edges of it. So we see that sometimes. So I love the phrase, the media party.

00:26:23.540 I think the court party is even more pronounced. I think it really is a, I mean, they have their

00:26:32.800 views and if there's a judge they don't who's offside they'll work to get rid of him i'm

00:26:37.460 there was actually one of the very few supreme court judges yeah why don't you tell us a little

00:26:44.140 bit about that there actually was a conservative judge on the supreme court and they removed him

00:26:48.640 yeah it was it was uh justice i don't know if it was nad on or nadau i think it was nad on

00:26:55.360 who was on the federal court of appeal and was from Quebec and was time one of the three Quebec

00:27:05.880 judges on the Supreme Court was retiring and was nominated by Harper and they effectively pushed

00:27:13.100 him off on a technicality. The other judges did not want this conservative-minded judge to join

00:27:22.600 them so there's definitely it's it's not a political party in which you take out a membership

00:27:26.980 and you know pay your ten dollars a year and then go to an annual policy convention and vote for

00:27:32.260 a leader it's not that kind of a political party but there's definitely a court party we see it

00:27:38.060 with a lot of the judgments ruling down where these these judges very obviously have a woke

00:27:43.660 perspective um you have supreme court rulings where they they write in that it's it's it's just

00:27:50.180 a fact that uh that there's more than two sexes you know it's just a fact that mankind controls

00:27:57.000 the weather and we should all be uh terrified of uh of global warming and we should you know choose

00:28:02.740 poverty over prosperity to uh to avoid the climate holocaust blah blah blah judges just buy into this

00:28:09.120 stuff. So there is definitely a court party in Canada. And, you know, it's up to the people to

00:28:20.940 elect freedom-loving elected representatives, federally, provincially, to appoint freedom-loving,

00:28:30.680 freedom-appreciating judges to the courts. I mean, ultimately, it is up to us. And it is

00:28:36.480 indirectly, but ultimately it's within our control to have better appointments to the bench.

00:28:42.580 Yeah. I regard that as one of Stephen Harper's top two missed opportunities as prime minister. One

00:28:48.440 was getting rid of the CBC, privatize it, sell it, shut it down, whatever. Huge missed opportunity.

00:28:54.220 And in the end, it was a big reason he lost so lopsidedly in 2015. And the other was not taking

00:29:01.880 appointments seriously uh basically going with typical party favors and returning you know a

00:29:10.460 judicial appointment being something that you earn by being a loyal partisan as opposed to

00:29:15.020 being an ideological conservative and one of the best things trump has done

00:29:18.920 is to basically delegate delegate the vetting of not just supreme court judges but

00:29:24.600 so many levels of judges to um truly conservative uh legal i don't know if clubs are the word but

00:29:34.980 um organizations like the federalist society who are originalists yeah the federal society is very

00:29:42.300 famous for basically encouraging conservative judges being clubs speakers events and so they

00:29:49.400 about their lists. Harper never did that. He never tried to put conservatives on the bench,

00:29:54.520 and his justice minister certainly didn't. Huge missed opportunity. If you're the PM

00:29:58.700 for around nine, 10 years, whatever it was, you had so many opportunities to put principled people

00:30:08.000 in the system, and he just didn't. And I regret that very much. And one of the things that happens

00:30:16.800 under the court party is the judges start to regard themselves. And then those who suck up 0.99

00:30:22.120 to the judges, journalists in particular, lawyers in particular, sort of fall into this deep

00:30:28.380 admiration and bending the knee and treating them like revered high priests. I mean, the chief

00:30:35.400 judges of our Supreme Court right now actually put a bust of himself in the, like, it's just

00:30:42.720 the chutzpah, the self-regard of these folks. And what I'm glad in recent years is that the

00:30:48.160 National Post, through a journalist named Jamie Sarkonic, and our own Rebel News,

00:30:53.380 Sheila Gunn-Reed has sort of a judicial watch, is starting to name and shame these judges because

00:30:58.880 they're extremely political, they're very partisan, but God forbid you criticize them. 1.00

00:31:05.580 They want the political power without the political accountability. And I think it starts

00:31:09.400 by removing this aura of holiness and high priests who can never get it wrong.

00:31:15.640 I prefer the American system where people speak plainly about judges

00:31:19.560 and realize they're partisan or ideological,

00:31:22.240 and they at least have honest debates about it.

00:31:25.040 Here in Canada, we pretend that our judges are above criticism

00:31:28.860 and pretend that they're neutral. They are not.

00:31:31.460 And we pretend that they're not political, and that's simply false.

00:31:34.380 you cannot help but be influenced by your own worldview right if if you ezra or if i john was

00:31:44.420 appointed to a court you know of course our overall outlook on life do you do you trust

00:31:52.320 government do you believe that government is a great solution for most problems uh you know do

00:31:57.460 you believe in uh woke progressive values or do you believe more in in traditional conservative

00:32:02.720 values, that necessarily is going to influence how we render our decisions, especially on

00:32:10.300 constitutional rights and freedoms. I mean, maybe it doesn't matter that much if we're deciding on

00:32:13.860 a contract dispute, two companies are suing each other. Okay, maybe our worldview is not going to

00:32:19.340 have a huge impact on that. But if there's a charter case before us with the involving freedom

00:32:28.120 of expression, association, conscience, religion, what have you, of course, our rulings are going

00:32:33.820 to be influenced by our worldview, our belief system, right? And that holds true. You and I

00:32:39.860 are maybe not good examples. Neither of us will ever be appointed to any court. But

00:32:43.260 the point is, when the politicians appoint judges, those judges do have a worldview. And that does

00:32:53.740 impact how they rule and whether they are a friend of the free society that's going to

00:32:59.140 uphold our rights and freedoms, or whether they're an enemy of the free society that

00:33:04.280 is going to rubber stamp government laws and policies that trample on our rights and freedoms.

00:33:10.220 John, I'm so glad you guys have published it.

00:33:12.060 It's called Saving Canada from Juristocracy, How the Charter's Not Withstanding Clause

00:33:20.800 Protects Democracy.

00:33:21.540 I think the court party sort of rolls off the tongue a little bit smoother than

00:33:25.520 Juristocracy, but I think it's talking about the same thing

00:33:28.020 It's a new report written by Nigel Hannaford and available at the Justice Center's website

00:33:33.720 John, great to see you. Keep up the fight

00:33:35.240 Thanks for having me on your show, Ezra

00:33:37.960 Our pleasure. The website is jccf.ca

00:33:42.200 Stay with us. More ahead

00:33:52.400 Hey, welcome back. Your letters to me. Today, the letters are about Orange Shirt Day.

00:33:58.080 Stark says, so they're digging into rebel news more than they dug into the claims of child graves.

00:34:02.980 Imagine if they put half their outrage into actually finding evidence. You know, I am open

00:34:08.300 to new facts all the time. I think that's how you should be. You should change your worldview. You

00:34:15.000 should change your theory based on observation. You don't want to just dismiss anything that is

00:34:20.520 contrary to your own beliefs. So I am open to finding horrifying evidence that there was a mass

00:34:27.860 grave, to quote Jagmeet Singh. I'm open to that. But the fact that the authorities refuse to dig

00:34:35.360 and refuse to allow others to dig in a forensic, careful way sort of gives the game away, especially

00:34:41.000 since they were given millions of dollars to do it. I think it's precisely because of the reason

00:34:45.660 I just outlined. They don't want the facts to get in the way of their belief system, which is that

00:34:51.440 Canada is a genocidal regime. Sir John A. Macdonald was a Hitler of his time. I know that sounds

00:34:56.600 absurd to say, but everyone from our former Supreme Court Justice on down has claimed that

00:35:01.200 Canada is a genocidal country. It's absolutely false. And people who want to gloss that over

00:35:07.760 and actually criminalize dissent, well, frankly, that's only going to make people more curious,

00:35:12.960 I think. Curtis King says the Department of Canadian Heritage needs to be booted out. My

00:35:18.280 tax dollars at work again. Well, the Canadian Heritage, they really spend so much time on

00:35:24.680 censoring. You know, I'm not sure if we need a Department of Heritage. Heritage is something

00:35:29.660 that everyone can participate in. It's a larger cultural experience. It doesn't require on

00:35:35.200 government funding. But it's not a surprise to me that something called the Department of Heritage

00:35:41.080 would very much be in charge of censorship because they're not in charge. They don't

00:35:45.660 believe in a common history. They don't believe in a common worldview or identity for Canada.

00:35:50.900 They believe in marginalizing and attacking those who are skeptics, like Rebel News.

00:35:57.020 TCZ says, I consider Reconciliation Day as the day that the Indigenous people should apologize

00:36:02.120 to the rest of Canada for the lies they are telling. I wouldn't put this on most Indigenous

00:36:07.080 people. I would put this on the activist class. Francis Whitteson used to use the phrase

00:36:12.460 the Indian industry or the indigenous industry. Maybe it was Dr. Tom Flanagan who

00:36:16.940 first popularized that. Many of them are white liberals. Many of them are what have sometimes

00:36:23.180 been called pretendians, people claiming to be indigenous but not actually. That's one of the 1.00

00:36:28.460 incentives in the system that rewards you, including financially, based on race. It reminds

00:36:33.140 me a little bit about that professor at Cambridge who was celebrated not for his scholarship but

00:36:37.820 for being the youngest black professor at Cambridge. Well you've just said what you value about him

00:36:42.500 and it's not his brains. I'll tell you one thing though there's no shortage in demand for grievance

00:36:47.500 politics. I see that the liberals have committed themselves to reparations not to indigenous people

00:36:52.960 but to black Canadians even though that historically speaking there were very few

00:36:57.940 Blacks in Canada and we were the destination of the Underground Railway. There's a lot of race

00:37:03.420 politics in Canada. A lot of it is sort of us retelling the American story of Black Lives

00:37:09.120 Matter, trying to Canadianize it. But I really think that the government is a factor keeping us

00:37:13.700 apart. I wish we could get back to a race-blind society. I don't know if we've ever had one, 0.81

00:37:18.880 but we're certainly not in that direction under Mark Carney. Those are my thoughts until tomorrow

00:37:24.680 on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters

00:37:26.800 to you at home, good night

00:37:28.420 and keep fighting for freedom.

Rebel News Podcast - September 14, 2026

EZRA LEVANT ｜ U.S. AI labs want to “pace the frontier,” citing safety fears. The fine print tells a different story.

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