Western Standard editor-in-chief Nigel Hannaford and senior editor-at-large Derek Fildebrandt talk about the Bundestag in Germany decriminalizing child porn, Canada paying foreigners $12 million to shoot deer on Vancouver Island with weapons that's otherwise illegal for us to use, and Canada's carbon tax.
00:00:51.600Okay, well, we've got a good show today.
00:00:54.560a bit more international than usual, a bit more well outside of Alberta, actually.
00:01:03.680Germany, the Bundestag, their parliament has voted to decriminalize child pornography.
00:01:10.560Oh, the algorithms are going to hate us now, so need to mention that.
00:01:14.000But I don't have a lot of faith in Germany's government. But when I saw this one, I had to do
00:01:20.240a double take and check and see if this one was correct. But yes, Germany's Bundestag is
00:01:24.960voted to decriminalize child pornography, moving it from a regular criminal offense to a minor
00:01:30.000misdemeanor. Well, there are. Well, and speaking of some evil Germans, unfortunately, Klaus Schwab0.97
00:01:37.680retiring from his post as the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum,
00:01:43.120stepping back into more of a background role, we're gonna be talking about that.
00:01:47.520Real funny story. Funny if you're a sucker for punishment like me. Ottawa has paid, we found, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation found out, has paid $12 million in taxpayers' money to shoot deer on Vancouver Island.
00:02:05.880Yes, you heard that right. You, especially all of you watching on the Wild TV network, you're apparently incapable of shooting deer for free.
00:02:15.960That's why Justin Trudeau has paid foreigners $12 million to shoot deer on Vancouver Island with weapons that he has otherwise declared illegal for us to use.
00:02:26.800Spain, Norway, and Ireland just today have recognized Hamas.
00:02:32.440Yes, Hamas, the genocidal terrorist organization, close cousins of al-Qaeda.
00:02:38.220They are, believe it or not, the legitimately elected government of Palestine and currently ruling over the Gaza half of that territory.
00:02:49.800Well, they've recognized it as a state.
00:02:53.400So that'll be interesting when we talk about Spain's relationship with Catalonia, won't it?
00:02:58.300Yeah. And federal environment, Mr. Stephen Gilboe, at a recent appearance before a parliamentary committee,
00:03:07.960No real way to put it shortly here, but we're calling it his carbon tax bull scheisse bomb.
00:03:14.920Quite a contradiction in facts, more or less at admission unintentionally by the federal government that the carbon tax, surprise, does nothing to save the earth.
00:04:09.740So this week Germany voted to downgrade what was originally a criminal offense for holding and distributing child abuse materials, which is child pornography.
00:04:22.280It's been knocked down to a misdemeanor. So it's no longer a federal crime worth more than six months imprisonment. It's now been downgraded to a misdemeanor with a minimum penalty of three months imprisonment.
00:04:39.280him. So I think this started with some conversation around technical matters, like
00:04:46.640someone who's innocent, but comes into possession of this, and they're holding it on their computer
00:04:51.160to give it to police people who aren't actually engaging engaging in, you know, malicious use of
00:04:56.560child pornography. I guess there was some technical stuff around that. But then the governing
00:05:03.800coalition, that's the Social Democratic Party, the Green Party and the Free Democratic Party,
00:05:08.840a mostly left and center-left coalition government. They took those kind of technical
00:05:15.300issues to resolve, and then they ran hog wild with it, just blanket decriminalizing child pornography.0.99
00:05:22.340Yep, that's exactly right, Derek. So there was reasoning by MPs that, well, there might be
00:05:28.800parents or teachers whose child comes across child pornography on their phone, and they alert their
00:05:36.840parent or teacher and then the parent or teacher downloads the material in order to notify law
00:05:43.720enforcement. So there are certain exceptions that could be made in the bill to accommodate
00:05:49.940these reasons and sure that may be the case sometimes but now it's just been blanketly
00:05:57.600dismissed that we're not going to call this criminal anymore. So no matter what so some
00:06:04.280creeper uh you know sitting in his basement looking at kiddie porn it's just it's not no
00:06:10.360longer a criminal offense it's just a minor misdemeanor that's exactly right and in fact
00:06:15.480in my research into this matter i found a pro pedophilia group based in germany whose leader
00:06:23.080was actually celebrating this and posting to members that frequent his child porn website
00:06:31.960that they should get a lawyer to delay the process until this bill goes into effect,
00:06:39.880and then therefore their charges will be stayed. So we already have groups that are looking into
00:06:46.360how to use this ruling to the advantage of pedophilia groups.
00:06:51.480I don't know what the hell to say. So yeah, why don't you say something, Nigel?
00:06:58.120Well, Jen, to what extent does this come from the use of kids taking pictures of each other with their cell phones?
00:07:08.320Is this kind of spun up to such a degree that has become a problem that needs to be addressed this way?
00:07:16.480Yeah, I think that's a good point, Nigel, because it did come up that, well, this is becoming more and more common
00:07:22.100to have these child abusive materials like minors sending each other pornographic pictures
00:07:29.680and so while this is a phenomenon that is happening where young people are feeling
00:07:35.320emboldened to share these images of themselves and others it doesn't take away from the fact
00:07:40.780that it is actually distribution of illegal well in germany would be formerly illegal
00:07:47.540child pornography materials. However, there are going to be adults who are using this to take
00:07:55.340advantage of that market as well. What happens to children, young people, underage kids who do
00:08:03.980that here in Canada? I believe that they are susceptible to the same kind of rules of anyone
00:08:11.220else. It's not allowed for kids to do that. Just because a minor is, say, 17, and with their
00:08:18.540boyfriend or girlfriend, they share these kind of pictures with each other, that is still, to my
00:08:24.840knowledge, considered child porn here in Canada, because it is the sharing of these compromised
00:08:32.040pictures of children. And what happens to them when they're caught? I believe they'd be persecuted,
00:08:38.800but probably as minors and not as adults.
00:08:42.720That is maybe something I can work on for a follow-up story.
00:08:45.040I've never heard of anyone being prosecuted for possession of their own images when they're underage.
00:08:50.500I think it's when you send it to someone else and then they're sharing it from there
00:08:54.780that criminal activity is considered going to take place.
00:08:59.880You know, if a 16-year-old takes a picture of themselves, it's not wise, it's not good,
00:09:06.000But I don't, I've never heard of another age person being prosecuted for having images of themselves.
00:09:11.520But that's the thing is here, we're allowing judicial discretion.
00:09:14.700If you brought a 17-year-old before a justice and said, we want to charge this girl because she shared a picture of herself that went around,
00:09:22.280the judge is going to say, get out of my courtroom, quit wasting my time.
00:09:25.080You bring in a 52-year-old man with 5,000 pictures of those 17-year-olds on his phone, he's going to say, this is problematic, this is a pedophile, let's get on this.
00:09:34.520Yeah, you're going to jail for six months.
00:09:36.560This sort of excuse and saying, well, we don't know if the person picked up the phone on the train and it had it on it.
00:09:41.540Well, again, that's what you bring to the judge if it gets that far.
00:09:44.360It's ridiculous to throw a law out because there might be extenuating circumstances.
00:09:49.060Well, the good news is the governing coalition of Germany is polling about as weekly as the UK Tories are as they go into a general election.
00:10:04.520Are you ready? Just drop it for now. Okay. All right. Well, staying with some unfortunately evil Germans. Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has stepped down from that position.1.00
00:10:22.700And he's going to be stepping into the role of, I guess, chairman of the board of trustees, more of kind of an oversight role, not, you know, the day to day running of things.
00:10:31.500He has been the head of the World Economic Forum since it was founded under a different name in 1971.
00:10:39.700I mean, I think most people have heard of it by now.
00:10:42.340It attracts, I think the last one had 50 presidents or prime ministers from different countries gathered at it.
00:10:48.500The last other big confabs in Davos, attracting major CEOs, business leaders.
00:10:57.760The World Economic Forum is the subject of many a conspiracy theory.
00:11:02.320Until roughly 10 years ago, most of those conspiracy theories were on the left.
00:11:06.920In the last 10 years, it's become more of a conspiracy theory of the right.
00:11:11.320I keep on getting told it's an anti-Semitic one, but I don't understand how.
00:11:15.640Klaus Schwab is a non-Jewish German, and he looks like Dr. Evil.1.00
00:11:21.040He even goes out of his way sometimes to dress as Dr. Evil.
00:11:24.220I mean, it is a powerful organization. It's got revenues of about half a billion dollars a year.
00:11:29.480He gets paid about a million Swiss francs a year, which works out to about a million USD.
00:11:34.080I've never really bought in that it's pulling the strings on governments all over the world.
00:11:42.760It has obvious influence. It's a very influential organization, but I suppose it's a thin line, Corey, between, you know, an influential organization that advocates for some pretty wacky and crazy ideas bordering on utopian socialism on the one hand.
00:12:03.600and a sinister cabal that, you know, secretly runs everything.
00:12:09.800They don't seem to be very good at secretly running everything
00:12:11.940because they put all their wacky statements right on their website.
00:12:15.220They advertise their membership on their website.
00:12:32.300I mean, they meet in a Swiss resort in the mountains with influential business leaders and political leaders, and they plot.
00:12:39.120And even as he speaks, it's like he's trolling.
00:12:41.660He likes to brag about how many world leaders he's influenced, and he's gotten into the inner circles of, again, probably overstated by just how much influence he has.
00:12:53.980But he stirs everybody up when he talks about it.
00:12:55.920But if somebody more modest and rational is his replacement in coming forward and it just turns more into an international lobby group, it might calm some of the conspiratorial worries about this group or whatnot.
00:13:10.480Or it could be somebody as colourful as he is and make it worse.
00:13:15.640But for the time being, he was the symbol of that organisation.
00:13:18.900So it'll be interesting to see how well the organisation fares without him being in the front.
00:13:22.700Nigel, the World Economic Forum has begun, Klaus Schwab aside, who's kind of leaned into the Dr. Evil look of things, I think it's become aware that its ability to influence, and therefore ability to continue to bring in as much money as it does, is threatened by how it's now become viewed broadly by the right across the Western democratic world right now.
00:13:49.380Now, his expected replacement, I can't recall the name of it, but he's apparently a former conservative prime minister of some Scandinavian country, I think Norway, but I'm not positive.
00:14:02.760How conservative is a conservative party in Scandinavia?
00:14:06.720That's debatable, but, I mean, they used to have a lot of prominent conservatives attending these things.
00:14:13.320I mean, Stephen Harper would go to it, and it wasn't considered unconservative to go.
00:14:18.560actually at that point, the conspiracy theories and the negative press on WEF came mostly from
00:14:23.860the left. But since then, the WEF has had these crazy things like you'll own nothing and you'll
00:14:29.600be happy, you know, trying to eliminate cars. But, you know, it kind of socialism for the ultra rich
00:14:41.140that, you know, the people live under destitute socialism, but there's still a place for the
00:14:45.840ultra uber wealthy to live lives of luxury. Do you think that is there any way for the WBF to
00:14:55.740kind of salvage its formerly fairly lofty reputation to be able to attract people from
00:15:03.940the right side back to it, not see it so anathema to the degree that Pierre Paulium has vowed that
00:15:09.160no minister of his will be permitted membership or attendance at these things?
00:15:13.820Well, of course, Pierre is going to say that, and so he should.
00:15:18.000But he himself, I believe, has attended, and so have many other members of the Conservative Party waiting to take government next year.
00:15:28.980Mr. Harper himself attended a number of times and used the podium there to make substantial public policy statements.
00:15:38.060I remember one about raising the age of retirement from 65 to 67.
00:15:43.260I don't want to talk about that particularly, but the point is, it was a good place to make a major economic policy statement because it was the World Economic Forum.
00:15:55.240And the kind of anxiety that has been generated since, has come since those days, I don't think he would do that now.
00:16:03.920But there's a tremendous number of Canadian politicians have been through, there's like a sort of a lecture program that you go through.
00:16:12.200They try to expose the politician to their ideas.
00:16:16.680Sometimes they get recruited right in.
00:16:18.800I think Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is on the board.
00:17:24.460Yeah, I mean, it's possible to be dead wrong about policy issues and have significant influence over governments and it not be some shadowy secret cabal.
00:17:35.120I almost wonder if it isn't purposeful sometimes. I mean, the way that discussion gets shut down when somebody brings up the Great Reset. It's crazy. Oh, you're talking about the Great Reset. You're a conspiracy theorist. Well, wait a minute. Schwab's book was called The Great Reset. It's right there. It's paged through it and it's full of looniness as well. But you're not a conspiracy theorist for calling it out. But you know what? It does stop a lot of people from calling it out because they just don't even want to get into those waters. You know, it's just a...
00:18:02.120And fair enough, because, I mean, some people, you know, on the side that would share a lot of, you know, some worldview with us, will take it too far.
00:18:11.060And they will think it's a shadowy cabal, and it is secret.
00:18:14.320And they're wrong in, like, how open these guys are about it.
00:18:19.180And so I'm actually, I'm a little hesitant to engage about it sometimes, because one side says anything you say about it is conspiracy theory, which is wrong.
00:18:27.760And then, you know, some on the other side will say, oh, it is a conspiracy.
00:19:36.160Well, let's bring it to, actually, let's keep it international for now.
00:19:43.220Let's keep it international, and then we're going to bring it closer to home.
00:19:46.300So speaking of countries in Europe doing crazy things, Spain, Norway, and Ireland have all recognized the Palestinian state.
00:20:02.180Now, that's interesting for a few reasons.
00:20:06.240I mean, I can't foresee there ever being any kind of lasting peace in the Middle East without there being two states, a Palestinian state.0.96
00:20:13.940But I also cannot see any possibility of the Palestinians accepting reasonable borders of a Palestinian state that doesn't include, as they would say, from the river to the sea.
00:20:25.600They want the whole damn thing or they want nothing.
00:20:28.680Something has been offered several times, and every time it's been rejected, they want the whole damn thing.
00:20:33.920But, and the last time there was an election in the Palestinian territories, you know who won those elections? Hamas.
00:20:44.420Yeah, they thumped their opponents. And most of those opponents were not exactly modern liberal Western Democrats. They were crazy, too. They were just a little less crazy. They were genocidal on, say, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and willing to talk Mondays and Wednesdays.
00:21:02.420Um, that's why Hamas runs Gaza and then, uh, West Bank. No, Hezbollah is, uh, West Bank. No, no, no, Hezbollah runs, uh, Southern Lebanon. Yeah, no, they're in the West Bank as well. That's the, the West Bank version of the Palestinians. Yeah.0.83
00:21:20.860Okay, they're all just lovely people, lovely people. Okay, so Spain, Norway, and Ireland have recognized the Palestinian state. Okay, but what is the Palestinian state? Because right now there are effectively two Palestinian states out of the territories. There's the government running the West Bank, and then there's Hamas running Gaza. Which one are they recognizing?
00:21:44.760Well, ostensibly the last one to win an election, which was Hamas, and is a self-declared genocidal organization dedicated to the elimination of the Jews in the Middle East.
00:22:07.940Because they're the legitimately elected government of Palestine.
00:22:11.540They're talking about recognizing a state.
00:22:13.500Well, nobody's even defined the boundaries of this state yet. That's what they're all fighting over. I mean, it would be a state that's in two parts because the West Bank is completely enclosed over bounding on Lebanon and Israel. And, you know, Gaza is bounding on Egypt and Israel down on the other end. But I mean, it's just so over the top and ridiculous. It would be, I guess, akin to saying post-World War II, we still recognize Germany as Germany, fine, but nobody was going to recognize Germany as long as the Nazis were in charge of the country.0.83
00:22:43.500Right now, Hamas is still running the show.0.89
00:22:47.280And I think most civilized people would say nothing is to be done with that state until Hamas is gone.
00:23:53.800All three, although especially Norway and Ireland are currently, and I should say especially, especially Ireland,
00:24:00.620are currently experiencing political chaos as they deal with resistance to large numbers of migrants from the Middle East
00:24:09.340who, by large, are very politically and religiously sympathetic with the Palestinian cause.
00:24:15.180Spain has that issue, but not as extreme.
00:24:19.320Spain has a bit of wild hypocrisy here.
00:24:23.320There's this region, a lot of people maybe don't know, maybe let's put a map up just to show people.
00:24:27.280A region, there's two regions in Spain which have long desired independence, the Basque country and Catalonia.
00:24:36.500The Basque country is smaller, so less consequential, but it's, you know, it's actually fought terrorist campaigns, not as extreme as the Palestinians have,
00:24:44.060but they have launched terrorism campaigns throughout the 20th century in the cause of independence.
00:24:48.380And Catalonia, which has had referendums on independence, has established independent governments which have supported independence and have faced arrest by the central national government in Madrid.
00:25:04.300They refuse to recognize independent statehood of countries and nations within their own borders, which have democratically and legitimately voted for independence.
00:25:16.520But, so they won't acknowledge those, but they will recognize statehood and independence of Palestine, which has never been a state, although I think it does have a right to be a state at some point, if it can fulfill some very basic benchmarks.
00:26:28.880not a chance they now have significant groups of people within the norway within ireland and
00:26:36.320the number of other places who are sympathetic to hamas so what's the deal they're going to turn
00:26:43.280the place upside down if they don't get what they uh what they want is that the strategy all along
00:26:49.120or is it something that has just developed opportunistically i don't know i don't pretend
00:26:54.640to have the answer but i do know that after what we've seen in the university protests all over the
00:27:01.520united states here in canada to some degree there's a lot of people who are prepared to
00:27:07.440make trouble for the governing authorities if they don't give some support and sympathy
00:27:13.760and take a hard line on hamas maybe the irish and the norwegians have decided it's not worth it
00:27:20.480And I mean, I mean, the IRA was never as vicious as Hamas, but you know, it was not, it was not your Sunday shooting club. I mean, the Irish have a long history of terrorism that worked. That's the, you know, terrorism does work. It is extremely, it is the most economic form of warfare there is.0.59
00:27:50.480I mean, you can graduate along, you've got nuclear war here, you got standing armies here,
00:27:55.760and then you've got guerrilla war, and then you've got terrorism. It is war on a budget,
00:27:59.840and it's very effective. And it did work, at least in large measure for Ireland. I mean,
00:28:05.680when they tried pitch battles with the British, I mean, taking on the British Empire and pitch
00:28:09.600battles pretty difficult. But when they launched in a long protracted civil and guerrilla terrorism
00:28:17.280wars it paid off so you know perhaps i don't mean to cast aspersions on the irish i don't i don't
00:28:22.720know enough irish living in the republic of ireland to be able to say and judge the national character
00:28:28.800but based on the history maybe there's maybe the history is some indication that
00:28:32.960you know hey we did it so who are we to judge um i don't know uh gory i know you're not a
00:28:40.880expert in Spanish domestic politics, but you've written a lot on Alberta independence, comparing it, you know, the Quebec independence movement.
00:28:54.140I don't know, would you foresee any trouble here with the wild, wild hypocrisy of Spain here as it regards its own, both Basque and Catalonian independence movements,
00:29:04.600recognizing them when it won't recognize the very democratically legitimate independence movements in its own country?
00:29:10.960Yeah, well, I mean, if we're talking about the independence movement,
00:29:13.120it's getting to the point of the others of seeing, you know, taking violent acts.
00:29:17.020I don't think we'll ever see it in Alberta.
00:29:19.260No, I'm not talking about Alberta. I'm talking about Spain.
00:29:36.300The point you hit on that was interesting, though, or Nigel did as well,
00:29:39.500It's just that there's this large and growing cultural and religious, as you said, element of immigrants, and it's a minority, but a very vocal and active one throughout Europe and North America that are exerting some very effective pressure on local governments.
00:30:21.580And I believe it's probably some of that motivation in Ireland as well.
00:30:24.500I think your average Irishman couldn't give two hoots what's going on in the Middle East, whether they recognize or don't recognize.
00:30:31.700And for the government to wade in on something like this, again, shows that, I mean, governments are motivated still more by their domestic standing than what's going on over there.
00:30:40.300And I think they're worried about the crap they'll have to deal with at home.
00:31:06.800It's not just recognizing a Palestinian state or even just recognizing Hamas.
00:31:10.540They're recognizing Hamas and Palestine as a state here, essentially because of October 7th.
00:31:19.960If October 7th did not happen, recognition doesn't happen, you are rewarding a terrorist organization that has got written into its charter that it is committed to the genocide of the Jewish people between the river and the sea, and you're rewarding it with recognizing it with statehood.0.56
00:31:38.780I mean, this sends a message to every terrorist organization that terrorism works.
00:31:45.540And we say, well, we don't negotiate with terrorists. Well, that's not strictly true.
00:31:48.760We negotiate with terrorists all the time. We just try to do it quietly so we don't inspire others to do the same thing.
00:31:55.700And now this is very clearly saying you go around and kidnap and murder and rape and make it politically inconvenient and disruptive with political groups domestically in our country.
00:32:09.140Well, we're going to reward you for that.
00:32:23.260So that's what some of these other countries have got to think a little harder on, too.
00:32:26.380You've got two intractable forces going on.
00:32:28.220If you really want Israel to calm down, this isn't going to do it.
00:32:31.480That's just telling Israel, well, we've really got to wipe out Hamas because they're trying to gain a toehold with these other nations.0.91
00:41:41.980Corey, CTV says turbulence is now caused by climate change.
00:41:46.660I've seen claims that climate change causes insomnia, fertility issues, that it unfairly impacts the LGBTQ community, racialized communities.
00:42:08.860And it shows, yes, when CTV so baselessly, so recently would attribute something so ridiculously as turbulence to climate change shows that they're no better than Gilbo when they will just throw out stuff with no basis.
00:42:21.220This has got all of the hallmarks of primitive religion, not even advanced monotheistic religions.
00:42:29.960I'm talking primitive sun god sacrificing virgins religion, animism, that kind of thing,
00:42:38.420that everything has some external cause beyond provable science, that everything can be attributable to this one thing.
00:42:46.000Are we going to have a good crop this year? It's the gods.
00:42:49.920And they just have replaced God with climate change.
00:42:59.620Yeah, anytime you find nature worship, you will find human sacrifice,
00:43:03.540whether it's actually the human body on the fire
00:43:06.780or whether it's humans being asked to do more with less and so on to their disadvantage.
00:43:14.200You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
00:43:17.020All right, gentlemen, thank you very much.
00:43:19.200And thank all of you for joining us here today on The Pipeline.
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