The Candice Malcolm Show - Ep. 15 ｜ Ezra Levant ｜ The most controversial man in Canadian media

00:00:00.120 Freedom of speech and press freedom are sacrosanct in a free and democratic society.

00:00:06.220 In Canada, these rights are so vital that they're outlined in Section 1 of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

00:00:13.060 And yet, it constantly feels like these ancient freedoms are under attack.

00:00:17.320 My guest on today's episode of the True North Speaker Series is Canada's foremost free speech champion.

00:00:22.520 And he has often single-handedly led the charge and fought back against overzealous government intrusions on our liberties.

00:00:31.480 Ezra Levant made headlines all the way back in 2006 as the editor of the Western Standard magazine

00:00:37.080 for being the only Canadian journalist brave enough to publish the infamous Mohammed cartoons.

00:00:43.460 For the crime of committing journalism, he was hauled in front of a human rights kangaroo court and questioned by a state official.

00:00:50.700 Fortunately, he recorded his closed-door hearing just so the world could see how far Canada had slid

00:00:57.480 in respect to upholding the basic freedoms we once enjoyed.

00:01:01.460 We published those cartoons for the intention and purpose of exercising our inalienable rights

00:01:11.980 as free-born Albertans to publish whatever the hell we want, no matter what the hell you think.

00:01:17.720 I think I've probably given 200 interviews with people other than the state

00:01:24.400 where I give a very thoughtful and nuanced expression of my intent.

00:01:28.640 But the only thing I have to say to the government about why I published it

00:01:32.640 is because it's my bloody right to do so.

00:01:34.940 In our conversation today, Ezra and I discuss the changing media landscape,

00:01:39.840 comparing free speech battles from the 1990s and early 2000s to those today.

00:01:44.960 We talk about the difference between big government censorship and that which comes from big tech.

00:01:49.540 And we discuss some of his biggest battles, including True North and the Rebels' successful lawsuit

00:01:55.160 against the Trudeau government during the last federal election.

00:01:58.500 Ezra is a fearless champion of freedom, a highly astute political commentator,

00:02:03.440 and perhaps the man most hated by the mainstream media, liberals, and leftists alike.

00:02:08.980 He's also a successful entrepreneur who has built one of the largest media companies in Canada.

00:02:14.080 We talk about the best and worst moments at the Rebel,

00:02:16.880 get into the details of what really happened with Faith Goldie in Charlottesville,

00:02:20.820 and we discuss the media's smear campaign against him and the Rebel.

00:02:24.640 Love him or hate him, Ezra continues to be a happy warrior,

00:02:28.720 speaking his mind and fighting for freedom,

00:02:30.620 with their tremendous army of online followers, fans, and supporters.

00:02:34.940 I hope you enjoy our conversation.

00:02:37.020 Let me know what you think in the comments section,

00:02:38.520 and please share this video with like-minded friends and family.

00:02:41.880 Don't forget to subscribe to True North,

00:02:43.960 and if you'd like to support this podcast, please visit tnc.news slash donate.

00:02:54.640 Well, Ezra, I was thinking about it, I think throughout the course of my career,

00:03:02.160 you've interviewed me dozens of times, maybe 50 times going back to the Sun News Network,

00:03:06.320 but this is the first time I've ever had the pleasure of interviewing you,

00:03:09.100 so thank you so much for sitting down with me in the flesh,

00:03:12.680 you know, despite all the crazy coronavirus stuff that's going on around us.

00:03:15.900 Yeah, no problem.

00:03:16.780 Well, you have so many interesting things to say,

00:03:19.820 and we're always delighted to have you on Rebel News, so I'm an open book for you.

00:03:24.160 Well, great.

00:03:24.840 I think that there's so many people out there who have been following your career for such a long time.

00:03:29.380 I know for me, the moment that I really first remember seeing you was the Human Rights Tribunals in Alberta.

00:03:35.220 You were the only journalist, one of the only journalists,

00:03:37.380 brave enough to publish those Muhammad cartoons back in the early 2000s, I believe,

00:03:41.620 and it was a big controversy that, you know, students were learning about law school and stuff like that,

00:03:46.020 and so you have always been a champion, a hero of free speech in Canada,

00:03:50.120 and you continue to be to this day,

00:03:52.120 so I wanted to just first ask you about those sort of early days in your career.

00:03:56.160 So you're a trained lawyer,

00:03:58.540 and you sort of transitioned from being a lawyer to being a journalist and writing in the mainstream media.

00:04:03.700 Tell us a little bit about that transition and what led you there.

00:04:06.680 Sure.

00:04:07.020 I was part of an early wave of young Reform Party youth, I guess.

00:04:12.200 Rob Anders was part of that.

00:04:14.760 Jason Kenney joined a little later, Raheem Jaffer,

00:04:17.060 and I went to law school while everyone else went to parliaments.

00:04:21.280 And I always sort of thought, well, maybe I'll run for office, maybe I'll run for office,

00:04:25.000 but other things intervened.

00:04:26.880 And I quickly abandoned the law, went to Ottawa with Preston Manning and whatnot.

00:04:31.960 But I don't know, I felt like I always had one foot in politics, one foot in law,

00:04:35.900 and one foot in journalism, even since I was a kid.

00:04:38.300 I think they were all related.

00:04:39.280 And with that human rights battle, I mean, I was always a bit of a troublemaker, let's be honest.

00:04:46.840 But I did not know then that that would shape so much of my life to come.

00:04:51.860 I'll be really candid.

00:04:53.120 The Western Standard was a fortnightly magazine.

00:04:55.600 That's when people, the Internet was growing, but it was still a paper magazine era.

00:04:59.980 And I thought, geez, we're fortnightly.

00:05:02.500 That means every two weeks.

00:05:03.760 By the time we covered this story, I said to our editor, Kevin Levin,

00:05:07.580 The Sun is going to cover it in their trademark tabloid style.

00:05:12.740 National Post is going to cover it, and they're not afraid of radical Islam.

00:05:16.400 And everyone else is going to cover it.

00:05:19.220 So we can't cover it in the same, here's the news or the cartoons.

00:05:22.380 We've got to be more reflective.

00:05:24.620 And so we were.

00:05:25.300 We didn't put it on the cover.

00:05:26.620 We thought, oh, everyone's going to see these cartoons by then.

00:05:29.100 And it wasn't a hot news story.

00:05:30.680 It's, you know, a media analysis of what happened.

00:05:34.560 It was almost written in a boring way.

00:05:37.580 And we hid, not that we hid them, we just thought it wouldn't be news anymore.

00:05:41.620 But between when we finished it, and it went to the presses, and then it goes to the post office,

00:05:47.280 and things took so long back then, it wasn't like the Internet,

00:05:50.060 we realized, oh, my God, no one else is doing it.

00:05:53.580 Not even the spicy Toronto Sun.

00:05:55.860 Not even Ken White's, I think Ken White was still running the National Post,

00:05:58.720 so he was afraid of nothing, or McLean's magazine was still rambunct.

00:06:02.020 And so it dawned on us, as the thing was working its way through the printing presses and the mailhouse,

00:06:08.320 we are going to be the first and only people of any size publishing them.

00:06:13.780 And we just sort of panicked.

00:06:15.340 Not in a bad way.

00:06:16.440 You just thought, oh, what do we do?

00:06:17.160 What do we do?

00:06:17.600 Okay, let's get some security for the front door.

00:06:19.300 Let's do this and that.

00:06:20.080 And it was a hit, and we started getting phone calls, tons of phone calls about it.

00:06:28.260 And I remember we had a little team of people answering the phone,

00:06:30.680 and they would say, well, here's all these different people signing up for subscriptions.

00:06:34.380 And I looked at the names, and they were Muslim names.

00:06:37.380 I said, this isn't right.

00:06:38.540 What are you talking about?

00:06:40.300 They weren't calling to complain.

00:06:41.880 They were calling to subscribe, to show loyalty and support.

00:06:47.560 Because to this day, it's almost 15 years later, but I remember a letter to the editor we published

00:06:54.000 by someone named Rawah Khaled.

00:06:55.940 I still remember her name.

00:06:57.340 And I'll paraphrase.

00:06:58.120 She said, I didn't sail halfway across the world to have Sharia law follow me.

00:07:05.660 And I thought, oh, my God.

00:07:06.600 And I would not have guessed that we would have been flooded by phone calls from Canadian Muslims

00:07:12.520 who were happy to have someone not bend the knee to Sharia censorship.

00:07:17.100 And so it was very exciting, and nothing bad happened to us.

00:07:21.380 But then the shoe dropped, and then the Alberta Human Rights Commission,

00:07:25.180 a government organization, really prosecuted kind of a blasphemy prosecution,

00:07:31.520 investigating, grilling me.

00:07:33.480 Well, I turned the tables.

00:07:34.560 We recorded the grilling.

00:07:35.560 Again, no one would ever believe in the year 2008 it was.

00:07:40.620 Cartoons were in 2006.

00:07:41.960 It took them two years for the Alberta Human Rights Commission to get around to interviewing me.

00:07:47.200 I just knew that if I didn't record it, no one would believe me.

00:07:50.260 Right.

00:07:50.520 So was that a legal recording?

00:07:52.520 Did they know that they were being recorded?

00:07:53.980 They did know.

00:07:54.400 In fact, we spent about six months negotiating with the Human Rights Commission the terms of that interview.

00:07:59.420 Okay.

00:08:00.000 And I insisted that we be able to keep a record of it.

00:08:03.920 Well, what does that mean?

00:08:04.780 So we arranged it so it was at my lawyer's office, and I got there early, and we set up the tripod very openly on the table.

00:08:11.820 And I got there early, and my lawyer got there early, and it was on our safe turf.

00:08:15.840 So the investigator walked in.

00:08:17.420 It was a Friday, and she just wanted to go home for the weekend.

00:08:20.300 She walked in.

00:08:21.420 She looked at the camera.

00:08:22.260 And again, this was 2008.

00:08:23.300 This was before the era of smartphones.

00:08:25.240 So to have a fairly ostentatious home movie camera there, it's not really normal.

00:08:30.840 But she looked at it.

00:08:32.160 I could see she paused for a second, and then she said, oh, whatever.

00:08:35.660 I've got to get out of here.

00:08:36.900 We spent six months arranging it.

00:08:38.800 So it was not a secret camera at all.

00:08:40.740 And for the course of the next hour, she asked questions, and I had really thought about one question only.

00:08:47.860 Because remember, this has been two years since the complaint was filed.

00:08:51.500 Human Rights Commission has moved so slowly.

00:08:53.480 I had been asked a hundred times the most obvious question.

00:08:57.820 Why did you publish cartoons?

00:08:59.560 That's a pretty good question.

00:09:01.220 And I would, well, it's a central artifact of the news story.

00:09:04.460 And we're a magazine.

00:09:05.640 We can show pictures.

00:09:06.700 If you're in the radio, you have to paint a picture with words.

00:09:09.260 It's the center of the news.

00:09:11.060 They're actually very boring cartoons.

00:09:13.160 That's an important part of the story, to know how hypersensitive this is.

00:09:16.100 These weren't obscene.

00:09:17.760 It's a statement of freedom.

00:09:18.880 There's a lot of good reasons.

00:09:20.100 And I practiced my answer maybe a hundred times with real journalists.

00:09:25.280 But I made a moral decision before that interrogation.

00:09:28.540 I thought, and Muslim students would write to me, I'm doing a thesis on this.

00:09:34.900 Can you talk to me?

00:09:35.980 And they thought I would be standoffish.

00:09:38.020 I engaged.

00:09:41.060 But when the government asks you, why did you publish those cartoons?

00:09:46.840 I don't think you can give the same answer.

00:09:48.320 My answer was not a secret.

00:09:50.180 I gave it to anyone who would ask.

00:09:51.900 Friendly or unfriendly.

00:09:53.840 But when the government asks you, they're asking for a reason.

00:09:56.220 What's the reason?

00:09:57.460 If your answer does not please them, there's a penalty.

00:10:00.520 There's a fine.

00:10:01.780 There's some other order.

00:10:03.400 So I would talk to almost anyone.

00:10:06.240 And I would try to be so reasonable.

00:10:08.040 Hey, please see it my way.

00:10:09.420 And can I convince you I'm right?

00:10:11.100 And I understand why you're sensitive to this.

00:10:13.040 Because it might be blasphemy.

00:10:14.520 But try and see it my way, I would sort of plead with them to take my persuasion.

00:10:19.700 Sometimes it will work.

00:10:20.460 Sometimes it wouldn't.

00:10:21.540 But when an agent of the state says, why did you publish this?

00:10:25.080 You cannot say, oh, please, sir, let me show you how reasonable I am.

00:10:30.000 Please let me show you my intricate philosophy for why.

00:10:33.300 No, no, no, no, no.

00:10:34.340 Because the reason that question is being asked in a government interrogation is because your

00:10:39.960 freedom turns on it.

00:10:41.560 Your fortune turns on it.

00:10:43.440 Your legal status turns on it.

00:10:45.740 And so to give a reasonable answer is to sort of submit.

00:10:49.340 It's to abide and agree with their right to ask you on pain of penalty.

00:10:53.580 If I met that interrogator on the street, hey, how are you?

00:10:56.280 Hey, how are you?

00:10:57.120 Here's my, I would have a conversation like a normal human.

00:11:00.020 But when it's a government interrogator, even though she was dressed in casual clothes

00:11:03.080 and it was very casual Friday.

00:11:04.860 And she seemed sort of bumbling and she seemed sort of caught off guard.

00:11:07.760 Like, I don't know why he's being, you know, aggressive with me or whatever.

00:11:11.560 But my freedom and fortune turned on my answers.

00:11:15.060 And so I made a moral decision to say, I, the only reason I'm going to tell you is because

00:11:21.560 it's my right to do so.

00:11:22.360 I think I said it's my bloody right to do so.

00:11:24.060 And instead of trying to sneak through, oh, I'm just a tiny mouse.

00:11:29.620 Please let me go by.

00:11:30.780 No, no, no.

00:11:31.680 Whatever reason is most offensive to you, government investigator, I invoke that reason.

00:11:36.460 I plead guilty, in effect, because there's no way I'm going to try and win my innocence

00:11:41.300 because I don't, I think this whole thing's a sham.

00:11:44.080 And in fact, that very morning I republished the cartoons on our Western Standard website.

00:11:50.040 And I told her that.

00:11:51.120 I said, this morning I've republished them.

00:11:53.220 That's what I think of you.

00:11:54.620 And I went home that day and my heart was pumping and I was sort of mad and I had been mad.

00:12:00.460 And I went home and I had never uploaded anything to YouTube before in my life.

00:12:03.940 YouTube was still brand new.

00:12:05.400 Was it part of Google back then?

00:12:06.760 No, I don't think so.

00:12:07.980 And PayPal was super new and blogs were still sort of new.

00:12:12.100 And I had never done any of these things before.

00:12:14.560 And I managed to edit the video into little clips and upload them.

00:12:18.940 And I thought, well, I'm going to send this to my friends and maybe 100 people, maybe a few thousand people will watch.

00:12:23.940 Well, those videos went super viral.

00:12:27.120 Hundreds of thousands of views.

00:12:28.440 And this was in 2008.

00:12:30.680 And because, like I say, no one would have believed that it would have happened.

00:12:35.540 If I would have said I was just interrogated by the government of Alberta about publishing cartoons,

00:12:39.800 nah, you weren't interrogated.

00:12:42.020 Well, I was.

00:12:42.780 And they asked me why I did it.

00:12:44.440 And they asked me about my religious thoughts or my political.

00:12:47.220 No, no, they didn't.

00:12:48.600 Well, the video didn't lie.

00:12:51.260 And within weeks, that interrogator quit the case because she was getting so many calls from the public.

00:12:57.340 And within months, the Human Rights Commission dropped the whole case without a hearing.

00:13:01.260 Wow.

00:13:02.220 The Vancouver Sun had an editorial a little bit later saying the Vancouver, the Human Rights Tribunal murdered its own reputation.

00:13:10.780 And that was in relation to a similar case against Mark Stein.

00:13:14.540 The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal murdered its own reputation.

00:13:18.360 So that was 2008, 2009.

00:13:22.980 I was being prosecuted.

00:13:24.340 Mark Stein was being prosecuted for something McLean's magazine did.

00:13:26.800 That's where Ken White was at the time.

00:13:28.220 He was at McLean's.

00:13:29.020 And there was a public change of the mood that we have gone too far down the path of political correctness.

00:13:36.740 And so the Conservative government under Stephen Harper passed a bill to repeal the federal censorship provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

00:13:45.920 In Alberta, where I had been investigated, the not-so-sympathetic provincial PCs also made changes.

00:13:53.160 And a last little factoid I want to bring to your attention is that a survey was done by Compass, which was a little pollster back then, interviewing dozens of working journalists.

00:14:04.500 So it wasn't a statistically valid poll of the general public.

00:14:08.880 It was phone calls to working journalists.

00:14:11.160 What do you think should have been done about the cartoons?

00:14:13.660 And 70% of working journalists surveyed in 2008 said, not only should Ezra have been allowed to publish them, but our media should have published them also.

00:14:24.540 70% of working journalists in the year 2008 said, we should have all done it out of solidarity, out of newsworthiness, out of freedom.

00:14:34.200 Well, now we're in the year 2020.

00:14:35.540 And I promise you, Candace, that if you were to do that same survey today, you would be lucky to have 30%.

00:14:43.460 You'd be lucky to have 10% who said, yeah, we should publish something like that.

00:14:48.600 People would say, oh, it's racist, it's systemic discrimination, it's hate speech, de-platform you, prosecute you, hate crime.

00:14:56.640 In a dozen years, the entire temperature has changed, worst of all, in the media class.

00:15:06.460 I put it to you that severely normal Canadians still love freedom of speech.

00:15:09.860 And I bet you Rawah Khaled and other refugees from strict Islamism still believe in free speech.

00:15:16.360 But our intellectual class, our cultural class, our professors, they've gone silent at best.

00:15:23.920 They're actually part of the woke mob.

00:15:26.880 And I think things are worse now than they were before.

00:15:31.200 Well, it's interesting because, you know, there's so much free speech on the Internet now.

00:15:34.900 And I think that's part of the thing that the tech companies are now scrambling, like, what are we going to do?

00:15:38.840 Because you can put any, anyone can put pictures up on Twitter.

00:15:41.820 Anyone can kind of publicize their own thing.

00:15:44.320 So to me, it's almost shocking that so many media companies were afraid to publish the cartoons in the first place.

00:15:50.080 And you can kind of say, okay, well, there was a lot of retaliation against the artists and people in Denmark.

00:15:55.260 Maybe they were afraid for their own safety.

00:15:56.860 But, you know, that 70% number of working journalists, I'd be really curious to see what it is now.

00:16:03.220 Because in some ways, you know, political correctness has gotten much, much worse.

00:16:07.080 But in other ways, I do feel that there are so many outlets and there are so many people who want to get the truth

00:16:12.100 and know the truth that they can find it because there are, you know, independent outlets like the ones that you've created

00:16:17.200 or we've created here at True North.

00:16:18.940 I'm going to politely disagree with you on that.

00:16:20.980 And I'm going to give you two proof points.

00:16:23.220 One is a recent instance of Rex Murphy at the National Post.

00:16:27.140 He's their star columnist.

00:16:28.200 I think he's probably their most read guy.

00:16:29.900 He's a character.

00:16:30.680 He's a Canadian icon.

00:16:32.060 And he's a very good arguer.

00:16:34.640 And he wrote a piece saying, you know, Canada has its problems, but we're not inherently systemically racist.

00:16:40.700 I think that's right.

00:16:42.240 But even if you disagree with him, all right, disagree with him.

00:16:44.820 But 30 of his colleagues, usually young millennial hires at the National Post,

00:16:50.800 I read the list of names and I Googled them all, who are they?

00:16:53.740 30 people at the National Post signed a letter to the editors demanding that that never happen again

00:16:58.900 and demanding all sorts of rules on what you can say and not.

00:17:01.820 Now, that's the majority of working reporters at the National Post,

00:17:06.560 a newspaper that was explicitly founded to be freer, conservative-ish.

00:17:12.580 And they actually had a struggle session where everyone vented and demanded that Rex be silenced.

00:17:18.220 Right.

00:17:18.480 And it's similar to what happened at the New York Times.

00:17:20.680 The difference, Ezra, is that at the New York Times, you know, they're a center-left publication

00:17:24.380 and you kind of expect them to be overridden by these sort of woke millennials,

00:17:28.180 whereas the National Post is not supposed to be that.

00:17:30.320 It's supposed to be the conservative.

00:17:31.300 Oh, and that's the thing.

00:17:32.800 If they're in there, you know, forget about raising the drawbridge.

00:17:36.660 They're already in the castle.

00:17:38.620 So using the 70% number, we went from 70% saying not only should Western Standard and Levant publish the cartoon,

00:17:47.080 we all should, to 70% saying get rid of Rex.

00:17:49.780 Because he said the, in fact, they ran an article by one of those young red guard cultural Marxists.

00:17:58.260 Who is a Financial Times reporter, so she doesn't even write about, or Financial Post, she doesn't even write about these social issues.

00:18:03.820 She writes about business.

00:18:04.680 Yeah, Van Malis, Supermanian, and I very carefully read her rebuttal, and I mean, I disagree with most of it, but so what?

00:18:11.500 But there was a key line, she said, he should not be allowed to have a national forum for these.

00:18:19.340 So she didn't say he's wrong for these five reasons.

00:18:22.200 She said he's wrong for these five reasons, and he should not be allowed to argue back.

00:18:27.400 And I read this amazing picture book, I'll show it to you later because I've got it with me, of the Cultural Revolution in Mao's China from 1966 to 1976.

00:18:39.700 The book is called Red Color News Soldier, and it's photographs from a People's Liberation Army, actually a red guard photographer of the struggle sessions,

00:18:47.960 where people had to self-denounce and weren't allowed to defend, and they had to wear dunce caps in the public square as thousands of people pointed and shouted.

00:18:56.320 And the psychological pressure, the political pressure, it was pure totalitarianism.

00:19:02.240 It was informants accusing each other, and it wasn't once.

00:19:05.960 It was a ten-year reign of terror.

00:19:08.540 And there's a couple of photos in this book of someone who didn't go along with his self-denunciation.

00:19:15.480 So there were all these sham trials, and one guy didn't want to go along with it.

00:19:19.240 So they literally stuffed a cloth in his mouth so he wouldn't protest his innocence.

00:19:23.360 Another woman had her jaw dislocated because she kept saying, no, I didn't do it, I didn't do it.

00:19:28.960 And I swear to God, I felt, I had first come across this book in Hong Kong a dozen years ago.

00:19:35.980 It was a shocking book to me then.

00:19:38.140 And when I heard what the struggle session in the National Post was like, it was the first thing I thought of.

00:19:43.600 Stuff a cloth in Rex Murphy's mouth if he won't self-denounce.

00:19:47.020 Well, we're going to bloody well stuff a cloth in his mouth.

00:19:48.940 So that's pretty much what they were saying.

00:19:53.900 My second proof point is much more terrifying.

00:19:58.600 It's social media.

00:20:00.300 We used to have a very colorful character at Rebel News called Tommy Robinson.

00:20:05.720 It's not his real name.

00:20:06.500 Stephen Yaxley landed his name.

00:20:07.880 He lives in Britain, and he's worried about the Islamification of Britain.

00:20:11.380 He's very careful to draw a distinction between Muslims, he has many Muslim friends, and between Islam and the Islamification of the public square.

00:20:20.120 He can take him or leave him.

00:20:21.160 I like the guy.

00:20:21.820 He's a colorful character.

00:20:23.240 He's got a criminal record.

00:20:25.100 He's a working class Brit.

00:20:26.880 He's imperfect, but he raises a real issue in society that people are afraid to talk about.

00:20:31.520 I think so.

00:20:31.980 And as Majid Nawaz, the Pakistani-Brit talk show host in the U.K., points out, because the establishment media refuses to talk about those issues, it's fallen to the Tommy Robinsons to talk about them.

00:20:46.400 People wouldn't go to Tommy Robinson if the Telegraph and the Times and the Mirror and the Guardian would have a fair hearing of these issues.

00:20:53.560 So Majid Nawaz says it's because we're so afraid to talk about it that Tommy has the mic because no one else is talking, and it's a very good point.

00:21:03.640 So anyways, Tommy worked with us, and he did great work.

00:21:06.960 He left us in 2018, and he's done his own thing.

00:21:10.320 But since he left us, I mean, it's coincidental, he's been deplatformed more and more, kicked off Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, even TikTok kicked him off, kicked off place after place.

00:21:22.760 Okay, we've seen that before, but he is on a special blacklist that has been confirmed by Facebook itself.

00:21:33.620 Even putting his photograph on Facebook without even his name will be facially recognized and taken down.

00:21:43.220 Any conversation about Tommy Robinson that represents his views or treats him favorably will be deleted as a strike.

00:21:54.340 The only way you can describe or discuss Tommy Robinson on Facebook is if you denounce him.

00:22:00.660 Now that sounds like an insane, dystopian, 1984-style rule.

00:22:06.100 That doesn't sound real, does it?

00:22:07.580 That's crazy.

00:22:08.320 But it was confirmed when a Danish TV station was doing a show on Tommy.

00:22:15.920 Tommy was coming to town.

00:22:17.400 They wanted to denounce him.

00:22:19.480 They're liberals in Copenhagen.

00:22:21.480 So they put on their Facebook page, Tommy Robinson is coming in.

00:22:25.080 What's your toughest question for him?

00:22:26.400 We're going to get him.

00:22:27.960 And that was taken down by Facebook because it wasn't a denunciation.

00:22:30.760 So they complained to Facebook, Facebook's Scandinavian boss came on the show and said,

00:22:37.460 we have a blacklist, Tommy's on it, you cannot say his name except to, whoa, you cannot even, you can't have audio,

00:22:46.920 you can't have video, and they will use the highest technology, facial recognition, to automatically detect that.

00:22:53.820 Now, we know that Tommy Robinson's on it.

00:22:56.220 Who else is on it?

00:22:57.660 And is there any oversight in how do you get off it?

00:22:59.920 The government has a no-fly list.

00:23:02.040 But you can find out if you're on it.

00:23:03.380 You can appeal it.

00:23:04.100 You can sue.

00:23:04.920 How do you know?

00:23:06.140 Who do you sue?

00:23:07.060 What was the hearing?

00:23:07.900 Can I appeal?

00:23:08.880 What was I accused of doing?

00:23:10.640 This Danish TV station did a 15-minute segment with the head of Facebook,

00:23:15.760 and they couldn't explain why he was on it.

00:23:19.300 They couldn't explain what he did to get on this blacklist.

00:23:21.260 I tell you this because you don't know what's being censored, right?

00:23:27.100 You don't know what Google has taken out of the search rankings.

00:23:30.100 You don't know what they pushed down.

00:23:32.160 One day, a favorite person you were looking for just isn't there.

00:23:35.300 Oh, well, you've got 100 other people to follow.

00:23:37.980 I went through the Alberta Human Rights Commission process, and I hated it.

00:23:42.500 But at least there was a process.

00:23:44.520 I had lawyers.

00:23:45.640 I had hearings.

00:23:48.080 There was something I could hold on to.

00:23:49.800 But a couple months ago, I interviewed one of Facebook's censors based in Phoenix, Arizona.

00:23:58.000 He worked for a company called Cognizant.

00:24:00.760 1,500 people worked in their Phoenix office three shifts a day censoring 200 posts per day each.

00:24:09.040 That's 300,000 posts per day they censored in this little Phoenix factory.

00:24:17.000 Right, and they're not even Facebook employees, so there's no real recourse.

00:24:20.160 Because if you bring it up with Facebook, they kind of shrug and say, well, we have contractors that do that kind of work.

00:24:25.700 Yeah, and I was talking to this guy, and he said, oh, we had a Canadian election handbook.

00:24:29.960 I said, oh, you did, did you?

00:24:30.960 And he looked it up while I was talking to him.

00:24:33.100 He said, no one was allowed to criticize Jagmeet Singh's turban.

00:24:38.900 Okay, now I wouldn't want to criticize his turban.

00:24:41.080 I would criticize his ideology.

00:24:42.440 That's sort of mean and personal, but people call this guy fat or call this guy short or call, you can be mean to people.

00:24:50.880 You can say terrible, but you're not allowed to be mean to Jagmeet Singh.

00:24:54.180 That was a rule.

00:24:55.800 He told me that the phrase Nazi, which is sometimes hurled at right-wingers, that's allowed.

00:25:01.600 But feminazi, which is sort of a made-up criticism of feminists who act very authoritarian, feminazi is banned.

00:25:10.800 But you can call someone a Nazi on Facebook, and they won't take it out.

00:25:14.300 You can't call someone a feminazi.

00:25:17.120 Open borders immigration was specifically mentioned in their election handbook for censorship for the Canadian election.

00:25:25.700 So here's a guy in Phoenix who's been given an election censorship handbook, and with 1,500 people in Phoenix, they're censoring 300,000 posts a day.

00:25:38.080 I don't know how many are in Canada.

00:25:39.840 We don't even know about it.

00:25:40.840 We don't even talk about it.

00:25:41.720 There's no recourse.

00:25:43.040 And you don't know what you didn't see because how would you know what you didn't see?

00:25:48.680 You don't know what you don't know.

00:25:50.240 So in many ways, things are much darker now because at least I wasn't in a dark room punching at shadows when I was facing down Charlene McGovern in 2008 with the cartoon kerfuffle.

00:26:04.280 In 2020, and this is an election year, who knows?

00:26:09.000 Right.

00:26:09.740 Who knows?

00:26:10.600 What they're coming at.

00:26:11.580 And it's interesting because I feel like the tech darlings in Silicon Valley was sort of viewed upon very positively by the public up until a couple of years ago.

00:26:19.160 And then things really took a sour turn after Trump got elected, and a lot of people blamed Facebook and, you know, the whole Russiagate and all that kind of stuff.

00:26:26.700 I feel like the tides are turning.

00:26:28.400 So I'm not going to disagree with you, but I'm a little bit more optimistic just in saying that I think that, you know, if the tech companies are doing this, and they are, and they're getting exposed, it's just a matter of time before they have to become more transparent, pivot, come up with a new way of doing things, come up with a transparent constitution that they're going to use so that there is recourse.

00:26:47.560 And I hope there is, and I think that part of the reason that we even know about this stuff is because of the journalism that you guys do over at The Rebel.

00:26:54.620 Well, essentially to say I rely on Alan Bocari of Breitbart's tech correspondent.

00:26:59.260 He has a lot of great sources in these companies.

00:27:01.880 Again, I'm more pessimistic than you, and I hope you're right.

00:27:05.160 But what's Google afraid of?

00:27:09.720 A fine?

00:27:11.800 Are they afraid of someone saying mean things about them?

00:27:15.800 I don't know if Google's afraid of anything other than maybe being broken up in a trust-busting action that Trump is obviously not going to achieve.

00:27:22.820 I don't think they're afraid of anything, and I think they regard themselves as larger than any national law.

00:27:31.060 I think they regard themselves almost like a country of their own.

00:27:34.420 And a lot of these companies, Facebook in particular, are run by men who have a messianic complex.

00:27:39.800 They think they're the messiah or a god-like complex.

00:27:42.520 Sometimes they say as much.

00:27:43.740 And it's Mark Zuckerberg.

00:27:47.080 I mean, these companies are the largest spenders on lobbying in Washington, D.C., and they colonize conservatives, too.

00:27:53.640 I mean, the Democrats are already on board with censorship, but, you know, $100,000 is enough to often buy off a conservative think tank.

00:28:01.340 I am deeply worried about it, and we ourselves have been hit by this.

00:28:06.360 And we have someone we can talk to at some of these companies now.

00:28:10.780 We were demonetized.

00:28:12.140 We were growing at 8% per month until early 2017 when all the conservative websites were shut down.

00:28:19.460 We were on course to make over a million bucks in ads from YouTube alone, and then they knocked that down by 90%.

00:28:26.640 They just demonetized it.

00:28:28.440 They say, oh, advertisers don't want to be on your controversial stuff.

00:28:32.300 Says you.

00:28:33.400 Says you.

00:28:33.920 They don't demonetize liberal sites like the Young Turks, for example.

00:28:37.540 So I think that so many of the changes are done subtly, quietly, and you don't even know, and there's no one to ask.

00:28:46.700 Last anecdote.

00:28:48.360 One day we were given a notice by Facebook.

00:28:52.360 You have violated Facebook policies.

00:28:56.500 Click this button to unpublish your site.

00:28:58.940 And the button said unpublish.

00:29:02.580 Okay, so that's the only button there was.

00:29:05.020 There wasn't two buttons, unpublish or I disagree.

00:29:08.360 That was just one button.

00:29:10.300 And they didn't say what policy we violated, and they didn't say which posts we made that violated what rule.

00:29:17.600 They just said, you've done something somewhere.

00:29:19.660 We're not going to tell you what.

00:29:20.440 And there's just a big button in front of you now.

00:29:23.640 Just touch it, and your entire site is gone.

00:29:26.660 Now, we just made such a fuss, and they finally said, oh, it was a glitch.

00:29:30.380 A glitch, eh?

00:29:32.260 Can you pretend I'm not quite that dumb?

00:29:34.880 Can you actually give me a real answer?

00:29:36.300 Oh, it's a glitch.

00:29:37.260 You wouldn't understand.

00:29:38.180 No, try me.

00:29:38.800 Try me.

00:29:39.220 I'll try and figure it out.

00:29:40.280 Like, just complete baloney.

00:29:42.040 And when all these glitches happen on one side of the ideological divide.

00:29:46.020 Look, San Francisco is the most left-wing city in North America.

00:29:48.820 And Silicon Valley are the elite, and people are terrified of being conservative there.

00:29:56.440 And they don't even realize how left-wing they are.

00:30:00.100 Anyhow, I think that censorship is the problem of our age, because free speech is the strategic freedom upon which all other freedoms are based.

00:30:09.120 Absolutely.

00:30:09.620 I agree.

00:30:10.120 I think that the concept behind the social media platforms was that it was going to enable free speech on a different level

00:30:16.460 and allow everyday Canadians, Americans, citizens to express their views.

00:30:21.500 So you wouldn't have to have an Alberta Report magazine.

00:30:24.840 You wouldn't have to have the printing press, you know, all of the overhead.

00:30:28.540 Everyone could just state their opinion.

00:30:30.780 You know, the problem for the Silicon Valley people was that when they extended this big free speech platform to everyone,

00:30:36.700 they realized that people have a lot of different views.

00:30:39.200 You know, there's not a lot of conformity.

00:30:40.940 There is intellectual conformity in elite circles.

00:30:43.460 You know, the Silicon Valley is sort of replicating like an Ivy League environment where they do all have the same opinions.

00:30:49.680 And my husband and I lived there for a couple of years.

00:30:51.520 We interacted in that environment.

00:30:53.600 And it's very much about conformity.

00:30:56.280 And so all of a sudden, you know, you have all these people from all over the country, all over the world,

00:31:00.400 that have really interesting, very different views.

00:31:03.920 And who's to say that you shouldn't have different views?

00:31:05.820 I mean, that's what makes a society more colorful.

00:31:08.860 But the idea, I think really since 2016 and Trump, sort of there's been a moral panic

00:31:13.600 and they're trying to reverse themselves and crack down.

00:31:17.280 So I agree that we're seeing some really, truly awful sort of moments of totalitarianism.

00:31:21.760 But I just have to remain optimistic that we're going to swing back towards the more that people realize what's happening

00:31:28.540 and these kind of things get exposed, they're going to demand transparency.

00:31:32.260 And maybe it is through the government.

00:31:33.460 Maybe the government does have to break up some of these companies or at least bring in some kind of rules around intellectual property

00:31:38.520 so that people own what they put out there or something.

00:31:41.560 Maybe it'll take decades.

00:31:42.860 But I still want to remain optimistic on that, Ezra.

00:31:46.600 I want to talk a little bit because, you know, you've had experiences in the mainstream media.

00:31:50.140 You worked for the National Post.

00:31:52.260 You had a show on Sun News Network that became, you know, the most popular conservative show in the country.

00:31:58.160 And then you kind of shifted towards independent media.

00:32:01.280 So first, let's talk a little bit about mainstream media and what it's like to work inside that environment.

00:32:07.140 So why don't you tell us a little bit about the National Post in the early days and what that was like?

00:32:11.460 Sure.

00:32:11.720 I mean, I started writing for newspapers when I was in college.

00:32:14.480 I was just such a frequent letter writer.

00:32:17.420 I really enjoyed writing short letters, especially if I could sneak in a joke.

00:32:21.380 And so one day the Calgary Sun editor said, you're writing so many letters.

00:32:25.100 Why don't we just give you a column and we'll pay you 50?

00:32:28.280 I think I wrote for free for months.

00:32:30.420 And then he gave me a raise to 50 bucks a column, which was a lot of money for me back then.

00:32:34.700 And by the time I was done law school, I had a little bit of a syndicate, Calgary, Edmonton.

00:32:39.720 I was writing for a newspaper in New Brunswick called The Daily Gleaner.

00:32:43.280 So I had this sort of fun.

00:32:45.040 I mean, I did dabble in student journalism, but it was more fun to write in the Edmonton Sun.

00:32:49.680 When I was going to law school at the University of Alberta, if I could fire back at my professors in the pages of The Edmonton Sun, it felt like an equalizer in terms of power because I was a student at their mercy.

00:32:59.340 And so I was always dabbling in that.

00:33:03.600 And when The National Post was born in 1998, I joined them soon after that.

00:33:10.740 It was wonderful being on the ground floor of an explicitly conservative newspaper that was so mainstream because it was owned by the biggest newspaper tycoon in the country, Conrad Black.

00:33:20.820 And they had a healthy budget, and this was 98, 99, 2000, before the Internet came in and killed everything in the media.

00:33:27.720 So it was really the glory days.

00:33:30.420 And to be in to help set the ideological direction of the paper was wonderful.

00:33:34.960 And back then, because Conrad Black and the paper was so big, the Internet was not as big by comparison, he was the mainstream.

00:33:42.860 So you can't de-platform the guy who has the biggest platform.

00:33:46.420 So it was great.

00:33:47.300 And over time, I went on and did other things.

00:33:53.760 But I switched to TV when Corey Tonight gave me a call and said, we're starting at the Sun News Network with Quebecor, and you've got to come out to Toronto and be part of that.

00:34:05.080 And even though they're owned by a Quebec-based tycoon, they're going to be pro-conservative and pro-Western.

00:34:11.840 And that's the funny thing.

00:34:12.860 Quebecor, as the name implies, is very much Quebec-centric.

00:34:15.600 But they built an English-language cable news show that was pro-Western.

00:34:22.920 I mean, it was just very unusual.

00:34:25.280 And I think Pierre-Carl Pella, though, sunk $50 million or more into that.

00:34:29.860 But at the end of the day, the CRTC regulators euthanized it.

00:34:35.360 And Stephen Harper lacked the political courage.

00:34:40.680 Well, I was going to say courage.

00:34:41.960 I was going to say ruthlessness to say to the CRTC, you approve this or you're out of a job.

00:34:46.320 Do you think Jean-Claude Chen would have allowed some bureaucratic agency to kill off a left-of-center media company?

00:34:53.120 He would personally have made the phone call himself.

00:34:56.840 Stephen Harper allowed the CRTC to kill the Sun News Network by not telling cable companies, you've got to run this.

00:35:06.340 I mean, in the names of, oh, I'm libertarian, I'm hands-off.

00:35:09.180 Well, you let someone else take those things.

00:35:10.840 The guys you left it up to were not libertarian and hands-off.

00:35:14.100 You let the incumbent legacy liberals kill off this conservative project by keeping your hands off Stephen Harper.

00:35:22.380 You didn't keep it neutral.

00:35:23.700 You gave it to your enemies.

00:35:25.300 So they euthanized the Sun News Network on the eve of the 2015 election.

00:35:30.460 I'm not saying it would have stopped Trudeau, but if you would have had a big, healthy, national, mainstream TV channel just blaring away 24-7,

00:35:39.320 you would have changed the media landscape the same way Fox News changed it in America.

00:35:42.800 But they didn't.

00:35:45.500 And when the Sun News Network shut down in February 2015, I was very sad.

00:35:49.820 It was the best job of my life.

00:35:51.720 It was so wonderful.

00:35:53.700 But I could sense that day was coming.

00:35:56.680 And so when we went in to pick up our severance checks, I said, you, you, you, you, you, come to my place and let's see if we can cook something up on YouTube.

00:36:04.980 And we spent a day in my living room and we hatched a plan.

00:36:09.880 And we just, okay, let's find a camera.

00:36:11.900 Does anyone have a camera?

00:36:13.280 Let's find a microphone.

00:36:14.380 Anyone have a microphone?

00:36:15.880 Okay.

00:36:16.200 How do we upload to YouTube?

00:36:17.380 Okay.

00:36:17.600 We figured that out.

00:36:18.600 So we did it the first day.

00:36:21.800 Okay.

00:36:22.640 Can we do it the next day?

00:36:23.640 Okay.

00:36:24.320 And we did it 10 days in a row.

00:36:25.960 And we put up about 50 videos in 10 days.

00:36:28.560 And we took a breath and we wrote to all our people because we had some email addresses and said, all right, the Sun News Network died.

00:36:36.280 If you want us to live, help out now.

00:36:38.620 And I'm not sure if I ever disclosed the figure, but that first email raised $85,000.

00:36:44.220 And when that came in, I said, okay, maybe we're going to be okay.

00:36:47.320 Because I had eight people.

00:36:48.680 I was paying them for my own severance.

00:36:50.460 I said, I'll pay you out of my severance until we get it going.

00:36:52.400 And by the way, the liberal media couldn't believe that we raised $85,000 that way.

00:36:57.960 They said, no, you must have some secret billionaire donor.

00:37:01.960 Because they couldn't believe that grassroots media could make it because I don't think they believe they could make it without some big benefactor, the CBC or a billionaire or Trudeau's bailout.

00:37:15.840 And we never looked back.

00:37:17.080 So here we are.

00:37:18.020 We're about five and a half years old.

00:37:19.400 And, you know, our staff grows and shrinks.

00:37:22.500 We're about 24 people now.

00:37:26.140 We've built some real stars.

00:37:27.880 Some have gone on to other networks.

00:37:30.240 Some stars have sort of exploded.

00:37:33.400 But others have gone on to become real shooting stars.

00:37:36.900 But most importantly, I think we've filled part of a void.

00:37:40.260 Our motto, we've had different mottos, but our motto right now is telling the other side of the story.

00:37:44.000 And the reason we chose that motto is to remind the world that it's okay to have another side of the story besides the government line.

00:37:55.860 And it's okay to tell the other side of the story.

00:37:57.860 And that used to be a thing.

00:37:58.880 And it's not a bad thing.

00:38:02.400 Maybe you can't do that if you're on the government take, which so much of the media is these days.

00:38:06.900 If I'm not mistaken, the CBC itself has more resources and more staff in the news side than all the private sector journalists in the country combined.

00:38:18.520 That is not healthy.

00:38:19.920 No.

00:38:20.220 And then most of the private sector journalists are now colonized by Trudeau's newspaper bailout.

00:38:26.360 And those on TV and radio are still at the whim of the CRTC.

00:38:31.260 And if you get too rambunctious, the CRTC will shut you down.

00:38:34.420 They threatened to do that to Schwa FM about 20 years ago because they were too...

00:38:38.000 So being on the Internet is really the only place to be free.

00:38:41.860 You've still got to fight with the Facebooks and the Twitters.

00:38:43.980 And don't think for a second they're not susceptible to political pressure.

00:38:48.380 But here we are five and a half years later.

00:38:50.820 We have 1.35 million YouTube subscribers.

00:38:54.900 Now I wish we got a buck a month for those.

00:38:56.900 It's free.

00:38:57.460 But people watch us.

00:39:01.360 We have viewers around the world also.

00:39:02.980 That's another fun thing is that the Sun News Network was just in Canada.

00:39:06.000 I mentioned Tommy Robinson.

00:39:07.140 We were active there.

00:39:08.040 We have American followers.

00:39:09.080 We have Australian followers.

00:39:10.500 Sometimes we travel around the world.

00:39:12.280 So we're still alive.

00:39:14.280 It's very much citizen journalism.

00:39:15.980 I think the only person in our whole shop with a journalism degree is David Menzies,

00:39:20.240 and he's very man on the street anyways.

00:39:22.640 And, you know, we make our share of mistakes.

00:39:24.900 But I'm very proud of what we've built.

00:39:28.820 And when you have to make your money $20 at a time through grassroots donations,

00:39:35.520 it forces you to be extremely attentive to what viewers like and don't like.

00:39:41.460 And sometimes we get it wrong, and we hear immediately.

00:39:44.040 Yeah, you get that immediate feedback, which you don't usually get in the newspaper or on the radio

00:39:47.780 because you see the comments, and they sort of direct you, and you see the view count and all that kind of stuff.

00:39:52.100 Right.

00:39:52.400 And if you work for the CBC or, frankly, any government bailed out media, you actually don't even care what the public says.

00:39:59.420 You're playing to one viewer, Justin Trudeau.

00:40:02.460 If you please, Justin Trudeau, you'll be fine.

00:40:04.960 We have thousands of grassroots supporters, none of whom, even our biggest donor, is maybe 1% or 2% of our total revenue.

00:40:16.100 So although I'm very attentive to if someone says, here's $1,000, I have a point of view.

00:40:19.640 But there's no one who gives us so much money that I feel like I am bound to him or to her.

00:40:27.620 And that's the great freedom, is if you can look at any donor and say, I really appreciate your point of view,

00:40:33.900 but we're not going to change our ideology or philosophy to get your $1,000, from that comes a great freedom and independence.

00:40:42.240 And that's actually why people give to us.

00:40:45.280 Well, you develop respect that way.

00:40:46.880 You're like, you know, for me, I love your journalism, Ezra.

00:40:49.640 I probably disagree with about a quarter of what you say.

00:40:52.040 Fair enough.

00:40:52.520 But that is more likely to make me want to tune in and see you.

00:40:55.720 And we get the same thing at True North where someone will say, you know, Candace, I hate what you have to say about supply management.

00:41:01.340 You know, I'm part of the dairy business and I disagree with you.

00:41:04.600 But I really appreciate these other five things that you do and I respect you for that.

00:41:07.540 And, you know, that's normal and healthy in a society.

00:41:10.260 And so I feel like the sort of independent citizenship journalism is much more closely to what the service of journalism ought to be.

00:41:18.220 Yeah.

00:41:18.420 And people sometimes say, Ezra, you're always crowdfunding.

00:41:21.360 I have two answers to that.

00:41:22.300 The first is, well, then don't chip in if you don't want to.

00:41:24.640 I mean, every time we send out a crowdfunding appeal, 99 percent of people don't give.

00:41:29.760 And that's OK because the 1 percent who does at any moment is enough to keep us going.

00:41:34.140 The second is, I think it's the most honest way to live.

00:41:37.420 I mean, like I say, YouTube has practically demonetized us, so we can't really sell ads.

00:41:42.440 So what's the alternative?

00:41:43.420 Have a corporate benefactor?

00:41:45.020 OK, that's fine as long as you follow that corporation's interest.

00:41:48.640 Have a government benefactor?

00:41:50.180 Well, then you're not a journalist at all.

00:41:51.980 So sometimes people say, oh, you're always crowdfunding.

00:41:54.500 Yeah?

00:41:55.200 Let me know if you have a better way to do it.

00:41:56.720 If I was a billionaire, I'd put my own money into it.

00:41:59.100 Right.

00:41:59.380 And it's at least transparent because people know that that's how you make your money.

00:42:03.180 It's not like, you know, sometimes you see a journalism outlet and you realize that they're funded by, like, the government of Qatar or something like that.

00:42:09.260 Yeah. Oh, yeah.

00:42:09.540 And you're like, OK, well, that should be disclosed right up at the front.

00:42:13.280 I think it's really kind of interesting how back then, you know, with the National Post and Sun News, there was a mainstream conservative voice in the media because that's basically been absent.

00:42:22.980 I write for the Toronto Sun and even the Toronto Sun sort of teeters.

00:42:26.420 Yes, sometimes they're really good editorially and firmly conservative, but other times they sort of go with the trends.

00:42:31.980 And I think that there is a lot of pressure on them.

00:42:34.100 Same with the radio stations, the radio hosts to sort of see the writing on the wall and they don't want to be the next ones canceled.

00:42:39.440 So they just it's not that there's any active censorship, but it's just like a self-censorship that happens.

00:42:44.840 And it has such an influence, like if half of the journalists in Ottawa work for the CBC, that's going to impact the questions that are going to go to the politicians and that's going to influence the way that the stories are written.

00:42:56.380 And it's also, you know, biased against any kind of conservative opinion.

00:43:01.640 It's just interesting to think that there was a time where those voices were legitimate and that there were conservatives in the mainstream.

00:43:07.300 And if you're one of the 50 percent or 40 percent of journalists who don't work for the CBC, you're thinking, yikes, if I get laid off, the CBC is the only safe bet.

00:43:15.860 I better start to, you know, tailor my reporting so I'm a good fit as a CBC guy.

00:43:21.120 So it does impact the non-government sector.

00:43:24.980 And, you know, post-media, they're taking 140 grand per week from Trudeau.

00:43:29.800 Don't tell me that's not subconsciously not on their mind.

00:43:33.720 You can't be.

00:43:34.540 If I knew someone was giving me, let me just make a different number, 14,000 a month, don't tell me I could separate that in my mind if there was a story to attack them.

00:43:45.440 About them, yeah.

00:43:46.120 And I'll be very candid.

00:43:46.940 When I worked for Quebecor, there were two things I wouldn't do.

00:43:50.500 No one told me this.

00:43:51.360 I'm just not dumb.

00:43:52.460 Don't take on Pierre-Carl Paladeau and his dream of having the Nordiques in Quebec City.

00:43:56.420 Just don't.

00:43:57.500 And how about lay off Brian Mulroney, the chairman of the company?

00:44:00.740 And you know what?

00:44:01.300 There's 10,000 things to talk about.

00:44:02.780 I don't regard that as self-censorship.

00:44:04.920 That's just, okay, those guys run the company.

00:44:07.080 Maybe I'm not going to shoot at my boss.

00:44:08.580 And I don't feel like I was in any way censored.

00:44:10.940 I felt like I was the freest journalist in Canada.

00:44:13.200 But you'd have to be insane to go after literally your boss.

00:44:16.480 So I didn't.

00:44:18.780 Don't tell me that if you're working for post-media, that's not in the back of your mind.

00:44:22.360 When the heritage minister is in the news, and the heritage minister is the one cutting the check.

00:44:27.520 And like I say, when I don't even know who's donating on any given day, that's not on my mind at all.

00:44:33.280 All that's on my mind is, am I staying true to what I think is right here, my own conscience?

00:44:38.800 Am I being fair enough?

00:44:39.900 And I sometimes sort of think, well, who is the average rebel viewer?

00:44:44.700 Am I doing what they want?

00:44:46.480 That's a far better math than, uh-oh, will my company's lobbyists not get a meeting with the heritage minister now because I was mean to them?

00:44:54.460 And don't think that politicians aren't petty that way.

00:44:57.120 They're extremely petty that way.

00:44:59.180 Yeah, I wonder if that was, I always wondered if that was part of the reason why Sun News didn't get their license because you guys were too harsh on James Moore, who was the heritage minister, who might have fallen on his desk.

00:45:09.740 But I won't speculate, but you're absolutely right that politicians having that kind of power over journalists is just wrong.

00:45:17.200 And so I think that the independent media is the way to go.

00:45:20.060 I think it's the way of the future.

00:45:20.880 And if you look at the Canadian media landscape, you had Justin Trudeau bribing the CBC in his first election with $150 million.

00:45:27.500 That money went towards creating a digital platform for CBC to compete with newspapers because at that point newspapers were all coming online and that was how they were getting their money.

00:45:37.100 So then all of a sudden, you know, Trudeau made it so that the newspapers weren't profitable enough.

00:45:41.260 Then he had to bail them out and it's just like bailout after bailout after bailout.

00:45:44.400 I can't see it actually fixing the problem that there aren't enough subscribers to these media outlets.

00:45:50.520 And I think that inevitably the models, you know, the model that you found and you were one of the first ones to go on to YouTube and to build this big kind of grassroots audience.

00:46:00.000 And it's been amazing to watch.

00:46:01.860 Now, if you don't mind, I kind of want to go into the history of The Rebel a little bit and talk about because, you know, you were this big rising star and you had this huge platform.

00:46:09.580 You had these really, really talented journalists that were famous all around the world.

00:46:14.620 And then sort of I don't want to say it blew up, but but there was a moment where Faith Goldie was down at the Charlottesville rally.

00:46:20.860 And it was sort of the height of the moral panic around our Trump supporters, Nazis.

00:46:25.140 And we've got these people who are acting kind of like Nazis in Charlottesville and Faith was there and she was sort of being too friendly with them.

00:46:32.060 She went on one of the podcasts with the Daily Storm, I believe.

00:46:36.280 Why don't you just tell us a little bit, as much as you're comfortable, you know, talking about what it was like on that side when that all blew up.

00:46:42.380 2016 was an amazing year.

00:46:44.480 It was the year of Trump.

00:46:46.500 It was the year of dissident, independent.

00:46:49.160 It was the year of the rebel.

00:46:49.860 So we we just blew up so huge that year.

00:46:52.640 And some of our stars were Lauren Southern, Faith Goldie.

00:46:56.460 I don't think Tommy Robinson was with us yet.

00:46:58.440 I can't remember.

00:46:59.140 I'd have to check.

00:47:00.600 And you even had Claire Lamont who went on to.

00:47:03.340 Oh, that's right.

00:47:04.160 Yeah.

00:47:04.460 She was doing videos.

00:47:05.540 You guys had a lot of talent all over the world.

00:47:07.420 Yeah.

00:47:07.740 And I think we were growing pretty quick.

00:47:10.880 Then Trump won and we grew even bigger.

00:47:13.040 And then we sent people down to the inauguration in January.

00:47:17.420 We grew even bigger.

00:47:18.060 So after the election, we continued to grow.

00:47:20.240 Like we were going 8% per month.

00:47:23.080 And then in February, the tap was turned off.

00:47:27.920 We said, what's going on?

00:47:28.600 Our income just fell by 85%.

00:47:30.160 What's going on here?

00:47:31.340 And that was the great demonetization.

00:47:33.220 That was the panic in all these social media companies that said, uh-oh, YouTube, Twitter,

00:47:38.060 Facebook created Trump.

00:47:39.360 We have to ensure this never happens again.

00:47:41.100 That's not even controversial.

00:47:42.360 That's pretty much documented what happened.

00:47:44.020 So we had a financial blow then, but we thought, okay, let's just keep going through.

00:47:48.000 Let's keep trying to grow.

00:47:51.500 And some of our staff got a little hot.

00:47:53.420 I mean, when you go from when you're 21 or 25 and you go from being a normal person to

00:48:00.520 being an internet celebrity, when you have a video that gets one or two million views

00:48:04.320 and 10,000 comments.

00:48:06.120 And I think my observation is that sometimes women are more susceptible to love or hate

00:48:13.420 comments on the internet.

00:48:14.920 I mean, it hurts my feelings a little bit too, but sometimes women have the most nasty comments

00:48:20.680 put to them on social media or the most flattering.

00:48:23.260 And if you're a regular human being and suddenly you become an internet celebrity and you have

00:48:28.980 10,000 people a day talking about you, you can become a little bit obsessed with getting

00:48:34.560 that hit, getting that fix.

00:48:36.160 And I think that happened to a couple of our people.

00:48:41.020 I have a memo I circulated in the office called Twitter Killed the Video Star.

00:48:45.060 It's about how Twitter can seduce you and you can start to live for the clicks.

00:48:48.940 I think Twitter is responsible for the loss of more of our staff than anyone else.

00:48:53.300 Anyways.

00:48:54.000 The funny thing about Twitter is that there isn't really an upside.

00:48:56.900 It's fun and it's a good way to learn stuff.

00:48:58.900 But if you say you have a scoop and you put it on Twitter, you know, you don't really drive

00:49:03.200 anyone to your story.

00:49:04.340 You kind of give it away for free.

00:49:05.660 It's a vanity.

00:49:06.020 It's all about vanity.

00:49:07.140 And I mean, I know the adrenaline rush of getting 10,000 people to like something.

00:49:11.780 Anyways, you ask about faith.

00:49:13.200 So yeah, I remember that weekend.

00:49:14.820 It was August.

00:49:16.120 And she had said, Ezra, there's this Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

00:49:19.280 I want to go on my own dime.

00:49:20.720 I'd never heard of this, so I Googled it.

00:49:22.180 And I looked at the lineup of speakers and I said, I remember I wrote her, I still have

00:49:26.480 the email I wrote to her.

00:49:27.260 I said, oh, you know what?

00:49:28.840 I don't like the looks of some of those speakers.

00:49:30.200 They're a little bit out there.

00:49:32.080 And, you know, alt-right, alt-light, what do these words even mean?

00:49:35.520 And I said to her, you know what?

00:49:36.740 Don't even go as a reporter because you simply being there, even if all you're doing is pointing

00:49:41.760 a camera, people will think you're part of it.

00:49:43.700 Just don't go.

00:49:44.500 And I forgot about it because, you know, this was before Charlottesville was a thing.

00:49:49.640 And then I actually went away that weekend with my family and I get this panic call on the

00:49:55.820 cell phone, Ezra, I just filmed a murder.

00:50:00.680 That was when the car rammed a protester.

00:50:03.280 I said, Faith, where are you?

00:50:04.360 What are you doing?

00:50:04.920 I'd totally forgotten about this Unite the Right thing that she had asked me about a few

00:50:09.280 weeks earlier.

00:50:09.860 I didn't even know where she, I told her not to go.

00:50:12.020 So I was surprised.

00:50:12.640 I didn't know you were somewhere.

00:50:13.460 But she captured the murder on camera.

00:50:16.800 And so weirdly, I spent the next six hours negotiating with different news agencies around

00:50:21.600 the world who wanted to buy that footage.

00:50:23.240 So I didn't understand where she was, what had happened, because I didn't remember this

00:50:28.980 email exchange we had had weeks earlier.

00:50:31.100 So I wasted half a day on that little, well, everyone's stealing our footage thing.

00:50:36.840 I get back to the office the next day and I say, oh, this is what happened.

00:50:40.660 And I talked to her and I said, well, I didn't want you down there.

00:50:43.460 And that's not good.

00:50:45.160 But if all you were doing was just pointing the camera and talking, that's not really

00:50:48.800 marching in the protest.

00:50:50.680 And people said, you got a fire.

00:50:51.920 It's terrible.

00:50:52.500 She's all right.

00:50:53.120 I said, well, she went to an event as a journalist.

00:50:56.900 Now, I hadn't watched all her live streams, hours of her footage.

00:50:59.580 So I hadn't watched it all.

00:51:02.780 So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday goes by.

00:51:04.700 And I'm fighting.

00:51:05.720 I'm saying, I'm not firing her because she went there.

00:51:08.000 You don't fire a journalist because she goes to something.

00:51:10.080 That's what you politically correct.

00:51:11.440 I was done.

00:51:11.820 I was taking on a lot of water.

00:51:14.780 But, I mean, I believe in some loyalty.

00:51:17.880 I hadn't really pieced it all together what this thing was.

00:51:21.880 And then Faith comes to me.

00:51:23.000 I think it was on a Thursday or something.

00:51:25.040 And she shows me her phone.

00:51:26.860 She says, Ezra, look at this.

00:51:28.440 So I look at it.

00:51:29.880 And it's an email from a reporter saying, Faith, was that you on the Daily Stormer Nazi

00:51:36.140 podcast?

00:51:37.000 I'm doing a story.

00:51:37.740 And she says, and I could understand it.

00:51:44.280 So apparently when she was down there, she wasn't just a reporter.

00:51:49.060 She had kept hidden from me that she was participating in at least this one explicitly racist, I would

00:51:58.800 even say neo-Nazis, if it's called the Daily Stormer, that's a reference to Hitler's Der Sturmer.

00:52:05.060 That was a Nazi publication.

00:52:07.680 So she had kept that secret, foolishly thinking that you're going on a public podcast.

00:52:14.480 You don't think that's going to be public.

00:52:15.900 That's the public part of it.

00:52:16.900 So she said, I know I have to resign.

00:52:19.640 I said, no, you're not resigning.

00:52:21.280 I'm firing you.

00:52:22.460 Of course I'm firing her.

00:52:23.920 Not just that she lied to me.

00:52:25.020 You don't go on a Nazi podcast.

00:52:26.780 I said, get your stuff.

00:52:27.960 We're going to go to the boardroom.

00:52:28.960 You're going to say goodbye and you're out of here.

00:52:30.720 And so we did.

00:52:31.580 And I was stunned.

00:52:33.060 Of all our staff, in some ways I knew her the best.

00:52:37.120 I had known her many years from Sundays.

00:52:39.540 I had gone to Israel with her, the Jewish state.

00:52:45.020 And she was so Zionist.

00:52:46.760 She out-Zionist the Jews.

00:52:48.300 I remember that, actually, because I had a personal trainer who was from Israel.

00:52:51.740 And she knew faith.

00:52:52.760 And this was in California.

00:52:54.000 And faith was very well known amongst Israeli dedicated Jews that were very pro-Israel.

00:52:59.840 Faith went to Israel.

00:53:00.900 And she was so turbo-Zionist.

00:53:02.860 She became this internet star, this beautiful, bold Canadian girl

00:53:07.880 who was more pro-Israel than the Israelis.

00:53:10.580 Literally millions of views in Israel.

00:53:12.820 It was incredible.

00:53:14.040 I had, you know, I don't hang out a lot with the staff.

00:53:17.560 The boss doesn't want to say, hey, staff, hang out with me because they feel an obligation.

00:53:21.420 But I would actually hang out with faith a little bit.

00:53:23.860 My family, met her family in Florida once.

00:53:27.080 She had come on some rebel cruises and stuff.

00:53:29.600 So I felt like I knew her.

00:53:31.720 And in many ways, she was the perfect employee.

00:53:34.080 And I thought she was a Jew lover, if anything.

00:53:36.360 Like, I didn't talk to her a lot about Jews.

00:53:37.880 But by God, she was a Zionist in Israel.

00:53:40.300 But I mean, it wasn't a big focus.

00:53:42.420 And I mean, she used some of the lingo of the alt-right.

00:53:44.840 But I thought she was doing so as a joker, ironically.

00:53:47.320 And then for her to go down there, contrary to my direction,

00:53:52.480 secretly go on this show and think it would be kept a secret, was stunning.

00:53:57.720 I fired her within 60 seconds of learning that.

00:54:00.800 And by the way, that night, I had dinner scheduled with Jordan Peterson, just by coincidence.

00:54:08.160 I was so frustrated.

00:54:09.500 Anyway, I thought I'm going to go to dinner with him anyways.

00:54:11.360 Yeah.

00:54:11.880 Well, it's interesting because I've heard Jordan talk about faith.

00:54:14.420 And I've known faith and worked with her.

00:54:16.900 And she was always a very nice person.

00:54:18.980 She was very conservative.

00:54:20.140 And that's the problem is that because she used to be a conservative activist

00:54:23.900 and then she kind of went down the rabbit hole,

00:54:26.360 it was always used against any conservative who knew her, who interacted with her.

00:54:30.040 Jordan Peterson, once I watched a video where he talked about how

00:54:33.060 faith was kind of just an agreeable person.

00:54:35.300 That's the word.

00:54:35.620 So when she's in Israel, she's like, yeah, this is great.

00:54:38.040 I love Jews.

00:54:38.700 I'm standing up for these people and they're my people.

00:54:41.040 But then when she was down in Charlottesville, she felt that same comfort and camaraderie,

00:54:45.820 but they were with people that she shouldn't have even been around with.

00:54:48.280 Now, I don't know.

00:54:48.720 You just told my story.

00:54:49.700 I was going to tell that story because I asked Jordan Peterson that night.

00:54:52.920 Like, I was so upset by what had happened.

00:54:54.720 And I told him.

00:54:55.840 And he used his psychological, I mean, he didn't diagnose, but he said she's very agreeable.

00:54:59.600 He used that word.

00:55:00.180 And the same things that made her such a great staffer because she knew exactly how to be a great rebel.

00:55:06.560 She knew how to please the boss.

00:55:07.960 In Israel, she knew, she grokked the situation.

00:55:10.740 Okay, let me size it up.

00:55:11.780 I can be the best of this.

00:55:13.040 You send her to Charlottetown, surround her 48, 72 hours with these bad guys.

00:55:18.540 She'll figure it out, game the system, say, oh, I can be their super Aryan girl.

00:55:23.660 And like Zelig, I don't know if you know that old Woody Allen movie,

00:55:26.940 a guy who would, like a chameleon, literally become whoever he's with.

00:55:30.900 And that's why it was so shocking because the person I thought was the perfect employee,

00:55:34.800 well, that's because she was mirroring me back to me.

00:55:38.360 And exactly, and Peterson put his finger on it.

00:55:40.960 Because Faith is so agreeable, she actually allowed herself to be transformed in that I was stunned by it.

00:55:48.900 And I was deeply sad by it because I felt like I didn't know,

00:55:53.520 I felt like I knew her better than I knew any of my staff.

00:55:56.460 I was completely stunned by it.

00:55:58.680 And that did damage to our brand because, you know, our star, beautiful, bold, courageous, funny, audacious.

00:56:08.520 And she knew everyone because, like, I first met her when I was working for Jason Kenney,

00:56:12.500 and she back then was like a big conservative Catholic.

00:56:15.240 And she loved Jason Kenney.

00:56:15.760 With Jason, she'll be a conservative Catholic, yeah.

00:56:17.780 So that's sort of what we thought, that's what I thought she was.

00:56:21.060 And then, you know, the fact that she had taken photos and done videos

00:56:23.820 with all these different conservatives over the years started being used against people

00:56:27.820 because the mainstream media just clung to it as a way to, you know.

00:56:31.620 She was the greatest gift to the anti-right.

00:56:33.800 I should tell you, maybe I shouldn't, but I will, a month after I sacked her,

00:56:41.040 because I had a friendly affection with her, I called her up.

00:56:44.140 I said, look, I'm not mad at you because you defied me and went down.

00:56:51.260 I'm not mad at you because you're politically incorrect.

00:56:54.120 I'm mad at you because you went on a Nazi show and said Nazi things.

00:56:58.660 And you may think you're a martyr for free speech and censorship.

00:57:02.480 That's not why you're fired.

00:57:03.240 You did Nazi things.

00:57:05.060 And she said, oh, well, on the street people are on my list.

00:57:07.640 No, because they don't know what you said and did.

00:57:09.180 I actually went and I listened to that part.

00:57:10.640 It was shocking.

00:57:11.500 Yeah, I listened to it.

00:57:12.480 And I said, you don't know this, but you've got a stinger in you.

00:57:15.980 I said, come on the show and we're going to pull that stinger out of you together.

00:57:20.320 And I'm not asking you to say you're suddenly for open borders or you're a liberal.

00:57:26.920 I'm not saying that.

00:57:28.440 You've got to take out that bizarre mania that you expressed for that one weekend.

00:57:33.860 We've got to pull it out together.

00:57:35.240 And it might hurt a little bit, but we'll hug it out.

00:57:37.700 And you've got to correct that because you don't even know that stinger is still in you.

00:57:43.760 I said, we'll hug it out.

00:57:45.660 We've got to pull it out together.

00:57:47.120 You're going to have to explain.

00:57:49.380 We're going to talk about why it was wrong.

00:57:51.080 And to my, I thought she would come back.

00:57:54.620 To my shock, she went harder than ever.

00:57:57.500 Never.

00:57:58.260 I will not bend the knee.

00:58:00.080 What?

00:58:00.760 Who is it?

00:58:01.460 And that was the last time we spoke.

00:58:04.840 We had some text messages and I, and I, my last words to her were, if someone truly loved

00:58:10.640 you, they would take away your cell phone.

00:58:13.200 Because it's that social media hit.

00:58:16.140 Oh, I can be more and more outrageous and get more and more feedback from anonymous people

00:58:21.540 who may even be robots or whatever, but it sure makes me feel good.

00:58:25.680 And what a terrible loss to the conservative movement, to the country.

00:58:30.220 She could have been anything, but she went, she fell down that rabbit hole and having a

00:58:37.160 chance to come back, she refused it.

00:58:39.320 And it makes me a little bit sad, but the sorrow is being replaced by anger because of what

00:58:44.340 she's done to herself and to those around her.

00:58:47.040 Now, did it damage the rebel?

00:58:49.140 It damaged rebel news in the eyes of the fancy pants who forever used that as a talking point.

00:58:55.120 But it's a fact that when I found out what she had done, I fired her within a minute.

00:59:00.480 And we marched her out shortly thereafter.

00:59:04.040 We acted as soon as we had the information.

00:59:07.160 It's still embarrassing.

00:59:08.040 And people would use that talking point.

00:59:13.820 And we had a few other people who used that as an excuse to kick us or punch us when we

00:59:20.240 were down.

00:59:21.220 But I want to make a clear distinction between what I call the 30 mean girls of the Toronto,

00:59:27.060 Ottawa, Montreal media clique and the severely normal people we were talking about earlier.

00:59:31.360 Because when people saw we were in trouble in the media and the newspapers were going crazy

00:59:37.920 and the CBC was going crazy, Wendy Mesley called us racist.

00:59:41.320 How ironic is that?

00:59:42.480 Wendy Mesley, who was dropping the N-word like confetti around CBC, she called us racist.

00:59:48.580 Yeah, Wendy.

00:59:51.100 So people said, oh my God, we're going to lose rebel news.

00:59:53.620 We've already lost Sun News.

00:59:55.440 We're going to lose rebel news.

00:59:56.660 And I said to folks, I sent out an email.

01:00:00.380 I did a video.

01:00:00.780 I said, folks, we're having a choppy water.

01:00:02.820 Here's my plan to get things back on track.

01:00:04.660 Hire a managing editor.

01:00:06.020 Make sure to keep an eye on staff.

01:00:07.540 We're going to do this.

01:00:08.160 We're going to do that.

01:00:08.920 I probably dropped the ball because we were growing so fast.

01:00:12.040 I wasn't watching things close enough.

01:00:13.740 I don't think there was any way to stop Faith from doing what she did.

01:00:16.740 I mean, she was our senior reporter.

01:00:18.260 How would I have known what she was doing?

01:00:19.540 There was no way to stop that.

01:00:21.460 But I sent out this call to our viewers and I said, guys, I think we got off course.

01:00:25.060 We fired Faith.

01:00:25.960 We're hiring a managing director.

01:00:27.220 We're going to do this, this, this.

01:00:28.660 And you know what?

01:00:29.640 That month, August 2017, which was the most embarrassing month by legacy media standards,

01:00:36.800 all the fancy people said, we hate you.

01:00:39.200 It was actually the most successful month for Rebel News in 2017 because our people said,

01:00:44.760 Ezra, we know you're not anti-Semitic.

01:00:47.000 You're a Jew, we think.

01:00:48.300 We know you're not.

01:00:51.080 I mean, we've had such a variety of people come and go on the state, people of every background,

01:00:56.660 every religion, Muslim supporters, visible minorities, whatever.

01:01:03.540 And people who watch us know who we are.

01:01:05.820 So they didn't believe the shrill shrieks from those who don't even watch us.

01:01:10.320 The opposite, they said, yikes, Ezra, we see what's happening.

01:01:13.300 We're going to be there for you.

01:01:14.280 We had more support in that crisis than in any other month that year.

01:01:20.340 Now, I don't like that.

01:01:21.820 I mean, you know, but it's a sign that, what would Nixon say?

01:01:26.960 He said, just because there's some chirping critters in the field doesn't mean they're the only critters there.

01:01:31.320 There's a thousand cattle very quick.

01:01:32.960 He had a great metaphor about quiet cattle and noisy crickets or something.

01:01:36.780 My point is, don't mistake the 30 professional scolds, Rajme Barton, Wendy Mesley, someone at the Toronto Star, someone at the Globe, Jesse Brown of Canada Land.

01:01:47.220 Don't mistake that for Canadian opinion, even opinion.

01:01:53.360 It's not.

01:01:55.120 And I said that being a grassroots media publication allows me to track what people want and don't want.

01:02:02.000 It also allows me to stay sane because every day, it's not just Lauren Southern and Faith Goldie who get feedback online.

01:02:10.160 I do, too.

01:02:12.080 Our average video is like a 98% like to dislike ratio.

01:02:18.420 I don't think I let that go to my head, but I use that as an antidote for if I'm reading what the mean girls say about me because they say, well, 98% of these 100,000 viewers seem to like it.

01:02:30.740 So sometimes you can get down and say, am I the only person who thinks this way?

01:02:35.960 Is everybody really condemning me?

01:02:37.700 Am I an anti-Semitic Jew?

01:02:40.360 But then you just, you're lucky because you actually know what real people say.

01:02:45.000 And I send, we send out many thousands of emails a week to our people and we get feedback.

01:02:50.380 People don't believe the BS.

01:02:52.420 They see us as an antidote to us.

01:02:54.720 And whenever we step in a pothole, which we do once in a while, our people aren't mad.

01:03:00.280 You know, they want us to do better because they don't want us to hurt ourselves.

01:03:02.820 But let me say this.

01:03:03.820 I talk too much about faith, but I wanted to tell you because we actually both know we're together.

01:03:07.140 I think that if it weren't that, it would have been something else.

01:03:21.140 I want to give you an example.

01:03:22.520 Mitt Romney, the most perfect man by mainstream media standards, butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

01:03:30.500 He paid more than his taxes were required, like that kind of guy.

01:03:37.580 Yeah, and if you watch the Mitt, there's a documentary on Netflix called Mitt, and it follows him during the campaign.

01:03:43.440 And it just paints this amazing picture of this remarkable man that's so committed to his family, his faith, his community, his country.

01:03:49.280 Turn the other cheek.

01:03:50.100 You know, you watch that video, you're like, why isn't this man present?

01:03:52.460 He seems so amazing.

01:03:53.760 Because they couldn't find a Charlottesville moment on him.

01:03:56.960 They couldn't find, so they said, well, he put his dog on the roof of a car.

01:04:03.040 He had binders.

01:04:03.740 Remember, he said, well, I've got binders full of women.

01:04:05.780 Oh, you think women belong in a binder.

01:04:09.340 No, no, he was saying he's got binders full of names.

01:04:11.600 He was saying he wanted to hire a lot of women, and he had a lot of qualified women.

01:04:14.860 Yeah, I have got binders full of women.

01:04:16.700 Women aren't in the binders.

01:04:18.320 It's just their names are in the binders.

01:04:19.800 So my point is, Mitt Romney is as close to a saint as you get, but they could demonize him.

01:04:29.140 Preston Manning was gentle.

01:04:30.740 They demonized him.

01:04:32.240 Stockwell Day turned the other cheek.

01:04:33.620 They demonized him.

01:04:35.120 Part of the lessons of Trump is that they're going to demonize you no matter what.

01:04:39.180 You may as well punch back.

01:04:40.100 And my point about Faith Goldie is she gave our critics an easy shot.

01:04:47.040 It's been three years now.

01:04:48.520 I really don't hear about it.

01:04:50.180 Our millions of viewers, we've had more than half a billion views of our videos.

01:04:54.160 People know who we are because they know who we are.

01:04:56.820 But if it weren't Faith, it would have been Lauren Southern or it would have been Gavin McInnes or Tommy Robinson or me or Raheel Raza or Sheila Gunn-Reed or David Menzies.

01:05:05.600 They'll find something.

01:05:06.580 If they can find something about mild-mannered Mitt Romney to demonize, they'll find it about anyone.

01:05:14.180 And so you have to make a decision.

01:05:16.500 Are you going to lean into the wind or lean back?

01:05:20.940 And they'll get you no matter what.

01:05:23.600 It's like those red guards.

01:05:25.200 When the red guard comes for you, are you going to self-denounce?

01:05:29.560 Let me tell you how that ends.

01:05:31.080 You don't do any better by denouncing yourself than if you refuse to.

01:05:34.660 So why not live authentically and truly, even if it's the last thing you do?

01:05:39.380 Because they're going to get you anyways.

01:05:40.920 And look, here we are.

01:05:41.980 We're coming up.

01:05:42.920 We'll be six years old next year.

01:05:45.120 We're five and a half years old.

01:05:47.640 In many ways, we're stronger than ever, bigger audience than ever in terms of YouTube subscriptions.

01:05:52.680 We made our share of mistakes, but I don't think any of them are deeply moral errors.

01:05:59.560 Right.

01:06:00.000 And once the thing happened with Faith, then they started sifting through things.

01:06:03.100 And all of a sudden, they held Gavin McInnes up and said, look, he promotes violence.

01:06:07.140 You know, his videos, to me, were always sort of funny and satirical.

01:06:10.780 But they were sort of taking them literally.

01:06:12.620 And then, yeah, then it just turned into sort of a dialogue.

01:06:15.060 Comedy's being destroyed by the left.

01:06:16.620 You know, the dumbest old jokes.

01:06:17.860 I just flew in from Florida.

01:06:19.760 And boy, are my arms tired.

01:06:21.340 Or take my wife, please.

01:06:23.060 What?

01:06:23.500 He wants me to take his wife?

01:06:25.580 No, no, it's a joke.

01:06:26.460 It's just a dumb joke.

01:06:27.720 You didn't fly in from Florida.

01:06:29.060 Your arms aren't tight.

01:06:29.640 I know, it's a joke.

01:06:30.860 Gavin McInnes is a conservative version of Jon Stewart.

01:06:35.780 It's a, it's a, he's using humor.

01:06:37.960 Now, I think Gavin over time could have been a little bit more careful about, he was, he

01:06:43.760 enjoyed twisting the knife a little bit.

01:06:46.580 Well, that's comedy.

01:06:47.740 That's comedy.

01:06:48.980 And it is kind of hard to know when you're doing an online publication, you don't have

01:06:53.460 the normal standard.

01:06:54.380 So it is hard to know what the line is and where you can go too far.

01:06:57.560 I know a lot, Gavin seems like the kind of guy who will seek out where the line is and

01:07:01.560 then take one big step on the other side just to be provocative.

01:07:04.780 You know, he came with us to Israel too.

01:07:07.180 And I have not laughed that much since I was a child.

01:07:11.300 He is so funny and he'll size you up and he'll spend a few minutes interrogating you

01:07:16.080 and he'll find the thing you're most sensitive about.

01:07:18.880 And then he'll work on that until, until you either laugh or cry.

01:07:22.780 He's a unique guy.

01:07:24.640 One of many unique characters that we've had in the Rebel.

01:07:27.060 You know, I was talking to a unique friend of mine in the UK the other day, James Dellingpole,

01:07:31.320 who's quite a eccentric.

01:07:32.580 And one of my favorite things about the United Kingdom that's vanishing is they used to love

01:07:37.420 eccentrics.

01:07:38.500 They used to sort of be proud.

01:07:40.500 Oh, look at that eccentric.

01:07:41.540 Well, yeah, these are the eccentrics, you know, the saying, reasonable people conform to the

01:07:46.340 world.

01:07:47.400 Unreasonable people make the world conform to them.

01:07:50.160 So all progress depends on unreasonable people.

01:07:52.980 I like that.

01:07:54.400 And Britain especially has these quirky people.

01:07:56.880 Well, look at their prime minister.

01:07:57.840 I mean, Boris Johnson is really funny.

01:08:00.000 I mean, so many Roger Scruton.

01:08:03.060 I can imagine what Isaac Newton was like.

01:08:05.480 I mean, that is a, George Orwell, all these people.

01:08:10.060 And you can say, no, no, no, I want everything homogenized.

01:08:13.100 I don't want anyone to take me out of my safe place.

01:08:15.840 Oh, he'll say something triggering.

01:08:17.560 Oh, I just don't like that.

01:08:19.180 You can live that way, but then don't go on the Internet because it's too scary a place.

01:08:22.820 One of the things I've loved at Rebel is the characters we've met.

01:08:27.660 Do they always work out well?

01:08:28.780 No.

01:08:30.680 I still like Gavin.

01:08:32.200 He's a little much.

01:08:34.060 Tommy Robinson, I visited the guy three times in prison.

01:08:36.940 That tells you something.

01:08:40.460 You know, Faith Goldie, I think she made a terrible moral mistake.

01:08:43.620 A moral mistake.

01:08:45.320 A shocking one.

01:08:46.040 Maybe it was a psychological mistake, as Peterson would say.

01:08:48.080 But do I regret for one second being interested in interesting people and sharing what's interesting

01:08:54.420 about them with our millions of people?

01:08:56.080 Not for a second.

01:08:58.160 And every week we try and be interesting and tell the other side of the story.

01:09:02.680 And there's something in human nature that wants to see that.

01:09:07.080 And it's not a dark part of human nature.

01:09:09.180 It's curiosity.

01:09:10.500 And it's maybe wanting to learn.

01:09:12.500 Or maybe there's something I didn't know before.

01:09:14.580 Or maybe my view is wrong in something.

01:09:16.780 Or let me at least hear what he has to say.

01:09:19.420 Or someone else is laughing.

01:09:20.680 What are they laughing at?

01:09:22.160 I don't apologize that we're not super boring.

01:09:25.220 And that, you know, we were talking before we turned the cameras on.

01:09:29.560 My chief criticism with the legacy media in this country is not that they're liberal.

01:09:33.600 Of course they're liberal.

01:09:34.860 They don't even know they're liberal.

01:09:36.400 It's the sameness.

01:09:37.820 It's the think-alikes.

01:09:39.160 I call it the media party.

01:09:40.780 Because it's almost like they have a party discipline.

01:09:43.180 You're not allowed to read outside the party platform.

01:09:45.420 And that's what gets me.

01:09:47.780 They have the entire spectrum on their strategist panel.

01:09:51.180 They're lobbyists.

01:09:52.280 They're not even strategists.

01:09:53.640 The whole spectrum from A to B.

01:09:55.680 I mean, the National has their at-interest panel.

01:10:00.240 They've got Chantal Libert, who was a Trudeau Foundation scholar.

01:10:03.760 They've got Althea Raj, Trudeau's official biographer.

01:10:09.500 They've got Andrew Coyne, who's a family relation to Trudeau.

01:10:13.320 And they've got Rosemary Barton, a plaintiff against the Conservative Party.

01:10:17.320 That's their spectrum of opinion.

01:10:19.800 Hey, guys, Ken is a sniff bigger than your little club.

01:10:23.880 And it's not, I mean, each of those people has a talent that I've just named.

01:10:28.680 I don't have an animosity, well, Rosemary Barton, I can't think of hers right now.

01:10:32.360 But do you really have to be so sane?

01:10:36.540 Is vanilla the only flavor at your ice cream store?

01:10:41.360 It's sugar-free vanilla.

01:10:43.180 It's not even real vanilla.

01:10:45.060 Please let me, you know what, we're a little bit of Tabasco here at Rebel News.

01:10:48.020 And you don't have to like to Tabasco, but, you know, we don't all have to be vanilla.

01:10:55.360 Absolutely.

01:10:55.960 Ezra, I think it's so great to have a true diversity of opinions and thoughts,

01:10:59.480 and that's really what you at the Rebel are pushing forward.

01:11:01.820 So thank you so much for sitting down and doing this interview.

01:11:04.660 I've learned a lot about you.

01:11:06.040 And keep doing your things.

01:11:07.220 It's great to have the Rebel as part of the media landscape here in Canada.

01:11:10.480 Well, that's nice of you to say, and you've been a friend to us even in the tough times.

01:11:13.880 So I appreciate that.

01:11:15.040 And it has been a great source of joy for me to watch True North grow into such a powerful

01:11:20.700 and influential group and a well-respected group.

01:11:24.280 You and your teammates are outstanding.

01:11:27.460 I have a special affection for Andrew Lawton, as you know, but you guys are doing important work.

01:11:32.160 So I really am so pleased to have other independent people, and may you go from strength to strength.

01:11:38.100 Great.

01:11:38.540 Well, thank you so much, Ezra.

01:11:39.720 Right on.

The Candice Malcolm Show - October 07, 2020

Ep. 15 ｜ Ezra Levant ｜ The most controversial man in Canadian media

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