Rebel News Podcast - NEW! StopDeplatforming.com： Fight for free speech

00:00:00.000 Hello, my friends. Today, I, with the passage of a few days' time,

00:00:06.020 think about and describe and explain my plan to fight against de-platforming. I think I've got

00:00:12.360 the idea. I think I've got the idea. It's a legal idea, and it's to sue the bullies

00:00:18.500 who bullied the theater owner to de-platform us. There's an old tort called inducement to

00:00:25.200 breach a contract. I'll explain it in this. I'm not going to get too legalistic. Don't worry. I

00:00:30.300 won't be dropping a lot of fancy pants in law. I'll read a little explanation of a case that's

00:00:35.280 very interesting, where this law came from about 150 years ago. And I'll tell you my plans to apply

00:00:42.940 the law today. Anyways, I hope you like it. Can I encourage you to become a premium subscriber

00:00:47.780 of The Rebel? Just go to premium.rebelnews.com. It's $8 a month. You get all the

00:00:55.160 video versions of these podcasts, plus Sheila Gunn-Reed's show and David Menzies' show.

00:00:59.640 And you help us fight the good fight. All right, here's the podcast.

00:01:16.260 Tonight, I'm officially launching my new project,

00:01:21.480 StopDeplatforming.com. It's time to fight back for free speech. It's October 14th,

00:01:28.020 and this is The Ezra Levant Show.

00:01:31.580 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?

00:01:35.300 There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.

00:01:39.360 The only thing I have to say to the government of a wire publisher is because it's my bloody right

00:01:44.540 to do so.

00:01:50.480 Last week started with a great win for media freedom. Justin Trudeau's hand-picked election

00:01:55.280 debates commission in collusion with the government-funded parliamentary press gallery

00:01:59.600 had rejected the accreditation requests of two rebel journalists, Kean Bextie and David Menzies,

00:02:05.400 and our friend Andrew Lawton from True North. They rejected us at the last possible moment on the

00:02:10.200 Friday. And of course, the debate was on Monday. So we went to court on Monday morning to seek an

00:02:16.460 emergency injunction. Trudeau sent five government lawyers to oppose our emergency application.

00:02:23.460 But miracle of miracles, we won. Justice Russell Zinn issued a court order directing Trudeau's staff

00:02:29.420 to accredit the three journalists. And boy, did they ever do a great job. You could see the

00:02:35.660 politicians of every party hadn't faced such tough questions on the campaign trail in a long

00:02:40.700 time. But the meanest reaction was from rival journalists, especially from Trudeau's CBC

00:02:47.800 state broadcaster. They hated everything about Kean and David and Andrew being there. They hated the

00:02:54.880 fact that conservative-leaning journalists even exist, that they were allowed into this debate,

00:03:00.500 that they were allowed to ask questions.

00:03:02.160 And that every network in the country that was running the debates live actually broadcast the

00:03:08.720 questions. Boy, those rival journalists were steaming mad now. I don't care if they're mad at

00:03:13.260 us. Frankly, we're frequently mad at them. It's your civil right to be mad at journalists or politicians.

00:03:18.680 I recommend it, in fact. And you can ignore journalists you don't like, or you can challenge

00:03:23.980 them or rebut them or do a better job than them, whatever. Not quite, because you can't quite

00:03:29.320 ignore the CBC stuff to pay for it out of your taxes, I guess. And no, the problem wasn't that

00:03:35.060 our rivals have a rivalry with us. It's that without the court order, we wouldn't have even

00:03:40.340 been allowed into the process, not even allowed into the building. As I showed you last week,

00:03:46.260 Trudeau's commission accredited foreigners, including from the state broadcaster of the OPEC

00:03:51.160 dictatorship, Al Jazeera. So they let anyone in except us. They didn't want to even let us share a

00:03:56.940 national platform with them. That word platform. A platform is what it sounds like. It could be a

00:04:02.760 stage, for example. It could also be a website. Facebook, Twitter, those are called platforms.

00:04:08.060 The difference between a platform and a publisher is that a platform is just a neutral canvas upon

00:04:13.680 which anyone can paint anything. It's like a bulletin board. You can tack a notice to it.

00:04:19.120 There's really no editor. A publisher, as opposed to a platform, a publisher creates or edits or

00:04:26.360 curates content, takes a point of view, chooses, makes decisions about what's good and what's bad.

00:04:31.680 So a newspaper is a publisher. A payphone is a platform. It doesn't determine what you can say

00:04:37.920 or not into the phone. It's neutral. That's sort of obvious, but deplatforming is the tactic

00:04:43.180 of the new authoritarian left to ban you from even once neutral places where you used to have the right

00:04:49.460 to go. You can't really expect a local newspaper to run your letter to the editor if they don't want

00:04:54.680 to. I mean, they might have a journalistic or a legal reason why they should, but at the end of

00:04:59.080 the day, it's a private publication that gets to choose what they put in it. By contrast, you can

00:05:03.800 assume that you're allowed to say whatever you like when you pick up a phone at a phone booth.

00:05:09.080 But deplatforming is the radical idea that, no, you can't. Now, nothing is neutral. Nothing is public.

00:05:15.360 Everything can be blocked or banned if you don't think correctly. It's radical in itself, and it's

00:05:19.440 corrosive, and then it's a substitute for the normal way. We have disagreed with each other

00:05:23.460 in the past. No need to debate anyone on a platform like before. Now, just remove the platform

00:05:29.420 from them, and they're gone. I know that there was an all-candidates debate recently in the election,

00:05:34.980 but the PPC candidate was banned from participating because the mosque that was hosting the debate said

00:05:41.440 the party was beyond the pale, beyond even debating. What's the purpose of a debate if not

00:05:47.560 to debate, though? Why bother having a debate if you've already decided without a debate by ruling

00:05:52.320 one party out? Now, I note that the PPC candidate in question is Muslim himself, our friend Salim

00:05:57.980 Mansour. That's deplatforming. It's un-Canadian, by the way. I'm not saying every single debate forum

00:06:04.640 has to have every single candidate on it. Sometimes you have 20 people running for mayor, for example,

00:06:08.960 but you can see the trend. And now that the leaders' debates are over, I'm certain that we will go right

00:06:13.660 back to being deplatformed by our fellow journalists and by all the parties. I should point out it was at an

00:06:20.120 Andrew Scheer event, not a liberal event that David Menzies was handcuffed. I see the gray area with the mosque 1.00

00:06:25.940 forum. I mean, it was their own mosque, I guess. I don't see the gray area with a national debate run by the 0.80

00:06:33.260 government. But the deplatforming that happened to me on Thursday at Edmonton's Princess Theatre was the clearest of all

00:06:40.440 cases. There wasn't any wiggle room there, no gray area there. I had a contract with the theatre. It was a done deal. I had paid

00:06:47.440 the full fee in advance. The analogy here isn't even a bulletin board or some public park. It was a

00:06:53.460 contract for money between me and the theatre owner. We had done it before with great success a couple of

00:06:59.860 years ago. I know the owner. He liked doing business with us. So we had a contract. That's not us just

00:07:04.340 hopping up in a town square on a fruit box and yapping. That's a contract. And yet he breached the

00:07:10.940 contract. I don't propose to rehearse how it all went down. I told some of the story last week on YouTube.

00:07:15.320 Basically, the owner, who himself is an immigrant to Canada from India, his name is Mike Brar. He told

00:07:22.220 me he was starting to get threats and pressure from NDP activists in Edmonton, and not just from

00:07:25.900 nobodies. The former NDP MLA, Jessica Littlewood, was pressuring the theatre to cancel us and said no

00:07:31.380 one should rent to us. There was an activist from Progress Alberta, Rachel Notley's pressure group,

00:07:36.860 doing the same thing. These are official people with high stations in public life. There's a professor

00:07:41.700 that was doing the same thing. There was a hairdresser. A whole whack of people from every

00:07:46.340 walk of life were pressuring this poor businessman. I talked with him on the phone, and he said he was

00:07:50.780 getting so many hostile phone calls, he couldn't sleep at night. He was so terrified, worried, scared.

00:07:57.300 So we cancelled him. By cancelled, I mean he breached his contract to me. He kept the doors locked.

00:08:03.280 I told him he didn't need to worry. We hired a private security team to make sure

00:08:06.860 no ruffians came, and no ruffians did come. There was all those really tough Antifa losers 0.98

00:08:12.560 who were really butch online. None of them bothered to show up. Just one crank, 0.98

00:08:16.660 known around Edmonton as Rickshaw Dave, really the village idiot. 200 supporters came, and one kook. 1.00

00:08:21.640 There literally was nothing to be afraid of. And even if there was, I had worked with police,

00:08:26.280 and they had a big presence right there. So I wasn't just deplatformed as in denied a platform in the

00:08:32.200 first place. I mean, I respect Mike Baragher's right to have said to me in the first place,

00:08:36.720 we don't want to rent to you to begin with. I think I would respect that. At least I'm

00:08:41.060 not sure if that violates my civil rights in some way. I'd have to think about it more. But

00:08:45.100 I guess had he said that at the beginning, at least I wouldn't have spent time and money

00:08:50.320 advertising and promoting that venue and buying a plane ticket there and getting all my friends to

00:08:54.480 show up there. Had he just said no in the first place, but he didn't say no. He said yes.

00:08:58.880 And I paid him a lot of money. And we even had a discussion about freedom of speech,

00:09:02.680 and he agreed to protect mine. But he didn't. He breached his contract to me,

00:09:07.360 so I have a legal remedy against him. I can sue him for any damages, but I can also sue

00:09:11.600 the people who pressured him to break his contract. I found this summary of the law on the website of

00:09:18.600 a Canadian law firm called Lawson Lundell out of BC. It's sort of a, you know, law for beginners

00:09:24.420 kind of publication. Let me quote it to you, okay? I think it's very good.

00:09:29.900 Although the tort of inducing breach of contract is rooted in medieval law of master and servant,

00:09:36.340 the modern version stems from the 1853 House of Lords case, Lumley v. Guy. In Lumley,

00:09:43.440 the plaintiff had a contract with an opera singer, Miss Wagner, to sing exclusively at his theater.

00:09:49.060 The defendant, who wanted to showcase Miss Wagner's talents at his own theater,

00:09:52.240 and for his own benefit, persuaded Miss Wagner to break her contract with the plaintiff

00:09:56.600 and sing exclusively for him. The plaintiff took action against the defendant,

00:10:01.400 and although the defendant was not a party to the contract, he was found liable.

00:10:07.100 That's what inducing a breach of contract is usually about. Someone tries to steal someone away.

00:10:14.560 A professional athlete, a top executive, a brilliant scientist, a record label stealing a

00:10:18.920 musician away from a rival record label. But it absolutely would apply to my case, too,

00:10:22.780 even though it's not like the bullies who bullied Mike Brar got any economic benefit out of it.

00:10:27.540 They didn't steal the theater away for their own show, for example.

00:10:33.580 They were just being malicious. In my mind, that actually makes it worse. They were just being

00:10:37.600 purely destructive. It's not like they were even trying to do something better than me. They were

00:10:41.200 just trying to destroy my event by bullying my business partner, Mr. Brar.

00:10:45.100 That's what he was. That's what the theater was. So I met with our Edmonton lawyers, and we came up

00:10:50.620 with a plan. We're just going to sue everyone, everyone who was dumb enough to reveal themselves as a 1.00

00:10:56.920 bully, bullying Mike Brar to breach the contract. So those who were the most cowardly, who made 0.99

00:11:02.560 anonymous threats to Mike Brar, the scarum, I'll probably never catch them, but Jessica Littlewood,

00:11:07.560 Professor Lavelle, all the other people who worked for Notley, you bet I got their names,

00:11:12.840 because they're under some weird impression that they can harm businesses like ours and like Mike

00:11:17.700 Brar's just because they're more noble in their minds. But they're not more noble. It's not noble 0.99

00:11:22.280 to stop a book launch. That's like a form of book burning, right? It's really gross. And it did dawn

00:11:28.660 on me that Mike Brar is a minority immigrant. I'm Jewish, and my book is being metaphorically burned.

00:11:33.760 I think that's not a good look on the NDB. If a judge would be appalled by one opera company

00:11:39.780 stealing a singer from another opera company for profit, I can only imagine that a judge would be

00:11:45.220 appalled by someone wrecking a book launch just out of censorship and spite. That's so contrary to

00:11:51.420 the public interest, it hardly needs to be argued. But that is my plan. Ironically, the fact that I had

00:11:56.660 a platform and it was taken away is precisely what gives me the legal standing to sue all of these

00:12:01.600 harassers for the damages they cause. And I plan to sue every single one because I truly believe it's just

00:12:06.460 a small number of bullies who have never been stood up to before, ever. I doubt there are 50 people in

00:12:11.740 all of Edmonton, a city of a million, who behave this way. 50 people are enough, though, to make a

00:12:16.380 city of a million unfree, at least when it comes to books or political events. That's a kind of tyranny.

00:12:22.780 I'm not about to be tyrannized or bullied. They need to be taught what they did was wrong and that they

00:12:27.980 can't do it with impunity. I believe that by suing these people, 10, 20, 50 of them, whatever,

00:12:32.940 they'll get a real education about right and wrong that they never got from their mama.

00:12:37.420 I believe they won't be so quick to deplatform anyone again, certainly not me. And I believe

00:12:42.620 that it will serve as a larger deterrent to this awful authoritarian practice of deplatforming.

00:12:47.500 I don't think this approach could work, say, for Salim Mansour in that mosque because

00:12:52.780 he didn't have a contract with them that was breached. But it would sure work with someone who tried

00:12:57.500 to have a conference and had a contract, but bullies had that conference canceled. Well,

00:13:03.580 not if they just tried, if the conference was actually canceled. So I'm excited about this.

00:13:10.220 It was a bad thing that was done to me, but it's a great way to fight back by using the law. It's a

00:13:17.260 teachable moment and it's a moment of counter-revolution. For a decade, we've seen the

00:13:21.020 speedy infringement of our freedom of speech. I think this is a way to fight back.

00:13:24.940 I'm setting up a website at StopDeplatforming.com. It's just very basic for now. But over the weeks

00:13:32.460 and months ahead, you'll see more. And it's where we'll post all of our news about the lawsuit. And

00:13:37.580 of course, we'll post the lawsuit itself. And it won't surprise you to hear, we need your help to

00:13:42.940 pay for this. I don't think we'll win much in the lawsuit in terms of damages. It'll surely cost us

00:13:48.380 many times that in terms of legal fees. But this isn't about money. It's about stopping the bullies

00:13:53.100 one at a time or 50 at a time and standing up for platforms for everyone, even people with whom we

00:13:59.500 disagree. If you can help chip in, please do at StopDeplatforming.com. And if you hear of anyone

00:14:05.900 else who has a contract with a restaurant or a bar or a theater or a convention center,

00:14:11.660 and that contract was breached because bullies bullied a venue owner, let me know.

00:14:16.220 I'd love to see lawsuits like this everywhere. Stay with us for more.

00:14:34.140 Welcome back. Well, things are exciting up here in Canada. We're less than two weeks away

00:14:38.940 to the federal election. Who knows how it's going to go? I have credible sources,

00:14:44.300 friends with access to party polling who say it could go a liberal win. Some people say it will go

00:14:51.980 a conservative win. Some people say it'll be a coalition. I have no idea how it's going to end

00:14:57.340 up. But we're not the only people in the world with politics. Our friends in the United States do

00:15:00.940 because, of course, their 2020 election campaign is in full tilt. President Trump went to Minnesota,

00:15:08.380 home of, amongst others, Ilhan Omar, for a big old rally. Huge turnout. But it so often happens

00:15:14.940 when the local mayor and constabulary are Democrats. Well, they let Antifa rioters have their way.

00:15:21.900 Check out this shocking footage. I don't see a cop in sight here. Just wrecking stuff, burning stuff,

00:15:29.420 assaulting people. This is not just condoned. This is positively the street teams. There's the

00:15:38.780 hammer and sickle there. Yeah, that's what it was like in Minnesota. Joining us now to talk about

00:15:45.100 the excitement in Minnesota, but also what's going on in Congress with the impeachment drive,

00:15:51.340 is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor at large at Breitbart.com. Joel, great to see you.

00:15:55.580 Great to see you, too. You know, I remember when Donald Trump had a few election rallies. I think

00:16:02.540 he had a big one in Chicago. I'm thinking back to the year 2016, if I'm remembering my cities right.

00:16:09.500 And the whole place devolved into a massive riot. Same thing when he went to California.

00:16:16.300 When the Democrats control the police, they like riots, don't they?

00:16:20.060 Well, there are some more interesting details. Your memory is pretty good. What happened in Chicago

00:16:27.820 was that left wing protesters crashed the venue for the rally and infiltrated the stadium where

00:16:35.820 it was supposed to happen. And so the rally had to be called off because of poor security by local

00:16:44.380 police. And they blamed Trump. The local authorities blamed Trump, saying it was his fault that all

00:16:51.900 these rioters had shown up. And to their great discredit, some of his Republican rivals also said

00:16:58.860 that Trump had caused this. It was really a turning point because I think there are some conservatives

00:17:04.060 who were on the fence about Trump and might have preferred Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, who saw that

00:17:09.980 Trump's rivals were basically trashing free speech and said, you know what? They've had it with

00:17:15.900 these other conservative rivals. They're sticking with Trump. It was really an important watershed

00:17:20.300 moment in the internal debate among conservatives in the United States. A couple of months later,

00:17:25.740 Trump came to California before the California primary, which was supposed to be the scene of the

00:17:30.700 final battle between Trump and Ted Cruz. Although Ted Cruz lost Indiana a week or two before, which meant

00:17:36.460 that he left the race. So California was not as competitive as it ought to have been or could

00:17:41.660 have been. But Trump came to California anyway, and he had a large rally in San Jose. And I was there,

00:17:46.460 actually. I covered the rally. And the police decided not to hang around the venue itself. They set up

00:17:54.860 a perimeter around the venue. What they allowed to happen by doing so was they allowed rioters,

00:18:01.500 anti-Trump rioters to harass and attack, physically attack Trump supporters as they were leaving the

00:18:09.100 venue. I personally witnessed the anti-Trump rioters burning an American flag and shouting radical slogans

00:18:15.500 and things like that. Other people standing at other parts of the complex witnessed Trump supporters

00:18:23.340 being hit with bottles, being chased. People in the parking lot were chased. Their cars were attacked.

00:18:29.180 Some of this happened in full view of the media. There was a woman in a Trump football jersey who

00:18:34.300 was pelted with eggs in front of television cameras. And so this was something the mainstream

00:18:38.860 media couldn't ignore because they were filming it. And the mayor, Sam Liccardo, who's a bit of a failure

00:18:45.180 because San Jose has a massive pension problem and he couldn't even manage a flood. One of the rivers

00:18:51.580 near his city basically overflowed its banks a few months later and caused toxic flooding in the city.

00:18:57.420 And he did not provide adequate warning to residents. So he's not a very good mayor,

00:19:00.780 although being a Democrat, he got elected anyway. But Mayor Sam Liccardo blamed Trump

00:19:06.060 for the riot instead of taking responsibility for the poor deployment of his police force,

00:19:12.140 which had been told to stand back from the rioters. So we are now back in that space.

00:19:17.420 Minneapolis is run by a guy named Jacob Frye, who's a first term left wing mayor. And he declared

00:19:23.580 Thursday love Trump's hate day. He opposed Trump having a rally in Minneapolis and initially the

00:19:30.060 target center, which is the venue Trump was going to have the rally in, they wanted to charge Trump

00:19:34.860 more than half a million dollars for additional security. Trump pointed out that Obama had never

00:19:39.740 had to have that kind of security when he was president. And eventually they backed down.

00:19:43.740 But what happened after the rally, the rally itself was very peaceful and law enforcement responded

00:19:48.220 very quickly to protesters in the arena and that sort of thing. What happened afterwards was several

00:19:53.020 hundred Antifa protesters descended and began attacking Trump supporters, almost exactly like

00:19:58.700 San Jose. They would surround one or two people and assault them, attack them, push them, steal their

00:20:03.660 hats, throw objects at them. When they had several dozen hats, they put them in a pile and they burned

00:20:09.260 them. They also removed police barricades as riot police basically stood by. Then riot police used

00:20:15.420 chemical irritants to try to disperse the crowd. Eventually it did disperse. But the mayor didn't

00:20:21.420 protect the people of his city. And judging from reports on social media, if the weather had been

00:20:27.020 a little better because it was raining, apparently, more chaos would have ensued because you would have

00:20:31.580 had more rioters. That's just unacceptable. And it's unfortunate that it happened, but also a sign of

00:20:38.780 how little the left cares for free speech. While that was going on, Beto O'Rourke at an LGBTQ forum

00:20:44.860 hosted by CNN here in Los Angeles was talking about how he wanted to remove the tax-exempt status

00:20:50.460 of religious organizations and institutions that didn't allow same-sex marriage, basically declaring

00:20:55.500 war on every church, mosque and synagogue and temple in this country. Because once you remove

00:21:01.260 their tax-exempt status, people can't contribute to those religious institutions without getting

00:21:06.300 the tax write-off for doing so, which is part of the system we have here, which means that you're

00:21:10.700 effectively going to be bankrupting a lot of these churches and synagogues and so forth.

00:21:14.460 So Beto O'Rourke and the Democrats are now attacking the First Amendment, not just in terms

00:21:18.940 of freedom of speech, but also in terms of freedom of religion. And Joe Biden is complaining that the

00:21:24.060 New York Times and other outlets are publishing anti-Biden op-eds, like the one from Breitbart's

00:21:29.260 own Peter Schweitzer, who was the initial reporter who did the digging on Biden's Ukrainian connections.

00:21:34.380 They're mad that the New York Times published an op-ed by Schweitzer, which didn't just attack Biden,

00:21:38.700 also attack Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for his wife's ties to Chinese

00:21:44.060 business interests. And Schweitzer basically said, we have a corrupt system in Washington that both

00:21:48.380 parties take advantage of, and we need to do something about that. Biden objected to that,

00:21:52.220 saying the New York Times was siding against him and shouldn't print this sort of thing.

00:21:56.380 So they're now attacking the First Amendment right to press freedom as well. So Democrats basically are

00:22:00.460 coming for whatever freedoms you have.

00:22:01.820 Well, you know, at least you have the First Amendment to defend yourself with until it's

00:22:08.380 gone. Here in Canada, we lack it. And it's funny because just in recent days, we've had book events

00:22:15.740 deplatformed. We had the Federal Debate Commission try and ban us. We had a federal court order us in. So

00:22:23.900 hold the line in the first ditch there, Joel, because it's easier to fight in the first ditch than in the

00:22:29.500 last ditch. If your First Amendment is gone, you will lose most of these fights as we have up here.

00:22:35.580 Well, many of us believe we have a First Amendment because we have a Second Amendment. I mean,

00:22:39.900 that's very important to the American way of thinking about freedom. Because you have an armed

00:22:44.140 citizenry, there's a limit to what the government can do. Now, if Beto O'Rourke tries to close the

00:22:49.180 churches down by going after their tax-exempt status unless they perform same-sex marriages,

00:22:54.620 he'll run into opposition in the courts. But there are a lot of judges Obama put on there,

00:22:59.420 and there are a lot of judges that a future Democratic will put on there who will not see

00:23:02.860 the First Amendment the same way. Right now, in fact, the Supreme Court is considering whether the term

00:23:08.380 sex in the law banning discrimination on the basis of sex also applies to transgender people. If you are

00:23:15.660 a male and decide to be a female, are you now protected by sexual discrimination laws that were 0.95

00:23:21.020 passed to protect women from discrimination? And the court is trying to figure that out. 0.69

00:23:27.020 If you can allow the courts to do that, well, perhaps Beto O'Rourke has a point. Perhaps you

00:23:32.540 can't discriminate against same-sex couples at the altar in your church or at your synagogue or in your

00:23:39.500 mosque or whatever. So we don't know where this is going, and it's a reminder to Americans of how

00:23:44.060 important this next election is because really everything is on the table.

00:23:47.340 Yeah, that's amazing. And Trump, for his flaws, a counterweight is his tremendous strength

00:23:56.380 with the help of the Senate in approving and, what's the phrase, affirming and voting for

00:24:06.460 so many judges who are truly conservative in nature. Would you agree with me that Trump has not only

00:24:13.340 affirmed a great number of judges, but they are ideologically strong?

00:24:18.540 Well, it's a really interesting story, and I'll give you the short version of it. Democrats grew

00:24:22.620 frustrated with Republican opposition in the Senate to some of their radical judges. So they changed the

00:24:28.380 rules of the Senate so that you only needed a simple majority to confirm federal judges. They did not

00:24:35.020 expect to lose the 2016 elections. When they did, and you suddenly had a Republican president, the

00:24:39.660 Republicans said, thank you very much. We are now going to take advantage of that rule change that

00:24:43.740 you implemented, and we're going to pass as many judges as we possibly can. And that's what Trump

00:24:48.060 has done. I think he's now confirmed over 180 federal judges. So he's really remaking the federal

00:24:54.060 judiciary. Now Democrats, in response, are talking about packing the courts. They want to change the

00:24:58.940 structure of the courts because there are too many judges who have views with which Democrats disagree.

00:25:04.860 What are those views? Well, the list of judges that was prepared for Trump by a conservative

00:25:09.580 organization called the Federalist Society includes people who commit to interpret the Constitution and

00:25:14.620 the law as written. They're not going to say you can't have liberal laws, but they are going to say

00:25:20.380 you have to pass them through the legislature. You can't just create those laws from the bench. And

00:25:24.940 that's essentially the commitment that conservative judges are making. And those are the judges Trump is

00:25:31.340 appointing. So it's not that Trump is ruling out same-sex marriage or any of this stuff. He's

00:25:35.420 just saying if you want to do that, you've got to do it through the legislature and not through the

00:25:38.300 courts. And the left doesn't like that because they fear the public is not on their side and they

00:25:42.860 want to put as many elite lawyers on the bench as possible because they tend to have left-wing opinions.

00:25:48.460 So that's why Trump has succeeded. And that Federalist Society is really interesting. I've been a

00:25:55.100 member of the Federalist Society and Trump basically did a deal with them, you know, the consummate dealmaker.

00:25:59.580 He basically said in 2016 in the primary when there was some conservative misgiving about Trump,

00:26:04.300 he said, look, I'll do a deal with you. Conservatives, I know you know that I'm a

00:26:08.220 former Democrat and I've had liberal social views. You know what? I'm going to give you,

00:26:12.380 essentially, control over my list of judges. You guys come up with the list and I will nominate

00:26:16.700 people from your list. And he has followed through on that deal, which is one of the reasons that

00:26:20.300 conservatives are so happy with President Trump. He has made that deal, kept that deal, and Democrats

00:26:26.460 are now trying to replicate it on their side by coming up with lists of liberal judges who would

00:26:30.700 be appointed to the courts in the event a Democrat wins and the Democrats take control of the Senate.

00:26:34.940 So that's the story of how we got to where we are. But the Democrats, including major presidential

00:26:40.140 candidates like Pete Buttigieg and others, they're saying they want to expand the number of Supreme

00:26:44.060 Court justices from nine to as many as 15. And they want to allow those judges to choose their own

00:26:51.180 replacements. They want to take the choice of judicial appointments away from the legislature

00:26:57.260 and give it to the courts themselves, which is how judges are chosen in some countries. And it has

00:27:01.980 resulted in runaway power for the courts unchecked by the Democratic majority. So that's what Democrats

00:27:10.140 want to do. And they hope it will create a liberal or left wing, really not liberal, left wing judiciary.

00:27:16.540 And, you know, we'll see. It's all coming down to 2020. Wow. Well, I got one last question for you.

00:27:23.420 I've learned so much from what you've just said here. And in Canada, we don't vet our judges in public.

00:27:32.700 It's all secretive. It's it's very undemocratic. And in Canada, we have a misplaced submission and

00:27:41.740 subservience to our judges. In America, judges, everyone knows judges are have a political nature.

00:27:48.620 So they bring to it a political accountability, political scrutiny. In Canada, our judges are even

00:27:54.620 more political than yours. But there's this aura around them that they are high priests who cannot

00:27:59.500 be questioned. I think it's a great flaw, not just in our Constitution, but in our media culture.

00:28:05.100 That's a branch of government, the judiciary, but we don't hold it to any account. And that's,

00:28:09.500 I think, a weakness of Canada. I want to shift back to the riots for a moment, if I may, because

00:28:18.460 I have a theory about Antifa, Black Bloc, and why George Soros, in the days and weeks after Trump's 0.81

00:28:25.740 win in 2016, publicly committed tens, I think it was even over $100 million to street activism.

00:28:34.060 And I think it's this, to associate the word Trump with controversy, chaos, and danger.

00:28:45.020 If you support Trump, not only will you personally be at risk if you wear a red Make America Great

00:28:50.460 Again hat, if you go to a Trump rally, not only will you personally be at risk, but wherever Trump

00:28:56.940 goes, there's a riot, there's someone being punched, there's some car burning, that it's to create a sense

00:29:02.940 of crisis in general, but crisis and controversy attached to Trump itself. And that is a psychological,

00:29:10.940 a mass psychology tactic from the left. That's my theory. Maybe that's, maybe that's obvious.

00:29:16.060 Well, it's not even a theory. You're 100% correct. And in fact, it predates the 2016 election. Or it

00:29:23.340 happened during the election. It predates election day. But that's specifically what the Democrats did.

00:29:29.660 And James O'Keefe, the conservative filmmaker, exposed it because he got several high-level

00:29:34.860 Democratic operatives on tape saying that that was their goal. They would infiltrate activists into

00:29:40.460 Trump rallies and other rallies, not just Trump, other Republican events. And they would instigate

00:29:45.660 fights. And they would have someone there to record on video, then they'd make sure the video

00:29:50.700 made its way to the mainstream media. And the idea was to create a sense, in their words, of anarchy

00:29:56.700 around anything happening with Trump and the Republicans. So that when people thought of Trump,

00:30:01.420 they thought of instability, danger, chaos, exactly as you said. That was the plan. They have a term

00:30:07.180 for it. They called it bird-dogging. And that's what they did. And that's what they continue to do.

00:30:13.740 The problem for them is that all the Trump supporters are onto what they're doing. And

00:30:19.340 Trump is also very good at setting the stage. When you've got a president who can command the audience,

00:30:25.180 he does. He's very good at setting things up. And he set it up in Minneapolis very well as a battle

00:30:31.020 over free speech. You're either going to let us have free speech, we can come together and express

00:30:36.700 ourselves, or you're not. And it's clear that even though Minneapolis reluctantly agreed to allow

00:30:42.620 this rally to happen, they did not protect the people who attended it. And they allowed these

00:30:47.180 thugs to attack them. Now, people may be reluctant to go to future political rallies. I can tell you

00:30:52.300 one thing, though. People who know about what happened are going to be more inclined to go to the polls

00:30:57.500 and vote for Donald Trump. Because people sense that if this sort of thing is allowed to take place

00:31:03.180 without any sort of repercussions politically, then it's going to continue and become worse. And

00:31:08.700 we're going to live in a society based on fear. The other thing that's making that clear to people

00:31:13.260 is the NBA, you know, the National Basketball Association. Congratulations again to the Toronto

00:31:18.060 Raptors. But, you know, we've got the NBA over in China right now, and they're shutting down

00:31:23.020 American journalists who want to ask questions of the basketball players about the crackdown

00:31:29.740 on their free speech rights by China. China is not allowing any sort of criticism of their policies

00:31:35.500 in Hong Kong. And an NBA general manager for the Houston Rockets made a comment about Hong Kong while

00:31:40.620 he was traveling with the team in Asia. And he was immediately rebuked by another NBA official,

00:31:46.860 and they've wrestled with it. And the Chinese basically said, we're not going to air any more

00:31:51.100 preseason games. And China is basically trying to shut the NBA down in China, even though it's very

00:31:55.420 popular there. And it's exposed the degree to which the NBA was in cahoots with the Chinese regime

00:32:01.500 in suppressing freedom of speech, but not just the NBA. ESPN, the big sports network here,

00:32:07.260 they've been suppressing discussion about this. And a whole bunch of other American companies

00:32:12.300 have been curtailing free speech activities because of the demands of the Chinese government.

00:32:17.500 So Americans are waking up to what Donald Trump has forced everyone to see, which is that doing

00:32:23.180 business with China comes at a major cost to our own freedoms. And so people are aware that 0.98

00:32:31.420 this is at stake very much in the 2020 election. Wow. I tell you, we didn't even have time to talk

00:32:38.220 about impeachment, but I'm so glad we focused on free speech. That's something that's important to us

00:32:43.100 up here. I also traveled to the United Kingdom from time to time. I'm interested in a former

00:32:48.460 journalist of ours named Tommy Robinson. I see that the UK is further down the road of censorship than

00:32:53.980 Canada is. And Canada is further down the road of censorship to the United States. And so just as I

00:33:00.620 use the UK as a cautionary tale, a warning for Canada, I encourage you, Joel, to look at what's 0.62

00:33:06.620 happening in Canada from our crackdown on social media to our crackdown on Islamophobia to the

00:33:14.940 de-platforming and shrinking of the bandwidth of political diversity. Look at us as a cautionary

00:33:21.020 tale, because if you don't dig in your heels, it will get worse. And I hope you don't let it get worse

00:33:26.540 down there. Well, you know, with us, we have a new challenge. It's not the government suppressing

00:33:31.740 freedom of speech yet anyway. It's really the private sector, large companies, social media

00:33:38.380 giants, and the NBA. I mean, who thought of them that way? But they're always quick to criticize

00:33:44.060 Trump and quick to side with social justice and all that stuff. But when it comes to China,

00:33:48.620 they're quiet in general. And so we're starting to realize that. You know, that's a good point.

00:33:53.260 And that's something we've learned, too. The governments like to, if anything, contract out

00:33:57.820 there's censorship to the social media companies. And you're right, the NBA, that's just pure

00:34:03.020 crony capitalism. They'd rather cut a deal with rich Beijing than uphold the system of freedom that

00:34:09.180 gave them their economic growth in America. Joel, thanks for your time today. Keep up the fight

00:34:14.780 down there. I look forward to keeping in touch with you as the US 2020 race unfolds.

00:34:19.900 Thank you so much. All right. There you have it. Joel Pollack,

00:34:22.620 the senior editor at large at Breitbart.com. Stay with us. More ahead.

00:34:27.820 Hello. Great to see you again. Thank you for joining us on this Canadian Thanksgiving.

00:34:40.860 I know I've talked a little bit on YouTube about deplatforming, but I thought I'd do a proper show

00:34:44.780 on it. Look, we started Rebel News to actually do news, do journalism, reporting commentary,

00:34:53.020 some activism, sure. We didn't start it to get into a bunch of litigation.

00:34:57.660 But our enemies have brought that to us. They call themselves our enemies. They don't want to

00:35:01.500 debate with us. We're not their counterparts. They want to silence us and deplatform us. But I believe

00:35:07.340 in the form of a inducement to breach contract lawsuit, I believe I can push back and root out

00:35:14.300 the problem and maybe stop this trend. I'm willing to bet on it. I'm going to put the money of our company

00:35:20.460 into suing the people who caused us to be deplatformed. I do need your help.

00:35:25.020 If you can go to stop deplatforming.com, I'd appreciate it. All right. That's the show for

00:35:29.580 today. Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night

00:35:33.420 great. And keep fighting for freedom.

00:35:46.060 We'll see you next time.

00:35:50.700 Bye.

00:35:52.700 Bye.

00:35:54.700 Bye.

00:35:56.700 Bye.

00:35:58.700 Bye.

00:36:00.700 Bye.

00:36:02.700 Bye.

00:36:04.700 Bye.

00:36:06.700 Bye.

00:36:08.700 Bye.

00:36:10.700 Bye.

00:36:12.700 Bye.

Rebel News Podcast - October 15, 2019

NEW! StopDeplatforming.com： Fight for free speech

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