It's the season finale of Fake News Friday, where we announce the biggest fake news narrative of the year, as chosen by you, the True North viewer. Plus, we're joined by Ezra Levant, who has been criticizing what he calls the "Media Party" for years.
00:00:00.040It's the season finale of Fake News Friday. We'll announce the biggest fake news narrative of the year as chosen by you, the True North viewer.
00:00:07.560Plus, I'll be joined by a special guest who has been criticizing what he calls the media party for years and years now.
00:00:14.940I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:21.720Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the show.
00:00:24.760So as you recall last week, we laid out what we thought were the top five fake news narratives of the year.
00:00:31.600We went through each of them and, you know, followed True North and you followed The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:36.060You know these narratives inside and out.
00:00:38.300Well, I'm excited to announce the winner of the poll. It wasn't even close.
00:00:42.880The number one fake news narrative of the year as chosen by you was the idea of moving goalposts when it comes to vaccines.
00:00:50.800They kept telling us one thing. They kept saying, all we have to do is get fully vaccinated. We'll go back to normal.
00:00:56.220All we have to do is X, Y, and Z. And it never came true.
00:00:59.280And so 44% of the vote, that was the biggest fake news narrative chosen by you.
00:01:04.800Number two, there was a tie for second. The first one was that unmarked grave story.
00:01:10.180And the second was the legacy media's outright defense of Justin Trudeau throughout the federal election.
00:01:15.920And so thank you so much to everyone who voted on that. And I am pleased to be joined by another person who is a well-known media critic in this country.
00:01:25.780He's been doing it for a very long time. Of course, I'm talking about Ezra Levant, Commander-in-Chief over at the Rebel News.
00:01:32.680Ezra, thanks so much for joining The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:01:35.400Well, my great pleasure. Thanks for having me.
00:01:37.000Well, so here you have it. I think that the idea that all we had to do was trust the health experts, all we had to do was trust Justin Trudeau, and our life would go back to normal.
00:01:49.300That was a mistake. And so many people chose to get vaccinated, Ezra, because they thought that it would just let them go back to normal.
00:01:55.800It would end the lockdown. It would end the rules. It would end just all the restrictions that we've been living with.
00:02:02.580And I think that we experienced one of the biggest bait and switches that we've ever experienced.
00:02:08.520I'm wondering if you could comment on what just happened in 2021 with regards to vaccines and COVID and, you know, what you think, the role that you think that the media played in that.
00:02:21.200Yeah, I think it's a libertarian's nightmare come true.
00:02:24.880I mean, for many years, I was a little bit as skeptical of the purest libertarians out there, the Ron Pauls, who would talk about the welfare, warfare state.
00:02:35.600But I see all of those warnings. I mean, it's almost like the conspiracy theorist of 2019 was simply a couple of years ahead of time.
00:02:46.280And what I think that when we were told two weeks to flatten the curve, that was to get us to accept something that wasn't acceptable.
00:02:56.280Hey, guys, I know it's a violation of your civil rights, but just two weeks and we're through this.
00:03:02.220I don't know if you remember, Donald Trump sent a hospital ship to New York port and the port of L.A.
00:03:08.500to take thousands of COVID patients who were overflowing the hospitals.
00:03:14.580They were turning convention centers into makeshift hospitals.
00:03:17.880The army engineers were working on that. None of those were ever used.
00:03:42.080It's the entire public health deep state.
00:03:45.600And I know that phrase sounds kooky, but really, who's been making the rules the last two years?
00:03:51.400Very few of these policies have been debated on in Parliament, let alone voted on.
00:03:56.660They're not even written by cabinet ministers in an executive capacity.
00:04:01.680These are individual public health officers of every city and province and federally who are just issuing edicts that change regularly, that make no sense in practice, that have no accountability session in a parliament.
00:04:19.320The judiciary has been compliant to the form, to the point of submissiveness.
00:04:25.260The media has been cheerleaders for this because the media loves a war.
00:04:30.360And the war on COVID is also a war on individual freedom, a war on small government.
00:04:38.880Every institution in society has failed.
00:04:41.840The courts, the media, the government, and the opposition.
00:11:52.580It's sort of sad that that's where we've become comparing ourselves to Soviet dissidents.
00:11:59.440Well, I want to talk a little bit more about some of the big media fake news narratives of the year and some of the stories that the media just showed their true colors.
00:12:09.840And I know you've been a critic of the media party, what you call the media party, for a very, very long time.
00:12:15.940So maybe you could just tell us a little bit about why you call the media the media party and if you had one or two of your own examples of some stories that the media just got flat out wrong this year.
00:12:26.400Sure. I mean, there's a lot of ways to describe the phenomenon that we see in Canadian media.
00:12:31.700The fact that more than 99% of journalists in Canada take the government bailout from Trudeau.
00:12:52.200Like literally everyone is on the dole except for you and us and Blackwalks and maybe five others in the country, Western Standard Online, Spencer Fernando, and I'm almost on my entire list.
00:13:26.180And it's really the sameness of it because there's not a broad spectrum of opinion.
00:13:33.160For example, on the core issue we're talking about, lockdowns, vaccines.
00:13:36.220If you would dare to say, well, I'm skeptical of vaccines.
00:13:39.900I've had all my vaccines all my life, but I'm a little skeptical of this one that's been rushed into market, especially now that we know that the virus only really affects the very old in a serious way.
00:13:49.240And there's some side effects that are showing up, especially for young men.
00:13:52.420Even if you say it in the most moderate, modest way, you're a kook conspiracy theorist, alt, right?
00:13:57.760Like there's no room for a spectrum of opinion in this.
00:14:15.200And of course, during elections, they come to the aid of their favorite candidate, which is typically Justin Trudeau.
00:14:22.800So they really act like a party, but they don't disclose their partisanship.
00:14:26.900I mean, I find it very odd that journalists who take money from Justin Trudeau through the media bailout do not disclose that in their reports.
00:14:35.080I mean, if it was the tobacco industry that was giving hundreds of millions of dollars to these news outlets, that would be a disclaimer or that would be called an ad.
00:14:44.840Trudeau gives the money and they just nod and wink.
00:14:47.680But you did ask me a specific question.
00:14:50.700There's one story I go and check, but once a month to see if it's still online.
00:16:43.260The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, hiding under their desk.
00:16:47.780By the way, just like in the United States, there's a disproportion of new Canadians and minorities who are skeptical for whatever reason about the vaccines.
00:17:00.240So you have, if I was a lefty, I'd be talking about systemic racism.
00:17:04.940Black people, new Canadians, less likely to be vaxxed.
00:17:09.440So they're being marginalized and segregated.
00:17:11.540I find there's a classist issue as well.
00:17:15.380You see all these fancy events where the politicians or the celebrities don't have masks on, but all the serving staff do.
00:17:25.160What happened to the champions of the working men?
00:17:27.500You see these unions, Unifor, QP, so many unions, not fighting vaccine mandates, being in league with the employer.
00:17:38.700You know, there's an old saying, if the union and the company say the same thing, one of them is not needed.
00:17:47.080So where are the labor union champions for the working men?
00:17:51.040Because if you're in a labor union and your union won't fight the company for you, you've given away all your rights in collective bargaining.
00:18:00.000So I think another atrocious failure, I talked about the knots on the net being broken, the labor union movement completely co-opted by the government and big corporations.
00:18:10.340So I think that's part of the fake news there is that these terrible things, they're not really happening.
00:18:16.600Those COVID jails are just a figment of the fever dreams of the alt-right.
00:18:22.420And don't worry about that pastor, Arthur Pawlowski, being arrested like he's a drug kingpin on the roads of Calgary by a SWAT team.
00:18:41.720Well, you're right, Ezra, there's so many elements there and we're so grateful for the reporting that you do over at True North because I don't think that Canadians would even be aware of what was happening with pastors being arrested and the entire, like you say, bonfire of civil liberties.
00:18:57.140What is the point of labor union leaders when they just allow their members to be fired for something arbitrary?
00:19:04.440And that's the point of the labor union is to defend the rights of these workers and yet they're completely letting them down.
00:19:10.700And I just wanted to comment on the point you made about how they're making conspiracy theories of all of us because I remember back in 2020 when some of our reporters at True North were looking into this idea of a potential vaccine mandate.
00:19:27.480And we had members of the parliamentary press gallery going crazy about us on Twitter calling us conspiracy theorists and far right and, you know, just give it six months and then there it was, right?
00:19:39.040It's like anything that you could be a conspiracy theorist about a few years ago, just give it six months and it'll come true, which is pretty scary stuff.
00:19:47.820Well, I wanted to talk to you about this one story because it sort of made, you know, it made a lot of conservatives sort of raise an eyebrow and wonder about the CBC.
00:19:59.640First of all, the CBC is doing this weird thing now where they publish op-eds, they publish perspectives and, you know, they're all far left perspectives as you would imagine.
00:20:07.800But there was one written by a woman, I hadn't heard of her before, her name is Ziha Rehman, and it was about how she was an Elections Canada worker who wrote this really deranged piece about how she greeted people all day and interacted with Canadians who turned out to be hateful, awful people, right?
00:20:27.380And so you're waiting for the punchline, you know, what was she talking about?
00:20:30.760Were there a bunch of, you know, people in her district, in her writing that voted for a neo-Nazi party or something?
00:20:36.860Was there an independent neo-Nazi party? No.
00:20:38.700She was just talking about the Conservative Party, not even the People's Party, but the Conservative Party.
00:20:42.640The fact that the CBC decided to run this piece, I mean, what does this say about, first of all, the state broadcaster, but also our elections, the integrity of our elections?
00:20:54.060And these are the kind of people who are running Elections Canada, they're so hateful and so deranged that they think that anyone who's white, anyone who's a Conservative is just an evil, racist person out to get them.
00:21:05.140Yeah, I mean, a good way to test if something is unacceptable or racist, I think a good shorthand is just to switch the race around.
00:21:14.420And how would you feel if they were talking about a different group?
00:21:17.180I did read that insane, psychopathic rant.
00:21:22.140I mean, it was shocking, and what was shocking about it is not just that it was someone's weird imagination, like there was not a single incident.
00:21:30.600It's just that she was looking at these white people, these Conservatives or whoever, as if non-white people don't vote for Conservative, for example.
00:21:38.740I mean, Leslie Lewis, is she racist too?
00:21:43.400So there was no factual basis for her to call people haters, it was her own hatred that she was projecting on them.
00:21:52.240If you swap it around, if there was someone saying, well, these Jews were coming in, and I just know what these Jews were thinking, or these Black people were coming in, and I just know.
00:22:07.820Like, it wouldn't work in any other way, it would be so obviously racist, and that the CBC would run this shows that we've lost Martin Luther King's concept of, you know, equality before the law by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
00:22:26.660I mean, that, I don't even think that was a left-wing idea, that was a traditional liberal idea, that was an Enlightenment idea.
00:22:33.98050 years ago, you had the Martin Luther King style of civil rights, equality before the law, get rid of Jim Crow laws, judge us based on our individual nature.
00:22:48.44050 years later, 50 years later, 50 years later, we have racism again, but it's not racism, as you just described there in that CBC article, so racism by white supremacists.
00:23:01.140It's this critical race theory, anti-white racism, anti-Christian bigotry, that's so shocking.
00:23:08.860The so-called anti-racists are the biggest racists around, and it's not just at the CBC.
00:23:15.380I want to point fingers at the National Post, and I worked at the National Post on their editorial board for two wonderful years, about 20 years ago, and I love that newspaper, but boy, has it gone down a funny path.
00:23:26.940You might recall that just over a year ago, that a majority of their newsroom signed a petition denouncing them for running a column by Rex Murphy.
00:23:40.660It's a wonderful column, it just says, Canada is not an inherently racist country, we really bend over backwards to make people feel welcome, multiculturalism and open immigration are hallmarks of our country, we're not a racist country.
00:23:55.560That's all he said, and not only did a majority of National Post writers condemn him, and demand that he not be able to speak on those subjects again, but the management of National Post actually had a staff town hall, like a struggle session, where one after another denounced the paper for even letting him have a voice there.
00:24:18.980So it's not just the CBC, and there's a new obsession with race and racism, and the trouble is demand exceeds supply.
00:24:33.960He had to manufacture a racist incident against himself, because it just wasn't enough natural racism, and he needed to get some publicity for his acting career, and I think in Canada it's the same thing.
00:24:48.720I think we are probably the most tolerant country in the world, I really can't think of any country that could beat us in terms of racial harmony, and I challenge the CBC or the National Post wokists to find a better place.
00:25:02.020There's a reason why a third of a million people from around the world come here every year, most of whom are visible minorities, because we're not racist, and these journalists, these activists, and that absurd CBC election worker who should never be allowed anywhere near a public process again, they found, you know, we found the enemy, and it is us.
00:25:27.320They found the racists, and it's them.
00:27:31.580We have a team in Quebec, both reporting in English and French.
00:27:35.300We have reporters in the UK again, and of course, in Australia, the amazing Avi Yamini.
00:27:40.440Here in Canada, we have new reporters in Saskatchewan, Kelly Lamb, great team in Vancouver.
00:27:45.880We're trying to cover the other side of the story.
00:27:48.980Our focus, of course, is video-based journalism.
00:27:52.120We try and get out of the office and onto the ground.
00:27:54.320But really, I think what defined 2021 for us is we spun off our civil liberties work into a charity called the Democracy Fund.
00:28:05.520As you know, we were defending people by crowdfunding lawyers if they got a lockdown ticket.
00:28:10.800And so we sort of pushed that into its own entity called the Democracy Fund.
00:28:14.300And I think that that's probably our greatest achievement in 2021 is that, I mean, I've always felt odd about that moment where someone has a cell phone, and there's a terrible thing happening, and they take out their cell phone, and they record the terrible event, a crime, a tragedy, a crash, a fire, whatever.
00:28:33.380Because on the one hand, I'm really glad that I saw it, and I wouldn't know about it if they didn't film it.
00:28:38.580But on the other hand, part of me thinks, put down the phone and help.
00:28:42.960And so with the Democracy Fund and our Fight the Fines project and now our FightVaccinePassports.com project, we split the two functions.
00:28:52.300So Rebel News, we tell the story, but now the Democracy Fund, its own separate entity, can try and do something about it.
00:29:00.540So we'll still hold the camera, but we're going to try and do something about it.
00:29:03.980And we've actually got a little network of 25 lawyers.
00:29:06.640And as you may know, charities have to disclose their financials every year.
00:29:12.480So the Democracy Fund is coming up on its first year.
00:29:15.640And again, totally separate entity from Rebel News, different board, different directors, different bank, different everything.
00:29:22.940It is now, at $5 million a year, the largest civil liberties organization in Canada.
00:29:31.200It's triple the size of the defunct Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
00:29:36.380It's even larger than our good friends at the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
00:29:39.640And again, I'm happy that we built it, but I'm tragically sad that it's so necessary.
00:29:45.760But I feel that if I look back on the last year, the greatest thing we did wasn't even journalism.
00:29:50.420It was helping 2,100 people fight back against the madness.
00:29:56.680That's just a drop in the bucket, by the way.
00:29:58.660We probably could have helped 200,000 people if we had the funds.
00:30:02.020But that's sort of what we've done the last year.
00:30:04.100And I think the next year, unfortunately, will be just as bad.
00:30:06.900Well, it is incredible what you're doing.
00:30:09.280And I know you're one of the biggest critics of the sort of defunct, what you say, civil liberties organizations in this country that exist or existed to defend people like the ones that you're defending now.
00:30:20.740So it's really great to see you step up, step into that role and fill a really, really necessary and vital role in our society, which is defending individual people against the massive encroachments by the government.