＂Terrifying＂ and ＂cult-like＂： Facebook video reveals their new censorship scheme
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Summary
Ezra Levant explains what happened to the 2016 election, and why it's not just about fake news, fake ads, and fake stories. He also explains why the idea that Donald Trump is a spy for the Russians is completely insane.
Transcript
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Tonight, Facebook produces a propaganda video about their plans for censoring propaganda.
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It's much more terrifying than anything I've seen from a government.
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It's July 12th, and you're watching The Ezra Levant Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
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The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
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What did Facebook do wrong in the 2016 U.S. presidential election?
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If you believe this man, Christopher Wiley, Facebook sold private information about its users to political campaigns.
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Information Facebook didn't tell their users what they were going to do with it,
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and they didn't have permission to do that with it.
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In the case made famous by Wiley, if you took one of those fun little Facebook quizzes like,
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what character from Star Wars are you, or whatever, it was really a psychological profile.
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You probably thought it was just a fun way to pass the time, but it was really a personality test,
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And then that information was sold to political campaigns.
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But what's more, all of your friends list was sucked up with that and sold the campaigns too.
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Now, just this week, Facebook paid a fine in the United Kingdom of half a million British pounds.
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It's just under a million bucks Canadian, which is a laugh, of course.
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I mean, the company is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
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And, of course, Facebook has been doing this for years and will surely continue to do it.
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Here's a Barack Obama campaign executive boasting about how they sucked in the entire Facebook database in 2012.
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So Facebook, 2012 election, had the ability for people to opt in.
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And the privacy policies at that time on Facebook were that if they opted in,
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This is very much how local campaigns work, right?
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All of their biggest supporters turn around the table and they, like, circle the names of the people that they know
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and that they're going to outreach to and they figure out how to fill in the gaps of the people that they don't know.
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The Obama campaign just did this on a digital, in a digital level, on a much larger level.
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But we were actually able to ingest the entire social network, social network of the U.S.
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So, yeah, it's not exactly news what they were doing in 2016.
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What made it of interest to journalists this time, though,
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was that the Trump campaign was just better at it than the Hillary Clinton campaign.
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But back when Obama did it, the media party were impressed by Obama's cleverness.
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But that's not what Facebook was really blamed for in the media that much.
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It was a bit of a thing, the privacy thing, but not that big a thing.
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The big thing, and it continues to this day, is fake news.
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It's true, but the left wants to say that Trump won through lies and fake news and through Russian propaganda.
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That Russia thing, that's the basis for this whole empty Robert Mueller witch hunt.
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It's the basis for all sorts of insinuations that Donald Trump, the all-American super capitalist,
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It's reached levels of insanity that are breathtaking.
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Here's an article in last week's New York magazine speculating that Donald Trump has been a Russian agent since the 1980s.
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Look at this headline on MSNBC when the author of this appeared.
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Unlikely but possible that Trump has been Russian intel asset since 1987.
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Hey, do me a favor, don't ever make fun of InfoWars or Alex Jones again.
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If you're with MSNBC or the fancy pants in New York magazine, I mean, that conspiracy theory of Trump being a 30-year spy is nuts.
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Here's Rob Goldman, the vice president of ads for Facebook.
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He reviewed all of the ads bought by Russian agents on Facebook during the whole campaign.
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Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to affect the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election.
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I have seen all of the Russian ads, and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was not the main goal.
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The majority of the Russian ad spend happened after the election.
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We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative of Trump in the election.
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By the way, I think the total ad spend by Russia was like $100,000 or so in a $2 billion ad campaign, presidential campaign.
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The single best demonstration of Russia's true motives is the Houston anti-Islamic protest.
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Americans were literally puppeted into the streets by trolls who organized both sides of the protest.
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So, yeah, did this Russian hundred grand change the course of the United States election?
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Is that really why Hillary Clinton lost the election in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Ohio or Michigan?
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But the left needs its narrative not just to explain their loss in 2016.
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I mean, Hillary Clinton can't accept the blame.
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But to turn a crisis into an opportunity because if they can blame Facebook propaganda for the loss in 2016,
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they can use that as an excuse to regulate Facebook in the future.
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Or better yet, have Facebook regulate itself to stop propaganda from the next election.
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Of course, what they mean by propaganda is anything they don't like.
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Do you call someone a physician, a doctor, or a quack?
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Three different people could have different views about the same doctor.
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Do you call campaign material propaganda, an election platform, or a fact check?
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What I call propaganda, CNN might call a fact check, right?
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I mean, if you just call your propaganda a fact check, is it now above fact checking itself?
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My point is that's for us each to decide every day in our own lives and online.
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We have to sort out all the information in the world.
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What we believe, what we sort of believe, what is fact, and what we know is a sales pitch.
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And, you know, I don't think we mind it that much.
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I don't think we mind listening to propaganda if it's entertaining, if we learn something from it.
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Sometimes the ads on TV are the most entertaining part of TV, right?
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I mean, think of all the great ads on the Super Bowl.
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Or they're part of a sales campaign, or maybe they're just the truth.
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But whatever, isn't it up to each of us to be the judge of them?
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The big push on Facebook and the left is to censor conservatives.
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And thus, this week, Facebook started its Maoist struggle to purge itself of wrong ideas.
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I want to show you extracts from a cult-like video produced by Facebook.
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I'm sure they think it looks really normal, really thoughtful.
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But, boy, it made Facebook look really creepy to me.
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Even the sound effects, the aesthetics, it looks like a creepy cult.
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Facebook and other social media sites are being criticized for not doing enough to stop bogus
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stories that seem to dominate the election cycle.
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I mean, the big thing that happened was in the wake of the U.S. presidential election in
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2016 is we just were under a massive amount of scrutiny.
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That's a result of us making mistakes along the way, both in what we built and how we explain
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Facebook is now unveiling this new tool that will allow users to see if they had all interacted
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with a troll farm with ties to the Russian government.
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But I think the scrutiny fundamentally was a healthy thing.
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You've created these platforms, and now they are being misused.
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And you have to be the ones to do something about it, or we will.
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Facebook's fight against misinformation, really?
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The most left-wing senator in Congress from San Francisco, the most left-wing city in America,
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where Facebook itself is headquartered, of course.
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Dianne Feinstein is despised across most of America as a hardcore leftist.
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But to Facebook, that's who they feel the need to answer to.
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Nearly everything you see in your news feed, you're seeing because somebody who you're connected
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with, or a page that you've decided to follow, decided to share that.
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For a time, we felt our responsibility was mostly around just trying to help organize that
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information that you, in some sense, had asked to see.
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There was some reluctance to try to get in between you and those people.
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So if I want to hear from someone left, right, center, friend, or foe, that's the thing.
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I could have any reason for following someone on Facebook, including that I dislike them,
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I mean, I follow as many political enemies as I follow political friends, and that's my
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But this guy, Dan Zygmunt, the Buddhist convert who preaches a 15-hour-a-day spiritual fasting
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diet, he knows better than me about what's normal.
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Now, I'm not making fun of him or his diet or his religion.
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I'm just pointing out some of the characters at Facebook who are determining what's normal
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Dan Zygmunt is severely normal for San Francisco.
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I Googled most of the people in this Facebook video.
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And the rest of these San Francisco liberals do too.
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One of the challenges in misinformation is that there is no one consensus or source for
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If you think about all of the news that you read in a day, how much of it is objectively
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The truth has this unfortunate aspect to it that sometimes it is not aligned with your
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It is not aligned with what you have invested in, what you would like.
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And you can see that reflected inside of the content.
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Most of it probably exists in some space where people are presenting the facts as they see
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People consider misinformation to involve a lot of different things.
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The speech about the government is misinformation.
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So one of the things we're doing internally is defining what we're really looking at and
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what we can measure reliably and then figuring out how do we communicate that in a way that
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They're all describing the process by which we decide what we believe and what we don't.
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I mean, it's the political wing of Silicon Valley.
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Lots of women in their late 20s and early 30s with strong political opinions about feminism
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and liberalism pretty different from the computer side of Silicon Valley.
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The engineers, basically white guys and Asian guys, all engineers, probably right-wingers
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The Mark Zuckerbergs and the Sergei Brins, they built Silicon Valley.
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And then they handed their companies over to the liberals who were less autistic than them
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The geeks sort of handed their prize over to the fashionable kids.
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There's also an expectation of a myth of objectivity or neutrality in the platforms.
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Just because Facebook is being manipulated, Facebook has an obligation to recognize that
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Don't we choose who is allowed to be our friends on Facebook?
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Isn't saying Facebook is being manipulated, isn't that a lot like saying the market is being
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manipulated so someone smarter than each of us has to come in and protect us?
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And if you know that every single person in that building, every single person in this
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video knows, just knows they're smarter than you.
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But being smart, or at least book smart, isn't the same as being morally superior.
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If I sign up and follow some crap on the internet, I want my crap.
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I'd call that weird guy's 15-hour-a-day Buddhist fast thing weird.
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So why does he get to tell me what I can think?
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I think an extreme that would be bad would be if a group of Facebook employees reviewed
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everything that people tried to post and determined if the content of that post was true or false.
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And based on that determination, decided whether or not it could be on the platform.
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But you'll see in this video later on, she has a better idea.
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She'll set up a computer program to do all that censoring for her.
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What I think would also be bad is if we took absolutely no responsibility whatsoever
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and allowed hate speech and violence to be broadly distributed.
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That wouldn't be taking nearly enough responsibility.
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Does that mean I can't see R-rated movies like action movies or cartoon war movies or superheroes?
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What does she mean by violence and hate speech?
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What does she mean by bad speech that is hateful?
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Now, I follow some alt-left people on Twitter, some extreme environmentalists, for example.
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The right answer is definitely somewhere in the middle.
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We want to make sure that we don't inadvertently introduce bias.
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It's extra important in all of our work to kind of know your own biases, but also sort
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of take a step back and make sure you're listening to the other side.
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Do you really think they listen to, let's say, blue-collar working men and women, people
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who didn't finish high school, maybe cowboys, I don't know, southern good old boys, right-wingers,
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Amongst the tens of thousands of Facebook employees, do you think that a single one of them wears
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I'm sure they're full of Hillary Clinton supporters.
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But do you think a single Facebook staffer is a Trump supporter, at least overtly?
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Someone, I don't know, who's against marijuana and prostitution?
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I'm not saying those are right or wrong points of view.
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I'm just saying the true diverse range of opinions.
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Do you think the people you have seen so far in this Facebook video would tolerate truly
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Do you think they really know their blind spots?
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But let me skip to the most troubling part of this Facebook movie, where they list their
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And there's a lot of different types of misinformation.
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There's bad actors, there's bad behavior, and there's bad content.
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Bad actors are things like fake accounts or foreign agents.
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Fake might be bad, but are anonymous commenters bad, by definition?
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Weren't many of the revolutionaries in the U.S. Revolutionary War who wrote some of the
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Federalist Papers, weren't some of them anonymous?
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Weren't many dissidents in the Soviet Union anonymous, had pen names?
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I mean, I get it, if you're freaking out about Russians, but this video is from California.
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So is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation a foreign agent?
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That Tessa Lyons-Lang woman who's listing the enemies, she's actually from Ottawa originally.
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How about U.S. environmentalist groups propagandizing into Canada?
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It's an American company, but is it a foreign agent in Canada?
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Isn't a foreign agent really just whoever Facebook or Dianne Feinstein doesn't like?
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Bad behavior is using tactics, like spamming, to try to spread a message.
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Except I suppose one person's spam is another person's direct mail, is another person's
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critically important public service announcement.
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Well, isn't that really just another word for marketing?
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Isn't the job of every single newspaper editor, for example, to write the most interesting,
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gripping, can't-miss headline for their front page?
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Aren't there a lot of questions to which the answers are only yes, no?
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Same thing with a lot of questions in politics.
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Isn't that what we call taking a vote in a legislature, like a parliament, calling for
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Isn't that how Facebook and other social media work?
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You either like something or you thumbs down or thumbs up.
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I guess you could sort of like something, but Facebook's own symbol is a thumbs up.
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And bad content includes things like false news, hate speech, or clickbait.
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It's a human emotion that the other side doesn't like.
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Well, so much for half of Hollywood's movies and rap videos.
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Now, you can agree with every single idea here, but your agreement and my agreement,
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we have different ideas how it's implemented, don't we?
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That's why we both get to be different individuals in real life.
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I don't want hate speech, but to me, hate speech is that horrible leftist comedian at
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the White House Correspondents' Dinner, or Kathy Griffin holding up Trump's severed head
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in effigy, or Samantha Bee swearing at Ivanka Trump so crudely.
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To me, that's hate speech, but those are heroes to the left.
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Well, until 2016, it was you and me deciding for ourselves.
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But now it's all the people in that Facebook video who are going to decide for us.
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Now, I know they are, because Mark Zuckerberg confessed it when he appeared before Congress
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Every one of these people voted for Hillary Clinton.
00:21:04.280
You think they'd allow a MAGA, Make America Great Again ad in there?
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So when they say they just remove bullying, you see that?
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Okay, now do they mean people on the right that they don't like?
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Go on to social media and type in any search engine.
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You'll find hundreds of entries on every social medium.
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With connecting people, particularly at our scale,
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Every week we talk to all of you, all of the new hires,
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about all the work that we're doing to try and improve the integrity
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of the information that flows through a news feed
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because it's important that you have that context.
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if we're going to be able to effectively address the issues that we face.
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We definitely think a lot about our responsibility.
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At the end of the day, we depend on our community of users.
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So ideally, what's good for them is also good for us.
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And there's sort of a natural alignment of interests.
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We try to make a more interesting news feed because we think that's good for people.
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And that will also be good for us and our business in the long run.
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They're just trying to make you more interesting, you knuckle-draggers, you Trump lovers.
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I mean, who are you to make your own world more interesting?
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Don't you see these interesting people are willing to do it for you?
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Misinformation is going to remain a topic, but it's going to be an arms race.
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It's going to move from one frontier of the battle to a different frontier.
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But in the time that I've been here, we doubled in size in my team and we're doubling again.
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So there's a great commitment to improving the integrity of our systems.
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I think that we're making progress now and that progress is going to accrue.
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And it's going to get better and better and better.
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But we're taking great steps every single day towards solving this incredibly complex problem.
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We have to get this right, not just for our platform,
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but for the community of people that we serve around the world.
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The problem they're talking about, you're the problem.
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You think too much or maybe not enough for them.
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You choose too much or maybe you're not choosy enough.
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because they've eliminated any bad thoughts for you.
00:24:02.120
George Orwell said the future was a boot stomping on a human face forever.
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The future of authoritarianism is smiling millennials in San Francisco with their cliches,
00:24:38.280
Well, Doug Ford has been wasting no time as Ontario's new premier.
00:24:42.220
He's making decisive decisions about the most important subjects, carbon tax, cap and trade, hydro one.
00:24:49.500
But I think he's tackled the most controversial subject of all, and he did so quickly and decisively,
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namely, scrapping the child sex curriculum that hyper-sexualized children of tender years.
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He just scrapped it and reverted to the last version of the sex ed while he engages in a review.
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And joining us now in studio to talk about this is the woman perhaps most responsible for this bold policy decision.
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The president, it's a pleasure to have you back in the studio.
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I have to say, this was a tough one because the media and the establishment is so unanimous that this is the test.
00:25:42.280
And Doug Ford just sort of said, boom, we're done it.
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No fuss, no muss, no wishy-washy, no flip-floppery.
00:25:52.260
This was a great issue because you actually did not require to pass legislation.
00:25:58.680
And to have that full repeal, though, I should mention that there needs to be a directive sent to the teacher saying that no component of the WinSex Ed should be discussed further.
00:26:08.200
For example, the unscientific gender identity theory, that should not be mentioned.
00:26:15.200
And also, I know they're reverting to the previous version, there must always be an opt-out for parents.
00:26:20.200
So advance notification and seeing through the repeal by always giving parents an opt-out.
00:26:24.200
Because let's face this, you'll never satisfy every parent, and every parent must have their rights respected, and that must be paramount.
00:26:30.420
Those are excellent details that ought to be added, and I agree with you that they're important.
00:26:39.260
And I think it gave people the creeps that Ben Levin, who was later convicted of trying to recruit young children to molest them,
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that such a person, a pedophile, would have been the deputy minister at the time this curriculum was developed.
00:26:57.560
When he was convicted, I think a lot of people said, how can you possibly allow a curriculum?
00:27:04.260
And I know he personally didn't write it, but he oversaw the ministry for a portion of that time.
00:27:09.800
Well, everything that came through his office, he signed off on.
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And so he was, in part, developing the curriculum.
00:27:18.720
Who wants their children learning a sex ed curriculum from a convicted child pornographer?
00:27:24.240
I mean, we followed that trial and that conviction very closely.
00:27:27.820
He—I even hate to mention the details because they're so stomach-turning.
00:27:33.180
He even chatted online with someone saying he would like to molest his own grandchildren.
00:27:38.840
I know that's so shocking to say, and I'm sorry to say it and gross our people out.
00:27:42.500
But when someone like that is in charge of the curriculum, how can you go with that into the schools?
00:27:50.920
And it's shocking to me that it took an election to get that ripped out.
00:27:55.360
And, you know, people say, well, are you for updating the curriculum?
00:27:59.380
And I will agree with the former Premier, Kathleen Wynne, that, yeah, updates need to happen.
00:28:04.420
And with modern technology, things like sexting and whatnot need to be covered.
00:28:08.060
Strange, though, that while, yes, I'll concede that it needs to be updated,
00:28:11.820
she never once mentioned pornography in the curriculum.
00:28:14.140
You mentioned Ben Levin, again, convicted child pornographer.
00:28:19.800
And we were just talking before we turned the cameras on.
00:28:24.860
If there are some parents out there who really want to teach their children of tender years,
00:28:30.220
I'm talking about six-year-olds here, about the six genders or some of the more extreme stuff,
00:28:37.900
So this isn't stopping any parent who really loved the Ben Levin curriculum, God forbid.
00:28:44.900
It's just freeing the other 90, 95, 99 percent of parents from being bound by it.
00:28:52.140
Let me ask you, though, what has been the public reaction?
00:28:54.860
I know the usual suspects in the media elites are freaking out.
00:28:57.520
But what's the reaction being, I mean, you're the president of a parents-oriented group.
00:29:03.180
What's the reaction from severely normal Ontarians?
00:29:08.300
In fact, I mean, think back to when they introduced the curriculum.
00:29:12.040
Did you see people protesting for classes on anal and oral sex or masturbation on Queen's Park?
00:29:17.480
I saw parents freezing their butts off in the middle of winter saying, by the thousands,
00:29:21.180
saying, hey, no, this is irresponsible and sexualizes our kids.
00:29:24.540
But since the leadership and since this issue was thrust into the leadership,
00:29:28.260
and now we have the repeal, hopefully fully by the end of the week,
00:29:32.000
we see that parents are saying, hey, we know there's a problem with this curriculum.
00:29:36.840
We hear a lot about the problems of this curriculum.
00:29:38.460
We're not sure exactly what, but there's an issue.
00:29:40.440
I need to open up the books of my kids and ask them, what are you learning in school?
00:29:43.240
And I think a lot of parents also had a lot of, they were alerted to the problems within this curriculum
00:29:48.080
when kids would come home from school and they'd be discussing things around the dinner table
00:29:52.200
that parents would never imagine they would have.
00:29:56.020
I mean, I read through the Ben Levin curriculum very carefully.
00:30:01.080
And some of those subjects, in my view, and I don't think I'm a prude at all.
00:30:06.820
If you're not a grown adult, if you're not, I mean, that's like college level.
00:30:13.240
And for maturity and for young kids, that was my chief beef with this,
00:30:19.880
is it pushed sexuality to people who, to young kids who should be allowed to have a childhood
00:30:25.840
where they're not being forced to think and talk and grapple with issues
00:30:30.440
that they're just, they're supposed to have a childhood.
00:30:35.960
Not even what was being taught, but how early, why are you talking to, I'm not going to say babies,
00:30:43.760
but these are people who are playing with dolls and not anatomically correct dolls.
00:30:49.360
Well, again, gender identity was introduced as a topic to eight-year-olds.
00:30:57.540
Most adults are confused by, and let's be clear here, this is unscientific.
00:31:03.320
I'm probably part of the majority that believes children should be taught facts
00:31:06.840
and scientific-based things in school, not theories that are unproven.
00:31:10.500
Well, and the left always says, oh, you're just a prude, this is science.
00:31:13.680
You know, I challenge anyone who's watching this, without Googling it,
00:31:17.720
to name the six official genders that the Ben Levin sex curriculum had.
00:31:22.240
And, you know, thankfully, what we're talking about now, it is now history.
00:31:26.920
Doug Ford, I'm impressed by the fact that he tackled this substantive issue.
00:31:32.220
But I got to tell you, it gives me encouragement about him as a premier on 20 different issues.
00:31:37.920
Because now I know that when it comes to an issue that the media is unanimous about over here,
00:31:44.160
and the people are almost unanimous about over here, he won't bend to the peer pressure of the media.
00:31:50.680
That's the rarest thing in a politician, isn't it?
00:31:55.500
When it came to my candidacy, that was not the case.
00:31:58.560
So while I'm happy to see that he is keeping most of his promises, he did break his promise to me.
00:32:04.980
And again, as to why, you'd have to ask him, because I have not heard from him.
00:32:09.820
I didn't want to emphasize that, because the news of the day is the sex,
00:32:16.800
Because you're right, that was a big beef for us here at The Rebel,
00:32:22.660
because in so many ways, you were the kingmaker.
00:32:25.840
It was your campaign that put Doug Ford over the top for his leadership.
00:32:30.320
And I found his firing of you as a candidate, or maybe you, I don't know how it actually went down.
00:32:37.180
And I thought, this reminds me of Patrick Brown.
00:32:39.700
But I think now that he crossed the finish line, he's stronger.
00:32:44.220
I don't want to ask you to reveal confidences, but are you at liberty to tell our viewers,
00:32:49.660
have you been in touch with Doug Ford personally or his staff since you were displaced as a candidate?
00:32:55.540
So his choosing not to recognize me as the democratically nominated candidate in Mississauga Center,
00:33:03.020
And I reached out to Doug that day, and he did not return my call or text.
00:33:06.960
I did hear from his campaign manager, Corey Tenike, who gave me the information.
00:33:14.080
So any particulars of that day, I suggest you invite Doug on and ask him yourself.
00:33:17.920
Well, I was more interested if you've had a rapprochement at all or a reconciliation or any more interaction.
00:33:22.640
So basically, when you were sacked as a candidate, that was it, eh?
00:33:28.300
And I hope if he wants to reach out to me, I'm happy to take his call.
00:33:34.420
And you're remarkably positive, given that you earned and you were not handed that nomination.
00:33:42.840
I told Doug this when he called to congratulate me on winning the nomination.
00:33:47.440
I said, Doug, I will do 10 leaderships before doing another one of those.
00:33:55.180
I met so many wonderful people from such a diverse community and faith backgrounds
00:34:00.320
who really stood unified with me on this issue of repealing the sex ed
00:34:04.100
and on religious liberty and freedom of speech.
00:34:06.720
Well, I hope that you can become a part of the government in some way
00:34:11.760
because I think you represent a group of Ontarians.
00:34:18.760
You have an expertise in the issue of representing parents.
00:34:25.760
Your focus on this issue, I think, is you and there's a few others
00:34:32.960
I hope that you are incorporated in the government in some way.
00:34:37.300
You're back as president of Parents as First Educators.
00:34:40.460
Is that a part-time, that's obviously a part-time NGO that you run?
00:34:44.340
Well, it represents over 80,000 supporters in Ontario, grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents.
00:34:57.460
Look, I got into the leadership for many issues, but to be an advocate for the grassroots,
00:35:02.780
for free speech, for religious liberty, and for the repealing of the sex ed and whatnot.
00:35:11.660
I only did so at the behest of Doug and his team.
00:35:16.600
But I will always be in there to advocate for the issues.
00:35:19.200
And in my role as Parents as First Educators, as president,
00:35:21.880
is to advocate for the parents and the children of Ontario.
00:35:24.000
Well, I got to tell you, you handled that unfair defenestration a lot friendlier than I would have done.
00:35:34.220
I mean, I think what happened to you was atrocious, frankly, and I said so at the time.
00:35:39.120
But you held your tongue and you were positive and you were focused on the prize,
00:35:48.420
So credit to you for biting your tongue and being a team player in a way that many others wouldn't.
00:35:53.620
I hope that you will have successes in the future.
00:36:03.740
You, in many ways, helped shape Ontario today, whether it's Doug Ford's own success or this curriculum.
00:36:14.720
we think that you are an important part of the public policy conversation.
00:36:18.680
And whatever you do in the weeks and months ahead, keep us posted because we think you're a positive force in this province.
00:36:26.180
And to all your supporters and viewers who have either personally sent positive messages
00:36:31.320
or I know who've quietly supported the parental rights and just freedom in general.
00:36:37.420
Well, I'm hopeful that a little bit of you is rubbed off on Doug.
00:36:43.020
He reminds me of his brother in a lot of ways who had a big heart.
00:36:45.520
I think he's going to be good for the province.
00:36:48.040
I think you've got to stay on him a little bit, though.
00:36:49.940
I think we all do because we have, because let me put it this way,
00:36:53.000
you've got a thousand journalists and other elites pulling him this way.
00:36:57.660
Everyone who can should help pull him that way so at least he can walk straight.
00:37:02.120
Well, and there are also, you know, sex that is one issue.
00:37:04.440
I mean, we have to talk about Bill 89 at some point where children are being removed from their homes
00:37:09.400
if their parents don't subscribe to gender theory and if their child wanted to change sex
00:37:13.080
and they don't get them hormone therapy or surgery, the child will be removed
00:37:18.700
because that's considered abuse, as said so by the minister under Kathleen Wynne's government.
00:37:29.240
Let's have you back on another day to talk about that in depth.
00:37:32.740
And then there's even the federal C-16 that Jordan Peterson first brought to the leg.
00:37:38.260
The battle never ends because the other side never rests.
00:37:46.560
I have to say, you've had more impact on Ontario's trajectory perhaps than anyone else other than Doug Ford himself.
00:38:04.140
I think Tanya has done some great work, and I just said so about four times, but it's the truth, don't you think?
00:38:23.600
This is the neighborhood that I live in with my three children.
00:38:43.980
A drug shooting zone, a shooting gallery in her neighborhood.
00:38:51.560
That is the effect of one of Toronto's eight official shooting galleries, the Toronto Public Health Safe Injection Sites.
00:39:03.240
When I hear safe injection sites, it makes me think of the phrase from Small Dead Animals, like a drunk driving lane on the highway.
00:39:10.720
When you have a safe injection site in the city, joining us now is the Toronto Sun columnist who has been writing a series about this, our friend Sue Ann Levy.
00:39:22.040
That was a very quick clip, but it was a mom who has three young kids, and all around her house, well, you describe it.
00:39:30.520
Well, I was there yesterday, so I saw it for myself.
00:39:33.580
When I arrived, her house is right beside a respite shelter.
00:39:38.060
So not only are the people shooting up, but they're coming and going and partying until five in the morning.
00:39:43.960
So they're partying, and that's allowed under the rules.
00:39:49.680
And these are, the people who stay in these respite shelters are, let's just say, people who've been kicked out of other shelters.
00:39:56.640
They're transients, they're the lowest of the low, and they are, these respite shelters are supposed to be temporary stopgap measures,
00:40:04.440
but many of them were open over the winter, and now they've been extended right to the end of the year.
00:40:09.720
A lot of shelters have rules, no drugs, no, I mean, because they want to not only maintain some safety for the other clients,
00:40:21.620
So they have some basic rules, a curfew, for example.
00:40:25.240
So you're saying that these, what exactly is a respite shelter?
00:40:31.020
Well, like I said, the respite shelter is supposed to be a temporary stopgap,
00:40:35.700
and it's supposed to just provide some of the homeless, basically to give them a place to sleep.
00:40:45.520
So it's basically to give them some place to put their heads.
00:40:49.200
However, as I've found out, because there are similar problems up around Park Road with the Collier-Asquith neighborhood,
00:40:58.200
which is right near Young and Bloor Street, so right in the core of the city,
00:41:04.200
these shelters may be able to maintain rules inside, but once the people come outside,
00:41:10.660
which they are, of course, doing at this time of year, there are no rules whatsoever.
00:41:15.040
Yeah. So I can understand if it's minus 20 out, you don't want anyone freezing,
00:41:19.140
even if they're very badly behaved, but it's gloriously sunny and temperate in Toronto.
00:41:24.420
I can imagine these places are magnets, because if they're getting free food and a place to sleep,
00:41:29.320
then they could save their change for, well, for drugs.
00:41:33.240
And, you know, we don't have to be shy about saying that,
00:41:35.340
because that's the explicit purpose of these places.
00:41:38.000
When you say that there's lawlessness there, when Sammy, the mum of three there, calls the cops,
00:41:44.480
what do they even do? Because if these are expressly law-free zones, what's a cop supposed to do?
00:41:50.960
Well, the cops have basically been doing nothing.
00:41:56.520
They've been instructed to stand down around these safe injection sites.
00:42:00.380
And what Sammy has been told is that unless they're doing something, you know, criminal,
00:42:08.180
and they have a knife or a gun or whatever, or they've attacked somebody, they can't respond.
00:42:13.500
So essentially, they can shoot up, they can go through her gate, which they've done, break glass.
00:42:28.000
Now, I presume that in these shelters, there are some social workers or something.
00:42:35.220
So these city staff watch as they go into Sammy's home.
00:42:42.800
Or they turn a blind eye to it, whether they see it or they don't.
00:42:46.060
You know, as I said, the same thing is happening up on Park Road, 21 Park Road.
00:42:50.840
And they've complained about people taking over the parks, prostituting themselves,
00:42:58.740
They vandalized the Rabba 24-hour store down the street.
00:43:02.540
The poor guy is losing business left, right, and center.
00:43:22.400
I don't want to say, well, shuffle them off somewhere.
00:43:26.000
You know how, you know what I'm thinking right now, Sue Ann?
00:43:28.880
I don't know the street that John Tory, the mayor, lives on.
00:43:32.100
But if this same respite shelter, I've never even heard that phrase before,
00:43:41.720
If we moved it into the fanciest neighborhood in Toronto,
00:43:44.680
Rosedale or a fancy part of Forest Hill or something.
00:43:49.540
Let's just say for sake of argument, he's off of Bloor.
00:43:53.500
The closest respite shelter to his place is at Park Road.
00:43:58.740
But I'm talking right next to him, like this Sammy, the mum.
00:44:02.000
And he had to run the gauntlet of druggies and people who are harassing her.
00:44:06.640
And by the way, when we arrived there to film these people,
00:44:11.420
they disappeared like cockroaches going back into,
00:44:20.560
I bet if this, and I don't know Sammy Barcellos.
00:44:27.620
You got to give her full marks for just doing the best a mum can do.
00:44:38.700
You know, they're bringing that onto her property.
00:44:41.720
She should be treated with the same respect as the high property tax paying Rosedale fancy pants.
00:44:50.060
And as her husband Michael said, and Michael was a crack cocaine addict.
00:44:56.800
He told me this, and he said that he's been off crack cocaine for 10 years.
00:45:08.980
And what he said is that this has become the new normal in their neighborhoods.
00:45:16.300
Well, here's what gets me is, again, I don't want to be heartless.
00:45:31.140
I don't know what the answer is, but this doesn't seem to be providing any solution.
00:45:39.520
Well, the safe injection sites, which started really up in Vancouver and now are spreading
00:45:49.580
So there were supposed to be four pillars because I've studied this issue.
00:45:52.680
And one of the pillars is supposed to be rehab.
00:46:01.200
Is this, I tell you, Sue Ann, I'm not going to impress you because last time we talked,
00:46:05.120
I said, come on, you got to run, you got to run.
00:46:07.380
Someone's got to bring the common sense criticism to this mayor.
00:46:11.280
And I know you do that through your journalism and the Toronto Sun's quite good at that.
00:46:14.540
But by gosh, do you see anyone in the horizon who is thinking of running for mayor to challenge
00:46:20.260
Like this is the, like the great thing about Canada is we have so many different cities
00:46:25.980
Vancouver is like the laboratory that came up with the worst idea in the world.
00:46:29.800
Anyone who's been to East Hastings Street, it's so, it's like zombies and zombies and
00:46:36.400
And you see people almost dying in front of you and Toronto's importing the bad lessons,
00:46:42.140
Is there anyone who looks like they might challenge the mayor for in, in, in this year's civic
00:46:51.860
So I don't want to put you on the spot, but boy, I'm rooting for you.
00:46:55.480
I mean, I think we need a happy warrior who's going to take it to John Tory and not, not
00:47:03.900
These are tough things that we need a tough person to take on the mayor.
00:47:07.440
Not to mention the violence and the, you know, the escalation in the shootings.
00:47:11.420
I read that there's been more shootings in Toronto than New York.
00:47:16.860
And every other day, every weekend, long holiday weekend, there were 11, 11 incidents.
00:47:25.560
You know, so Anne, I'm glad that Doug Ford is premier.
00:47:31.860
You go back in January, no one would have thought because everyone thought Patrick Brown
00:47:35.120
was running, but him moving to the provincial level has created a void.
00:47:44.040
If it's someone else who champions confidence ideas, we'll be there for them too.
00:47:50.000
I know I'm, I know, I don't mean to put you under, well, I sort of do, but we'll be there.
00:47:55.600
You have a very important influence in the Toronto sun.
00:47:58.240
You have had a very key role in the provincial election.
00:48:00.440
So at the very least, I know you'll keep writing about this, but we need a champion at
00:48:09.580
You can see, you can see that I'm sort of twisting Sue Ann's arm.
00:48:16.860
I mean, I think of one of the greatest journalist politicians of all time in Canada, Ralph Klein,
00:48:25.200
He became mayor and then premier, one of the most successful because he had the common
00:48:28.560
sense of the common man and he got through all the BS.
00:48:34.960
Our friend Sue Ann Levy, you can read her columns in the Toronto Sun.
00:48:54.720
On my monologue yesterday about Donald Trump calling out NATO countries for not pulling
00:49:00.200
Trump is the first real person to confront NATO.
00:49:09.100
How I wish we had more real people in power rather than myopic politicians who only care
00:49:16.540
Most of what Trump says that irritates people, I think it irritates people.
00:49:19.980
They say it's because the style and the aesthetic approach of Trump and the tone.
00:49:25.060
Yeah, I think it's because he says blunt things, the substance of them.
00:49:33.960
He was saying things that made people uncomfortable.
00:49:40.760
Well, sister, going back to 1945, it would be from the Soviet Union.
00:49:56.280
And although I salute the efforts of our Canadian military, only a fool would realize that we
00:50:00.880
were not under the protective shield of NATO and NORAD and, to the point, American nukes.
00:50:07.600
It was mutually assured destruction of the American nuclear arsenal that kept the peace
00:50:19.860
Well, who was defending us against a great many threats since then?
00:50:30.320
Yeah, listen, I wish that we were, as they said in World War I, a fireproof country far away
00:50:38.040
But that ain't true in the era of ICBM's globalism and terrorism.
00:50:42.440
So, yeah, even if you don't like to acknowledge it, it is a fact.
00:50:50.900
What we have now is a president who's just saying,
00:50:58.480
And if you do, don't pretend that you're part of NATO.
00:51:00.680
I mean, don't pretend you want an equal compact of equal countries.
00:51:11.940
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters,