The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220222_putin-exploits-bidens-weakness-and-canadas-authori
Aired: 2022-02-22
Duration: 01:32:11


=== Kamala Harris Weaknesses (14:29) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:12]  Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
[00:00:13]  Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show.
[00:00:15]  All eyes at this hour on Ukraine and the White House after a dramatic series of events over the past 24 hours.
[00:00:22]  We're going to lay it out for you in terms that are easy to understand, okay?
[00:00:27]  Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced He is sending troops into two regions in Ukraine.
[00:00:34]  These are two pro Russia areas of Ukraine.
[00:00:37]  A lot of Russians live there.
[00:00:39]  And now the Biden administration is slowly, and I do mean slowly, beginning to use the word invasion.
[00:00:46]  We are expecting to hear directly from President Biden himself within the hour.
[00:00:51]  So we will bring you that news as soon as we have it.
[00:00:53]  This is Jennifer Griffin, our old pal at Fox News, had this to say about what's happening right now.
[00:01:00]  Of the post Cold War architecture.
[00:01:03]  The world must now brace itself for what follows.
[00:01:07]  Eric Bolling will join us in a bit to lay out what this means for the market, for gas prices, and for the U.S. economy overall, which, as you know, is already struggling.
[00:01:16]  But first, I am joined by Charles C.W. Cook, senior writer for National Review.
[00:01:20]  Charles, great to have you back here.
[00:01:22]  So the reports are that Vladimir Putin has been creating the conditions for war inside Ukraine, certain alleged false flag incidents.
[00:01:34]  That have happened within these two very pro Russian regions of Ukraine that he's now declaring independent.
[00:01:40]  He's just unilaterally declared them to be independent.
[00:01:44]  In any event, some small incidents of explosion or what have you that, according to the New York Times at least, are believed to have originated with the Russians, trying to make it look like there's violence against the local Russians by Ukraine, but it's not so.
[00:02:01]  He's looking for a reason to send troops in there.
[00:02:04]  We've been told all along it's because he wants NATO not to expand.
[00:02:10]  He doesn't want Ukraine to be a part of NATO.
[00:02:12]  More and more analysts who I trust are saying that's just pretextual.
[00:02:15]  That's not what this is about.
[00:02:17]  Putin wants Ukraine to remain essentially a part of Russia, or at least an extension in a way of Russia under his control, not under the control of the West.
[00:02:27]  He likes their border a lot better than he likes his own Western border.
[00:02:33]  And he's just not going to sit back and let it become more and more pro.
[00:02:38]  Western and tied to the West, and that that's what this is really about.
[00:02:41]  But right now, he's made a move.
[00:02:43]  It's an aggressive one for sure.
[00:02:45]  This is, we were told 24 hours ago that they were going to have more talks this week than he essentially decided to invade.
[00:02:52]  And the ball is now in our court to decide what we're going to do.
[00:02:56]  So far, Biden said some sanctions.
[00:02:58]  They're small sanctions at first, saying Americans can't do business in these two regions, these two pro Russian regions within Ukraine.
[00:03:05]  That's not really going to do much.
[00:03:07]  But he knows it.
[00:03:09]  So, Republicans have been calling that impotent.
[00:03:11]  His own party had been pushed back.
[00:03:12]  And now, within the hour, we're expected to get more from President Biden on quote, severe sanctions to punish Putin for what he's done thus far, never mind what he may do.
[00:03:22]  What do you make of it?
[00:03:24]  Clearly, the whole thing is pretextual.
[00:03:30]  The skeptical parts of American and British press have to some extent indulged what Putin is saying.
[00:03:41]  There is no reason.
[00:03:42]  To do that, there is no reason for us to take his words at face value.
[00:03:49]  I think one of the problems here is that we have a tendency in the West to view everything that happens in the world through our own eyes, through our own lens.
[00:03:59]  You said that Republicans had argued that Biden was weak.
[00:04:03]  There is some truth to that, but I would, of course, caution anyone from seeing this as primarily a domestic American question.
[00:04:12]  It's not.
[00:04:14]  The ambitions that you described at the beginning did not start when Joe Biden became president, they didn't start when Donald Trump became president.
[00:04:23]  We have been aware of who Vladimir Putin is and what he wants to do for 20 years.
[00:04:29]  This is a question that faced George W. Bush as a new president.
[00:04:35]  In fact, these ambitions predate Vladimir Putin himself.
[00:04:41]  We, as I'm sure everyone knows, spent most of the last century in a struggle with the Soviet Union, which also had expansionist ambitions.
[00:04:50]  So I think a lot of the coverage that we're going to see is going to get sucked into this Republican, Democrat, Western, particularly American mindset.
[00:05:01]  And that would be a mistake.
[00:05:03]  Now, that said, Clearly, Vladimir Putin is aware that the preeminent world power is the United States, and that he is at 69 years old unlikely to find another opportunity in his lifetime to execute some of the plans that he's had in mind for a long time.
[00:05:20]  And America does look relatively weak.
[00:05:24]  Its president is old, he's weak, he does not project confidence.
[00:05:28]  His vice president, who was sent to Munich and has been frankly vapid and embarrassing, Seems weak.
[00:05:36]  And the United States is currently divided, suffering from inflation and still reeling from COVID.
[00:05:43]  So this does present an opportunity.
[00:05:46]  But what he is doing here is what he has wanted to do for a long, long time.
[00:05:52]  And if global circumstances were different, he would, of course, do even more than this.
[00:05:57]  Last time we saw him seize territory in Ukraine was Crimea.
[00:06:01]  That was during the Obama administration.
[00:06:05]  And Putin was upset because back then, They had managed to oust a more pro Putin president of Ukraine for a more pro Western president of Ukraine.
[00:06:16]  And then before he knew it, he was taking Crimea.
[00:06:19]  You know, he's not going to give up Russian influence and power in Ukraine easily.
[00:06:24]  He's made that clear over the past 10 years.
[00:06:27]  He did nothing during the Trump administration that looked anything like that.
[00:06:30]  And now we have this under President Biden.
[00:06:34]  And I saw you had called attention to this tweet by then candidate Joe Biden, which really does sort of.
[00:06:42]  Belie the reality of those two events as I just laid them out.
[00:06:47]  This is from February of 2020.
[00:06:49]  Biden, then candidate Biden, tweeting out Vladimir Putin doesn't want me to be president.
[00:06:54]  He doesn't want me to be our nominee.
[00:06:56]  If you're wondering why, it's because I'm the only person in this field who's ever gone toe to toe with him.
[00:07:03]  What do you make of that?
[00:07:04]  Well, I think it's nonsense.
[00:07:06]  My colleague, Jim Garrity at National Review, said earlier that he was trying to sound like John Wayne.
[00:07:11]  Of course, it didn't work.
[00:07:14]  Because it's based on nothing.
[00:07:15]  And again, this is a good example of a tendency within the United States to view everything that happens on the world stage as an extension of our domestic politics.
[00:07:26]  Donald Trump said some pretty terrible things about Vladimir Putin.
[00:07:31]  There's a famous moment with Bill O'Reilly where Bill O'Reilly says, Well, he's a killer.
[00:07:35]  And Vladimir Putin, Trump says, is not so bad because we have killers here too.
[00:07:42]  We're not so innocent, I think were his exact words.
[00:07:45]  That was a terrible thing to say, but there's no real evidence beyond that.
[00:07:48]  That Donald Trump was weak on Russia.
[00:07:50]  In fact, Trump sent more arms to the countries that are threatened by Russia than did Barack Obama.
[00:07:58]  And so, what Joe Biden was trying to do there is play off this conception that Trump was Putin's puppet and that what we really needed in the White House was a guy who would stand up to him.
[00:08:10]  Of course, that's not really how this works.
[00:08:12]  And even if Joe Biden does a good job in responding to Russian aggression, he's still going to be somewhat hamstrung.
[00:08:20]  We're not going to go to war with Russia.
[00:08:23]  We will be able to maneuver, maybe send weapons, maybe impose more sanctions, maybe deploy some troops to make sure this doesn't spiral out of control.
[00:08:32]  But I don't really know what Biden means when he says, Well, I'm the one who went toe to toe with him.
[00:08:39]  That's just not how the Russians think.
[00:08:41]  Yeah, he's trying to sound tough.
[00:08:43]  And even now, the word invasion, which the White House was reluctant to use, comes from some low level person in the PR shop who I've never even heard of.
[00:08:53]  It's not the president saying that, at least not yet.
[00:08:55]  It's like the 14th man in charge at the PR shop has called it an invasion.
[00:09:00]  The Ukrainians aren't calling it that.
[00:09:02]  We've been threatening these severe sanctions over and over, but we haven't.
[00:09:06]  Unleashed them, even though Putin's been upping his game and upping his game.
[00:09:09]  Now we'll see whether Biden does it today.
[00:09:11]  But, you know, one does wonder whether Biden and his administration are somehow, I don't want to use the term, enjoying this controversy, but he certainly does tout it every other day as tomorrow's the day.
[00:09:25]  Putin's invading tomorrow.
[00:09:26]  He's going to invade tomorrow.
[00:09:28]  And it's this week for sure.
[00:09:29]  It's this, it's tomorrow, whatever.
[00:09:31]  And it hasn't happened thus far.
[00:09:32]  And there's now speculation in the press that Biden's looking to this whole conflict as a distraction.
[00:09:38]  From our disastrous domestic situation back here at home?
[00:09:43]  Well, I hope he's not, because that would be genuinely appalling.
[00:09:46]  And it would also be to reduce the lives and happiness of the Ukrainian people to mere domestic pawns.
[00:09:55]  One of the strange things about this administration, and it's true of Joe Biden, it's also true of Kamala Harris, is their tendency to answer questions on grave topics such as these as if they were a pundit on a panel in Washington, D.C.
[00:10:10]  It's fine if you are in a think tank to say you think that Putin will engage in warfare or in an invasion.
[00:10:20]  It is fine if you're on a think tank to say a minor incursion might be acceptable.
[00:10:25]  As an analytical matter, that may well be correct.
[00:10:29]  But if you're the president of the United States, you have to talk differently.
[00:10:32]  Your job is to say, no, he will not.
[00:10:34]  And if he does, he will face consequences, even if those consequences are sanctions or arms exports or what you will.
[00:10:41]  And both he and Kamala Harris have this strange way of separating themselves from this, of talking about it from 30,000 feet in the abstract, when in fact they are in charge of the executive branch.
[00:10:55]  I wish they would stop doing that.
[00:10:58]  You know, you had an interesting observation about Kamala Harris that I don't think is unrelated to this discussion.
[00:11:03]  And it was about a tweet she sent out.
[00:11:06]  It was ripping on America again, calling us Islamophobic and anti Semitic and all of the phobias.
[00:11:13]  We have them all.
[00:11:14]  Hold on.
[00:11:15]  You say, okay.
[00:11:16]  She put out a statement in Farsi that reads, There is segregation in America.
[00:11:20]  There's xenophobia, anti Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia.
[00:11:24]  Wherever injustice is dealt with, there is activity ahead.
[00:11:28]  So I don't know what that means, first of all.
[00:11:30]  What?
[00:11:31]  There is activity ahead?
[00:11:32]  Okay.
[00:11:34]  We'll look forward to that.
[00:11:36]  But I do think it sort of lays in on a broader way, in a broader way.
[00:11:40]  And here's how we keep running around, the Democrats, trying to tell America how awful it is and how America is all these terrible things.
[00:11:49]  Not only does that undermine morale here at home, right?
[00:11:52]  Americans don't want to hear that over and over and over.
[00:11:54]  It's not exactly a rallying cry for patriotism or the strength of our country and so on.
[00:11:58]  But Secondly, we seem determined to try to export those values.
[00:12:04]  And it makes us into a laughing stock.
[00:12:07]  You know, Saudi Arabia is not going to look at America as any stronger or as a world leader because we're flagging ourselves, flogging ourselves for being Islamophobic, or never mind any of the other things.
[00:12:20]  And I think the more we try to tell the world how they need to act when it comes to political correctness or wokeness or whatever you want to call it.
[00:12:29]  The more absurd we look, the less strong we look.
[00:12:33]  And of course, it comes as no surprise to me that she's doing that up until this very moment.
[00:12:40]  Well, I think that it weakens us enormously because the other countries that are jockeying for world power and attention know that they can exploit these internal divisions.
[00:12:53]  Now, there's no point pretending they don't exist, but one doesn't have to proactively put them out there.
[00:12:59]  And I have a real problem with Kamala Harris for exactly.
[00:13:03]  This reason.
[00:13:05]  You know me, we talked about this before.
[00:13:07]  I'm a free speech absolutist.
[00:13:09]  I don't want to see people prosecuted or marginalized in our society for criticizing the United States.
[00:13:17]  If Kamala Harris thinks that the United States has segregation, fine.
[00:13:22]  If she thinks that it's an Islamophobic, transphobic, homophobic nation, fine.
[00:13:27]  But there are certain responsibilities that go with being the vice president.
[00:13:31]  You don't get to just say that.
[00:13:33]  Anymore.
[00:13:34]  You have a responsibility to represent your country to put the best foot forward.
[00:13:40]  Ronald Reagan had a conception of the United States as a shining city on a hill.
[00:13:45]  That doesn't mean he didn't recognize that there were problems at home.
[00:13:48]  In fact, he was elected to fix some of those problems.
[00:13:51]  But he understood that just as building up arms helps you win in a Cold War type scenario, so does telling the rest of the world that actually your country's great.
[00:14:04]  But yes, it may have some issues, but it is a model.
[00:14:07]  It is a beacon.
[00:14:08]  It is a North Star.
[00:14:10]  And I consider that to be the job of the president when on the foreign stage.
[00:14:17]  There's no need to do it at home.
[00:14:19]  I think on the merits, presidents who think the United States is a bad place are wrong.
[00:14:23]  But at home, of course, they can engage more openly.
[00:14:27]  Internationally, don't do it.

=== Putin's Hitler Comparison (06:53) ===

[00:14:29]  Don't do it.
[00:14:30]  It weakens us and it shows our rivals.
[00:14:35]  And indeed, our allies, how they can divide us and how they can best use diplomacy to achieve their ends at the expense of ours.
[00:14:51]  So, there's that rhetoric from our vice president.
[00:14:53]  We'll hear what the president says in terms of sanctions on Russia.
[00:14:56]  One does wonder if we drop the big hammer of the quote, severe sanctions, that's the term he keeps using today, if we take it from impotent to something more severe, where do we go from there?
[00:15:09]  If Putin's not done, if a full scale invasion of the non sort of pro Russia areas of Ukraine happens, what's the next cudgel that we have?
[00:15:20]  I don't know.
[00:15:22]  And I'm not sure.
[00:15:23]  Yeah, I'm not sure that he knows either.
[00:15:27]  And a lot of that is not his fault.
[00:15:29]  And first off, there is not, as far as I can see, a particular appetite in the United States to get into a war over Ukraine, irrespective of whether or not this should be the case.
[00:15:42]  If Russia invaded London, I think you would see a majority in favor of the United States going in hard.
[00:15:51]  Ukraine is a long, long, long way away.
[00:15:55]  It is not a NATO country.
[00:15:57]  It is not a country with which most Americans have any affinity.
[00:16:02]  Again, I'm not endorsing this view, I'm just describing it.
[00:16:05]  Second, historically, we tend to struggle when the areas in question are disputed or when there are elements within them that would actually prefer to be part of the invading force.
[00:16:24]  Let us dispense for a second with the idea that Vladimir Putin is Hitler.
[00:16:29]  Or that this crisis is the same as those that arose in the late 1930s.
[00:16:36]  But as we saw then, it's tough.
[00:16:40]  When Germany said, well, we want the Sudetenland because it's full of ethnic Germans, many of whom want to be German, we struggle with that because at the root of our system is consent.
[00:16:51]  And we find it difficult to rationalize opposition to consent.
[00:16:57]  And we're not quite sure what's true and what's not.
[00:16:59]  And it divides.
[00:17:01]  Public opinion.
[00:17:02]  And I think where Putin has been clever here is in addition to creating all sorts of pretextual reasons to go in, he's playing around with the separatist parts of Ukraine that don't actually want to be a part of Ukraine.
[00:17:19]  Some of them want to be Russian.
[00:17:21]  And I'm not buying his reasoning, and I'm certainly not endorsing or condoning what he's doing.
[00:17:27]  But in the West, we struggle with that because of our own history of self determination.
[00:17:32]  Mm hmm.
[00:17:33]  And if you apparently watch TV in Russia right now, you will see story after story.
[00:17:38]  Of course, he controls the media.
[00:17:40]  Story after story of the human rights abuses that are allegedly being perpetrated on the Russians inside of these two regions of Ukraine in particular.
[00:17:49]  And the spin inside of Russia and inside of, you know, their, their, with their, amongst their lawmakers is, you know, we have to do something.
[00:17:56]  It's, it's what's right.
[00:17:58]  We have to protect our fellow Russians who are, you know, being abused.
[00:18:01]  And apparently there was a vote to support this move.
[00:18:03]  It was unanimous.
[00:18:04]  There was a standing ovation for, Vladimir Putin's comments, his speech the other day.
[00:18:09]  So, within Russia, they see themselves as sort of liberators going there to protect the Russians who are living in these two parts of Ukraine in particular.
[00:18:17]  That's, of course, not at all the way Europe or the rest of the world sees it.
[00:18:21]  But you're right.
[00:18:22]  I don't think there's an appetite here in America to do more than economic sanctions.
[00:18:26]  The question is, what will those do to our economy?
[00:18:29]  I mean, Biden, when he was playing pundit in that ever long press conference, you and I talked about this, one of his observations was, of course, that could come back to haunt us too.
[00:18:38]  You know, it's like, yes, it could.
[00:18:40]  But That is one of the considerations we have to think about how is it going to hurt our economy if we impose the severe, quote, again, capital sanctions?
[00:18:51]  Well, and especially given a backdrop that is not that rosy to begin with.
[00:18:57]  And I think this will only lessen any American willingness to make sacrifices in order to help Ukraine.
[00:19:07]  It would be one thing if it were 1998.
[00:19:11]  The economy was booming.
[00:19:13]  Gas was, you know, $1.25 a gallon.
[00:19:17]  Gas is creeping up to $4 in many places.
[00:19:21]  Inflation is rampant.
[00:19:23]  Americans are coming out of a terrible two years with COVID and its associated lockdowns.
[00:19:31]  And I suspect the last thing they're going to want to do is to make more sacrifices, again, for a country many of them couldn't locate on a map.
[00:19:40]  And I don't say that disparagingly, there's no rational reason.
[00:19:44]  Most people should spend their days looking at maps of that part of the world.
[00:19:49]  So I think Biden has his hands tied here.
[00:19:52]  I do think, though, that.
[00:19:55]  The JD Vance approach to this, which is to say, who cares about what happens in Ukraine, it may poll well.
[00:20:02]  It may make headlines.
[00:20:04]  I don't think, historically speaking, it is a good approach.
[00:20:09]  I think we have learned that.
[00:20:10]  And we don't have to have Vladimir Putin as Hitler in order to understand that.
[00:20:17]  We do have in this country a commitment to a principle that was established 500 years ago the Treaty of Westphalia.
[00:20:25]  That borders are important and sovereign nations should be respected.
[00:20:30]  And in such a case as they are not, we have historically done all that we can, or at least a great deal, to change that.
[00:20:40]  And if America decides for whatever reason just to look the other way, I'm not arguing here we should go to war with Russia, but if America decides to look the other way, so who cares, someone else's problem?
[00:20:52]  There are very, very few historical examples of that working out for us.
[00:20:58]  So, we should be concerned about this and we should be rooting for this administration to do as well as it can.
[00:21:06]  But I don't think there are that many options on the table at the moment.
[00:21:10]  One positive development is the Germans.
[00:21:13]  You know, the German chancellor there hadn't been going so far as to explicitly say that he was going to sort of put the Nord Stream 2 on hold, that he was going to suspend it.

=== Oil Price Concerns (16:59) ===

[00:21:23]  And now he has.
[00:21:24]  So, that's, you know, yet another sort of threat that we have over Putin because he definitely wants that thing open.
[00:21:30]  He wants to get.
[00:21:32]  Be the main energy supplier on an ongoing basis to Germany, and Nord Stream 2 is important to that.
[00:21:37]  We'll continue to watch it as we expect President Biden in about 40 minutes to come out and add to his earlier comments.
[00:21:43]  Charles C.W. Cook, always a pleasure.
[00:21:45]  Thank you.
[00:21:46]  Thank you for having me.
[00:21:48]  Coming up, Eric Bowling, before he was a big star on Fox News and now Newsmax, made his big fortune trading oil and gas futures in sort of the financial markets.
[00:21:59]  I didn't know about this, but Melissa Francis explained it to me once.
[00:22:02]  Eric Bowling, Made a fortune doing that.
[00:22:04]  He understands this area very, very well.
[00:22:07]  And he's the perfect person to talk to about what's going to happen to gas prices here if we impose severe sanctions, what's going to happen to your energy bill, what's going to happen to inflation that is already at record levels.
[00:22:20]  He's going to speak to all of that.
[00:22:22]  And then we'll get into this Canada up in, or this convoy up in Canada and whether it's coming here next.
[00:22:29]  Don't go away.
[00:22:37]  You can start the new drift with Fiken.
[00:22:39]  If you want to register the new drift with Fiken, click on the new drift with a new drift with Fiken.
[00:22:46]  This is a very good way to register the drift.
[00:22:49]  You can use your favorite drift with a new drift with a new drift.
[00:22:54]  The best way to start the new drift is to make it.
[00:22:57]  Fiken, start the new drift.
[00:22:59]  Super!
[00:23:07]  Here with me now, my pal Eric Bowling, host of The Balance on Newsmax.
[00:23:12]  It airs every day at 4 p.m. on Newsmax, and it's a great show.
[00:23:15]  All right, Eric.
[00:23:16]  So, what's this going to do now to Americans' wallets here at home and to the price they're paying at the pump?
[00:23:25]  Because we're about to get the new announcement on, quote, severe sanctions.
[00:23:29]  So, it could get even tighter than it is already, like the crackdown on Russia and Ukraine.
[00:23:34]  Yeah, Megan, great to be back with you, and what a day to be back.
[00:23:37]  And we have the The breaking news of all these sanctions that were going to slap on Russia.
[00:23:43]  But what's it?
[00:23:45]  So I was listening to the last segment, and Charles C.W. Cook is a brilliant, brilliant analyst.
[00:23:49]  I disagree with him very, very vehemently about why we should.
[00:23:55]  He believes we should get involved in this.
[00:23:57]  And I'm, listen, what is it for us?
[00:24:00]  There's really literally nothing that's going on in that region of the world that affects us.
[00:24:05]  I just don't see why we risk blood and treasure.
[00:24:08]  I don't think he was advocating it.
[00:24:10]  He was just saying some people will advocate for a harsher approach, saying, you know, appeasement isn't going to get us anywhere.
[00:24:16]  Well, how about neither?
[00:24:18]  You know, my point is, why don't we stay out of these things?
[00:24:21]  These things historically, Vietnam, you know, Afghanistan, these things end up costing us lives and treasure.
[00:24:27]  And there's really, Literally no payoff.
[00:24:28]  I would even say Afghanistan made more sense than us getting involved in a sort of Ukraine Russia conflict because in Afghanistan, at least it was geographically situated where you can keep an eye on China and you can keep an eye on Russia from that one spot.
[00:24:43]  And we let that go.
[00:24:44]  But okay, so fine.
[00:24:46]  I'm all about pulling people out.
[00:24:47]  Anyway, to make a long story short, here we are.
[00:24:50]  Putin, over the last few months, has aligned troops and done his little military war games along the Ukraine border.
[00:24:56]  It scared the bejesus out of the oil markets.
[00:24:58]  Oil was about $50 a barrel before this whole thing started.
[00:25:02]  And I'm talking about North Sea Brent, which is the international oil for Europe.
[00:25:06]  And now it's spiked to $98 and almost $99 a barrel today.
[00:25:10]  So that's a 100% increase, a $50 barrel increase.
[00:25:14]  That translates into about $250 billion a year increase, not just total increase to the Russian economy because they sell, they produce and sell 11 million barrels of oil per day.
[00:25:28]  And that turns into almost a quarter of a trillion dollars increase.
[00:25:32]  Because we're allowing the oil markets to rally because we say we're going to get involved in a situation that has absolutely nothing to do with us.
[00:25:38]  If we didn't play these sanctioned games, Megan, why would the price of a barrel of oil go up?
[00:25:43]  Russia is still going to produce their 11 million barrels.
[00:25:46]  We're not sanctioning them.
[00:25:47]  It's not going to pull their oil off the world market.
[00:25:50]  If we say we're not going to buy Russian oil, guess what's going to happen to the price of oil?
[00:25:54]  It's going to continue higher.
[00:25:56]  And at this price right now, because we've run up so dramatically over the last month, month and a half, all that oil is becoming higher and higher priced oil in inventory tanks of refiners.
[00:26:06]  They buy oil, they put it into the tank.
[00:26:08]  They have to have a supply.
[00:26:09]  They have to have a 60 day supply.
[00:26:10]  So, everything they're replacing the cheaper oil is being replaced with a $100 barrel of oil, which means they haven't even begun to charge us at the gas pump yet for the more expensive feedstock inventory crude that's going into the refinery.
[00:26:24]  In other words, if you're paying $4 a gallon right now, $3.75, whatever now, expect another 50% increase.
[00:26:31]  So, I would say it's almost a lot that nationally average, we're going to see a $5.
[00:26:36]  Gallon of gasoline, which is very, very difficult, especially.
[00:26:39]  Wait, let me let you know.
[00:26:41]  You know me and the numbers, you know me and the math, Eric.
[00:26:43]  We're going to walk through it slowly.
[00:26:45]  So, I get our gas prices are going up even more.
[00:26:47]  I mean, that's shocking.
[00:26:48]  That is a sticker shocking number five dollars a gallon here in the United States.
[00:26:52]  It's already gone up 90 cents just over the past year, so going to go up more.
[00:26:56]  And is that without the severe sanctions?
[00:26:59]  Are you saying that's going to happen to us irrespective of what happens in Ukraine?
[00:27:02]  Megan, Megan, this is this is without any sanctions yet.
[00:27:05]  This is this is what's already happened with this saber rattling of Putin on the border and the world saying.
[00:27:11]  Well, if they're going to do that, there's surely going to be some sanctions slapped on them.
[00:27:14]  It's the anticipation of whatever these sanctions will be.
[00:27:17]  We're locked in to probably another dollar a gallon on the upside on gasoline, just locked in already because these refiners have to buy crude oil on the world market.
[00:27:27]  They're paying $100 a barrel right now.
[00:27:28]  They're not going to take a loss on that.
[00:27:30]  When that feedstock finally goes through the refinery, on the backside becomes gasoline, heating oil, and jet fuel.
[00:27:36]  They have to make up that loss.
[00:27:38]  And they get it from us.
[00:27:39]  Of course, we're going to eat it.
[00:27:41]  We're going to see $5 a gallon in this country, absolutely, no matter what happens.
[00:27:46]  So, what happens?
[00:27:47]  So, if the Nord Stream 2 is going to be shut down, so Russia's not going to be able to get that energy supply down to Germany.
[00:27:55]  Russia supplies 40% of Europe's natural gas and 25% of Europe's oil.
[00:28:01]  So, if you're, and apparently what I read is that that's what Biden's been doing overnight, trying to get the Europeans to come on board so that we can, as a unified force, come out today, again, within the next 30 minutes and say, we're all together.
[00:28:12]  This is what we're doing to Russia.
[00:28:14]  So, if that happens, it's not without consequence to our European friends when it comes to their gas bills, which are already high.
[00:28:20]  And we've been saying, oh, don't worry, we'll backstop you.
[00:28:22]  We got you.
[00:28:23]  We got that 40% of natural gas supply and we got that 25% of oil supply.
[00:28:27]  But if we had, All of that in abundance, and I know we do, but we're just not mining it under Biden.
[00:28:32]  Why wouldn't we be using it on the American people to lower those gas prices down from four to three instead of going from four to five?
[00:28:37]  So, what position are we going to be in if this all really does go through and Germany doesn't go through and Europe starts curtailing its energy purchases from Russia and so on?
[00:28:46]  Yeah, and any sort of supply disruption or dislocation in this case, because Russia will still produce, they just won't be able to put it anywhere.
[00:28:54]  It's a dislocation.
[00:28:55]  Any sort of supply or dislocation or disruption in any part of the country.
[00:29:00]  Will always, or the world will always increase prices.
[00:29:03]  So we don't really have it to give anymore.
[00:29:06]  We used to be energy independent about a year and a half ago.
[00:29:08]  We're not anymore.
[00:29:10]  We're now importing oil for the better part of the last two years of the Trump administration.
[00:29:14]  We were exporting oil.
[00:29:15]  We were more than substantially producing what we use.
[00:29:18]  Now we're back to importers begging OPEC, begging Russia, begging Iran to sell us oil at a higher price.
[00:29:24]  So, you know, in this whole thing, this whole joke, and I watch these people do it, I watch the Biden administration do it, I watch politicians do it.
[00:29:32]  Oh, prices are going up.
[00:29:34]  We're going to release, I don't know, 5 million barrels of oil or some ridiculous thing like that.
[00:29:38]  That is a we use 20 million barrels of oil per day here in the United States alone.
[00:29:45]  These minor releases are all for show.
[00:29:47]  They're all politics.
[00:29:48]  They're all none of them mean a lick, a bit to the price of gasoline at the pump.
[00:29:56]  Not one of them, but they all use it to say, oh, you know, we're going to do the right thing.
[00:29:59]  There's no way to give Europe relief on this.
[00:30:03]  We'll squeeze in a quick break.
[00:30:04]  We'll come back with much more with Eric Bolling, including what's happening in Canada.
[00:30:08]  I mean, Justin Trudeau, he's lost his mind.
[00:30:14]  He is treating the remaining truckers, right?
[00:30:17]  He's already cleared the streets, essentially, as though they are, I mean, just a band of roaming criminals wreaking havoc from city to city.
[00:30:27]  Meanwhile, one of those blockades ended with handshakes between the truckers and the cops.
[00:30:32]  But he treats them and has explicitly said they're racists, they're like Nazis.
[00:30:37]  They have swastikas, all unfounded.
[00:30:39]  And what he's doing to those who have supported them with, let's say, a $50 donation here, a $25 donation there, is shameful.
[00:30:48]  So we'll pick it up with Russia and Canada when I get Eric back right after this.
[00:30:53]  And don't forget, you can watch the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.comslash Megan Kelly.
[00:31:02]  Check it out.
[00:31:08]  So, Eric, just to put a pin in the end of the Russia and the sanctions and all that discussion, on the price of gas, there was a report that there's talk in Washington of possibly suspending federal taxes on gas as a relief to people when it comes to the price of gasoline.
[00:31:25]  Is that a meaningful solution?
[00:31:27]  Yeah.
[00:31:27]  Well, it is.
[00:31:29]  But think about that, Megan, for a second.
[00:31:30]  So, they're going to take 18.3 cents a gallon that we're not going to have to pay.
[00:31:34]  That'll help.
[00:31:35]  But that 18.3 cents, it may be the only tax that makes sense in the whole entire country.
[00:31:40]  US government, it's because all that money goes to the Department of Transportation to build roads and highways and fix potholes.
[00:31:46]  That's the one place it's not a grift.
[00:31:49]  They're not taking your tax dollars and doing something.
[00:31:52]  They're actually.
[00:31:52]  Taking people who use the roads and taxing them for the use of the roads.
[00:31:57]  Everything else is let's borrow from here, let's borrow from Social Security.
[00:32:01]  I say get rid of it all completely, make every road a toll road and privatize the whole darn system.
[00:32:09]  But it'll help, but it's not a lasting solution to it.
[00:32:12]  So what happens then down the road when it's $6 a gallon?
[00:32:15]  Then what are you going to do?
[00:32:17]  Here's what happened.
[00:32:19]  When Biden pulled us off of energy independence, he handed the power.
[00:32:24]  To countries like Russia, to the OPEC ministers, to the people who hate us.
[00:32:29]  It was a transfer of power from the United States, with the most powerful economy in the world, most powerful military in the world, to watch what happens when the price of all these things starts to go higher and higher and higher.
[00:32:40]  And don't forget, the price of gasoline just doesn't mean your drive to the soccer stadium, soccer field is more expensive.
[00:32:47]  Everything's more expensive.
[00:32:48]  Your avocados are more expensive.
[00:32:50]  Your potatoes are more expensive.
[00:32:51]  Your meat is more expensive.
[00:32:52]  Every single thing we do in this country becomes more expensive.
[00:32:55]  And that's where they talk about Biden's inflation.
[00:32:57]  It's sourced at one spot, the fuel market.
[00:33:00]  And that's the real source of his aspiring out of control inflation.
[00:33:05]  They say all these other things, it's really fuel because fuel goes into everything, including that pork chop that you put on the family's table every day.
[00:33:13]  So, all right, another question.
[00:33:14]  This is like geopolitical, but with Russia and China, they're not natural allies.
[00:33:20]  They don't necessarily make a lot of sense in terms of the way they live and what their strategic goals are and so on.
[00:33:25]  But we've seen some cozying.
[00:33:27]  We've seen some cozying up in recent months.
[00:33:30]  And Putin went to the Beijing Olympics and There was just sort of a public showing of we're buds now.
[00:33:35]  And I think that was obviously for our benefit.
[00:33:38]  So if we punish him too much, if we punish Putin too much with these sanctions, and Europe does as well, what are the risks realistically of China becoming more important to Russia in a way that's going to hurt us?
[00:33:52]  I think both of them have a common interest.
[00:33:54]  And the common interest is knocking the United States off that top pedestal.
[00:33:57]  They both clearly like that.
[00:33:59]  Putin, for his egotistical reasons, and President Xi in China, because they want to be number one.
[00:34:04]  They have the fastest growing economy for the last.
[00:34:06]  20 years every year.
[00:34:08]  They're approaching our level of gross domestic product.
[00:34:11]  They want to overtake us to be the world superpower in finance and gross domestic product.
[00:34:15]  And what they need to do that, one of the most important things, one thing we have is we have energy.
[00:34:21]  We have energy under our ground that can provide everything we need.
[00:34:26]  China doesn't.
[00:34:27]  China has coal, and that's it.
[00:34:29]  They don't have natural gas.
[00:34:30]  They don't have much crude production.
[00:34:31]  They're at the mercy of other producers.
[00:34:33]  They're at the mercy of France.
[00:34:34]  They're at the mercy of Russia.
[00:34:35]  They're at the mercy of OPEC.
[00:34:37]  As what we would be if we were less of a producer, but we eliminated that.
[00:34:42]  We proved that we can be self sufficient.
[00:34:44]  For some reason, we threw that away.
[00:34:45]  So, China wanting us to get off the top level and they want to be on the top level, what's the inroad to do that?
[00:34:52]  Energy.
[00:34:53]  They strike deals with Russia by saying the United States is bad.
[00:34:57]  Putin doesn't like us anyway.
[00:34:58]  So, they agree.
[00:35:00]  Russia sends oil to China.
[00:35:01]  China's economy rises.
[00:35:03]  Russia sells a lot of oil, creating a lot of revenue for them.
[00:35:06]  And what happens?
[00:35:07]  Our price of oil goes up.
[00:35:08]  We get less access to it.
[00:35:10]  China grows, we don't.
[00:35:12]  It's more than clear.
[00:35:13]  They're even doing military exercises together for the first time ever in the last year, Russia and China.
[00:35:21]  It's a complex matter.
[00:35:22]  We have a lot of moving parts to keep an eye on.
[00:35:24]  It's not so simple as, oh, you know, one country crossed another country's sovereign borders, and we're the United States, so we step in and stop the bully from doing that.
[00:35:32]  It's a lot more layered than that.
[00:35:34]  Okay, let's shift gears, speaking of country and borders, and let's go up north to the Canadian one, where Justin Trudeau, I mean, he's.
[00:35:42]  He thinks he's Vladimir Putin.
[00:35:44]  He wants to be more of an authoritarian, apparently, because he has unleashed hell on these truckers and not just the truckers, but anybody who supported them.
[00:35:54]  Now we've seen an extension, thanks to at least one half of the Canadian Parliament.
[00:35:59]  It's got to pass both houses, but so far they're extending his emergency powers.
[00:36:04]  There's a very strong editorial in the Wall Street Journal saying none of this was necessary.
[00:36:07]  He didn't need emergency powers.
[00:36:09]  Regular law enforcement could have dealt with this problem.
[00:36:11]  The things that they're doing to sort of clear the areas in Ottawa and so on were all regular matters of law enforcement.
[00:36:17]  You didn't need to give Trudeau the power to seize people's bank accounts.
[00:36:22]  And so he's seizing the truckers' professional bank accounts.
[00:36:25]  Canceling their insurance policy so that they can't work at all.
[00:36:29]  And if you're some person who donated 25 bucks or 50 bucks from your personal bank account now, some of those private personal bank accounts are being seized.
[00:36:40]  And Justin Trudeau has zero problem with any of this.
[00:36:44]  What are we to make of it?
[00:36:46]  So I don't know if you've had her on yet.
[00:36:47]  There's an Alexandra Lavoie.
[00:36:49]  She's a reporter that was in the, she was part of the, not part of the protest, but she was covering the Canadian protest.
[00:36:54]  Well, she got shot.
[00:36:55]  She was rebel?
[00:36:57]  I think she's with Rebel News, and we've had her colleague Ezra Levante on.
[00:37:01]  Yeah, fantastic.
[00:37:02]  But Trudeau has become the Canadian Fidel Castro.
[00:37:06]  I mean, he has really become a dictator up there.
[00:37:09]  He's a power drunk, hungry socialist who says exactly what you said there.
[00:37:15]  What kind of constitution allows a government to go in and seize people's personal property for peaceful protest?
[00:37:21]  I mean, they didn't do that with BLM here.
[00:37:23]  I've become very close to the People's Convoy here in the United States, which is leaving.
[00:37:28]  Barstow, California, tomorrow, trekking across the country, weeding its way through Texas and other states.
[00:37:34]  They don't announce where they're going to be, but we know that they're going to end up in the DC area on March 5th.
[00:37:39]  I'm going to ride the last leg of that with them.
[00:37:41]  And they're doing exactly the same thing the Canadian truckers did.
[00:37:44]  They're fighting for our freedoms.
[00:37:45]  Now, we have a constitution that protects that peaceful protests.
[00:37:49]  They're going to be very peaceful.
[00:37:50]  The question is will the United States crack down the way Canada is cracking down on the people who showed up in Ottawa?
[00:37:57]  Let's hope now.
[00:37:58]  They didn't crack down.
[00:37:59]  In Minneapolis and Kenosha, in LA, and all the other cities that burned to the ground in 2020 on the heels of George Floyd's murder.
[00:38:07]  They didn't crack down on all the violence and rioting and looting that went on there.
[00:38:10]  Hopefully, this becomes a peaceful protest, and the DC swamp realizes that this is about our freedoms and we're willing to protect those truckers and people's convoy.
[00:38:20]  They got it going on.

=== Vaccine Mandate Politics (05:05) ===

[00:38:22]  Yeah.
[00:38:22]  In Canada and in here, there's a collapse of faith in the public health messengers.
[00:38:27]  And, you know, Like, I call him the Prophet Fauci because that's how he's treated by the mainstream media and the far left.
[00:38:34]  And at my little Upper West Side bookstore, there's literally a Dr. Fauci superhero doll you can buy, and people buy it, not even ironically.
[00:38:44]  But there's been a collapse in trust, apart from those crazy, you know, far left 10% people in public health messages, and for good reason.
[00:38:54]  You know, we're seeing it all fall apart.
[00:38:55]  We're seeing reason to doubt them.
[00:38:57]  There's a report just today, Eric, about how the CDC has not been publishing large.
[00:39:02]  Portions of the COVID data that it's collecting because it basically admits it's not going to uphold its push for vaccines, in particular the booster, but not just the booster, the data on the hospitalizations of children and so on.
[00:39:16]  So they don't want to release it because it undermines their narrative.
[00:39:19]  And then when you try to talk about facts that may undermine their narrative, they block you, they organize letter writing campaigns against you, they try to get you pulled off the air like they did with Joe Rogan.
[00:39:28]  So they're all connected, right?
[00:39:29]  Up in Canada, they decided to go out and protest in the streets over this nonsense.
[00:39:33]  Here we're doing it as well.
[00:39:35]  Any sort of public messaging gets shut down, and we're supposed to just take it.
[00:39:39]  Yeah.
[00:39:40]  Unfortunately, you're hitting the nail on the head here.
[00:39:43]  So they said it's all about the science, three weeks to stop the spread.
[00:39:48]  And we realized all these things were wrong.
[00:39:51]  They were just completely wrong about masks.
[00:39:53]  There may or may not be.
[00:39:54]  Have been wrong about vaccines.
[00:39:56]  Again, I'm vaccinated, I'm pro vaccine, anti mandate, hate the mandate part because we're not really sure.
[00:40:01]  You want to do it, do it for yourself.
[00:40:02]  But here's the point when the CDC admits that they were not exposing or sharing data that they knew would affect the way the narrative would be seen by the people because they were so intent on having people vaccinated that they didn't want to show them what the actual science was saying and let them decide for themselves, isn't that in itself?
[00:40:27]  A statism, a communism, the government telling you what you can and can't do and with your own body.
[00:40:34]  I mean, it literally, we've gone from a democratic republic into some sort of communist regime where the group, the big pharma, gets together with the administration, who also gets backed by the vast majority of the mainstream media to make sure that the loop is closed and the narrative stays the same.
[00:40:53]  It becomes less about science and more about the politics of it, what they want.
[00:40:56]  And again, Megan, I'm telling you, we talked about this for a long time, for two years of this pandemic.
[00:41:01]  This is all about money.
[00:41:03]  Money.
[00:41:04]  Big Pharma was by far the biggest donator to the Joe Biden campaign.
[00:41:08]  They put $8.5 million as a group into the Joe Biden 2020 campaign.
[00:41:13]  Everyone else, the next highest was Trump at about $2.5 million.
[00:41:16]  So it's almost more than triple the amount of money.
[00:41:19]  Why?
[00:41:20]  What happens?
[00:41:21]  Biden says, you know what?
[00:41:22]  Everyone's got to get, everyone is mandated to get vaccinated, not once, not twice, not three times, four times with a booster, right?
[00:41:28]  Everyone, including five month old, down to whatever, year olds.
[00:41:32]  For free.
[00:41:33]  Well, it's free to those people who are doing it because that's a lot of demand that you can create.
[00:41:38]  The demand means that there's a lot of medicine that these big pharma people are going to sell to our government, who's just printed five or six trillion dollars to pay for all that, send it over to big pharma, and they turn around and send it back into these Democrats' coffers.
[00:41:51]  It's a closed loop.
[00:41:52]  It's shady.
[00:41:53]  It's probably illegal.
[00:41:55]  And hopefully, the House goes and the Senate goes Republican next term, 2022.
[00:42:01]  It looks like it's going to.
[00:42:02]  And we start hearing some.
[00:42:03]  Some of these people, some of these Pfizer CEOs and Moderna CEOs on the stand explaining why they're the biggest donors to the Democrats.
[00:42:10]  And is there any link to the Democrats pushing their product on the American people?
[00:42:15]  There's no federal booster mandate yet, but there is in city after city.
[00:42:18]  In New York, you're going to have to have it to enter a lot of facilities and so on.
[00:42:21]  And the thing that supports that theory, because I understand you could just make the argument.
[00:42:26]  I mean, it would just sort of make logical sense.
[00:42:28]  And you could say, this is just what I believe.
[00:42:30]  But the thing that really adds to it, in my view, is the fact that they were doing, they were pushing the vaccine at the expense of the therapeutics.
[00:42:37]  They didn't want any talk of therapeutics at all.
[00:42:39]  They weren't actively unleashing the way they did to generate the vaccine, the companies to go get the therapeutics on it.
[00:42:46]  And when you had hydroxychloroquine come up, it was like, no.
[00:42:49]  Ivermectin, it was like, no.
[00:42:51]  You had the Fauci squash machine come down and anybody pushing it.
[00:42:54]  So why?
[00:42:55]  Why was the vaccine so prized over everything?
[00:42:58]  We can't get straight answers because they bury the information.
[00:43:01]  Yeah, you can, because the therapeutics are cheap.
[00:43:04]  And Ivermectin was like 10 cents a dose.
[00:43:08]  Meanwhile, you're selling a Moderna vaccine that we With costs $100 per dose.
[00:43:13]  And they were selling and they were demanding, they were mandating those.
[00:43:16]  And, you know, it really is, if you, it probably would be illegal if you were doing it in the public and the free, you know, your average investor, average person out in the markets trying to do this.

=== Freedoms Trampled in Canada (15:44) ===

[00:43:28]  But these guys are scratching each other's back.
[00:43:30]  There's a string attached to every policy that the administration is making.
[00:43:35]  They get Fauci to sign on and say, yeah, this is definitely a doctor.
[00:43:38]  He's a scientist.
[00:43:39]  He's a doctor.
[00:43:40]  He knows what he's talking about.
[00:43:41]  The world's greatest neurologist who's been, has he treated even one COVID patient?
[00:43:44]  Has he treated even one?
[00:43:45]  Even one COVID patient.
[00:43:47]  He's been wrong about everything, Megan.
[00:43:49]  He came out and said no masks.
[00:43:50]  Then he said mask.
[00:43:51]  And then he said two masks.
[00:43:52]  And then he said, you know, masks didn't matter.
[00:43:54]  And then I think wrong is being too generous.
[00:43:56]  You know, he's lied.
[00:43:57]  He admitted that he lied to us repeatedly.
[00:43:59]  He wasn't wrong.
[00:44:00]  There's a difference between making an error, which we would forgive, and openly lying to us, and then saying we have to stick a needle, not just in our arm, but in our baby's arm, right?
[00:44:08]  Like, that's what Fauci's guilty of.
[00:44:10]  But where's Punno?
[00:44:12]  You know what?
[00:44:12]  He's guilty of?
[00:44:13]  He's guilty of hiding for the Chinese.
[00:44:15]  He's guilty of blocking, lead blocking for the Chinese.
[00:44:18]  They clearly started this pandemic.
[00:44:20]  It clearly started.
[00:44:22]  And now we believe it started in the Wuhan lab, which we've been talking about for a long time.
[00:44:26]  In the meantime, he found you saying, no, no, that's Kabuki theory.
[00:44:29]  That's not proven that the Wuhan lab theory is.
[00:44:32]  Real.
[00:44:32]  And also in the meantime, China destroys all their data from that Wuhan lab and then tells us they only lost 3,000 people during the pandemic.
[00:44:40]  We lost 600,000, 800,000, whatever the number is.
[00:44:44]  They've lied and Fauci's hidden, he's blocked for the Chinese.
[00:44:50]  And we've done less to the Chinese to hold them accountable than we're about to do to Russia for its border skirmish with Ukraine.
[00:44:57]  Okay, let me shift gears because we lost a friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours, and a former co host of yours, Bob Beckel, died.
[00:45:05]  Bob Beckles dead, age of 73, the cause of death not released.
[00:45:10]  It's hard to believe, Eric, such a larger than life force, right?
[00:45:14]  It's hard to believe he's passed on.
[00:45:18]  So many great memories with Bob.
[00:45:20]  Bob used to sit in the breezeway smoking his little cigar and talk to anyone who would talk to him.
[00:45:25]  Bob, you may not remember this, but Bob, the first day the five was slated to become a show, we went and had lunch over at Del Frisco's across the street with the whole cast and crew and everything.
[00:45:36]  And Bob choked on a shrimp.
[00:45:37]  And I.
[00:45:38]  Yes, you saved him.
[00:45:40]  I did save him the Heimlich.
[00:45:41]  I did save him with the Heimlich, and I wish I could do it again.
[00:45:44]  Bob was a unique character, a real true hero in my book.
[00:45:49]  Look, we had opposite political views, but that was a time when two people can have completely bipolar political views and come together and just be friends and have a good time and make some good TV.
[00:46:02]  My husband talked to him for one of his books, spent so much time with Doug.
[00:46:06]  He wasn't going to get anything out of this, but spent so much time with him talking about the golden days when he used to be able to run the Democrat campaign and talk to the guy running the Republican campaign.
[00:46:13]  Fight it out all day, but then have a drink together at night back when he was still drinking.
[00:46:18]  But, you know, it's just he always gave and gave and gave and never expected anything in return.
[00:46:22]  And so quick with a laugh and a compliment and support.
[00:46:25]  And man, we will miss him.
[00:46:27]  Eric Bowling, so good to see you.
[00:46:29]  Love you as well.
[00:46:30]  Check him out on Newsmax.
[00:46:31]  Everybody's a great, great show.
[00:46:32]  4 p.m. You can watch him there.
[00:46:34]  And up next, we're going to have a bit more on that authoritarian crackdown in Canada as a Canadian radio host who recently went independent is here to share his story of what the media there did to him when he had the nerve to be a Black man who with heterodox thinking.
[00:46:51]  Don't go away.
[00:46:57]  President Biden is expected to speak this afternoon, within minutes, we're told, about Russia and sanctions while a Ukraine invasion is underway, though not necessarily in progress.
[00:47:10]  In other words, they went in, they took these two areas of Ukraine that are more pro Russian and filled with a bunch of Russians.
[00:47:18]  Last we knew they weren't continuing the march, though anything could happen.
[00:47:22]  That situation is clearly quite fluid.
[00:47:25]  Meantime, Canada's Justin Trudeau, being accused of crossing a Democratic line of his own in his crackdown against the Freedom Convoy truckers.
[00:47:33]  Late last night, in a party line vote, his side won to continue his emergency measures as Canada's House of Commons approved the Emergencies Act extension.
[00:47:45]  Today, police are fully in control of the Canadian capital.
[00:47:49]  Convoy leaders are under arrest, and people who supported them, even with small donations, have had their personal bank accounts frozen.
[00:47:58]  And the pain continues.
[00:48:00]  Jamil Giovanni is a Canadian radio personality who recently left his corporate gig and started a Substack.
[00:48:06]  More on that later and what happened to him.
[00:48:08]  But first, let's talk about what's happening up north of our border.
[00:48:12]  Welcome, Jamil.
[00:48:13]  Thank you so much for having me, Megan.
[00:48:15]  The pleasure is mine.
[00:48:16]  So, what's the reaction?
[00:48:17]  I realize that Canadians tend to be nicer than Americans, they tend to take a bit more than we would take here, though clearly they have their breaking point.
[00:48:26]  So, what's been the reaction to the Canadian parliament, at least part of it, extending this emergency state?
[00:48:33]  That allows him to pursue these crazy measures.
[00:48:36]  Well, you're right.
[00:48:37]  You know, Canadians, we are very polite people.
[00:48:40]  You know, you step on our shoe on the street and we'll apologize to you.
[00:48:44]  That's sort of what we're known for, but it's also a reality.
[00:48:48]  And we have put up with a lot.
[00:48:49]  I mean, you know, the decision of the Trudeau government to continue pushing these mandates onto the truckers, onto others, despite the fact that 90% of our population has gotten vaccinated.
[00:49:03]  It just seems like such an unnecessary, brutal action.
[00:49:07]  And that's what led to the trucker convoy.
[00:49:10]  And the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is continuing on this path of using his power in ways that are completely unnecessary.
[00:49:18]  What's interesting, as you noted, Megan, about the party line vote is that the reason why Justin Trudeau was able to get his Liberal Party members to all vote in this direction and also to get our Socialist Party, the NDP in Canada, To vote in this direction is because he made it what is called a confidence vote.
[00:49:39]  And in our parliamentary system, what that means is if his party didn't support him 100%, it could have triggered an election.
[00:49:46]  And so a lot of the people who voted in favor of him getting the Emergency Act passed are actually doing so because they didn't want an election, not because they agree with him.
[00:49:56]  Wow.
[00:49:57]  All right.
[00:49:57]  So here was his message to Parliament about why it was necessary to give him these powers officially to let him roll with these.
[00:50:05]  This is Justin Trudeau from.
[00:50:07]  Monday, Soundbite 2.
[00:50:09]  I ask all members of Parliament to take action against illegal blockades and to stand up for public safety and for the freedom of Canadians.
[00:50:21]  Invoking the Emergencies Act has been necessary.
[00:50:25]  In a democracy, you can protest, you can share your opinion at the top of your lungs, you can disagree with elected officials, you can certainly disagree with me.
[00:50:38]  But you can't harass.
[00:50:41]  Your fellow citizens who disagree with you.
[00:50:44]  You can't hold a city hostage.
[00:50:47]  You can't block a critical trade corridor and deprive people of their jobs.
[00:50:53]  You can't attack journalists for reporting, which is essential to our democracy.
[00:50:59]  It's pretty crazy when you listen to that and think back on how he felt very differently when the BLM protests were going on inside Canada.
[00:51:08]  And by the way, as for the harassment of journalists, we just had Eric Bolling on.
[00:51:12]  Why don't you tell it to the Rebel News journalists, including Alexa, who we were talking about with Eric Bowling?
[00:51:19]  You can see her, I'll just play it, this Soundbite 5.
[00:51:21]  You can see her getting hit with a billy club.
[00:51:24]  Talk about harassment.
[00:51:25]  Here's some.
[00:51:45]  It's crazy.
[00:51:46]  So, for our listening audience, you can see this young woman.
[00:51:48]  She's holding a stick mic.
[00:51:49]  She's clearly not just some random, you know, bully.
[00:51:53]  And this cop comes up to her with his billy club.
[00:51:56]  Turned horizontally and shoves it against her.
[00:51:58]  You can't tell, but what I'm told is up against her neck over and over and over.
[00:52:03]  So, your thoughts on it, Jamil?
[00:52:05]  Well, it's frustrating to see and hear those images, those interactions, those conflicts between citizens, journalists, and police officers.
[00:52:18]  The unfortunate thing here is that the Trudeau government has pit cops against the community.
[00:52:25]  You mentioned Black Lives Matter earlier, Megan.
[00:52:28]  I mean, this is.
[00:52:29]  The same prime minister who kneeled with Black Lives Matter protesters, called our country racist, called police officers racist, and then decided to put police officers in these tense situations where they're in conflict with citizens and journalists.
[00:52:46]  Keeping in mind, by the way, that the police chief of Ottawa resigned a week ago.
[00:52:52]  The first Black police chief, by the way, in Ottawa's history, which is just another layer of what's going on here in terms of the hypocrisy.
[00:52:59]  Of the Trudeau government treating police officers in many ways like pawns to do their bidding.
[00:53:05]  It's incredibly frustrating.
[00:53:07]  When it comes to the BLM protests in Canada, and while it didn't approach what we saw here in America in terms of the violence and the looting and so on, it doesn't look like it was exactly a picnic and completely law abiding either.
[00:53:24]  And yet, back then, like you point out, he was out there marching with them.
[00:53:27]  Look at that.
[00:53:28]  You can see the people running in the streets and kicking over the garbage.
[00:53:31]  And he was like, Yeah, let's go out and protest with them.
[00:53:33]  I'll be with them right in the middle of the road, blocking traffic, the very things he said you cannot do.
[00:53:38]  But he supported that fully, Jamil, fully.
[00:53:42]  And now, how does he distinguish between the two?
[00:53:44]  Oh, he says, Well, the truckers are all racists.
[00:53:47]  Based on what?
[00:53:48]  One flag with a swastika on it that wasn't even tied directly to an actual protester, as opposed to somebody there trying to make protesters look bad.
[00:53:57]  You're absolutely right.
[00:53:59]  And the reality is, when those BLM protests were happening, We weren't even supposed to be gathered in groups.
[00:54:04]  That was at the height of COVID, and everyone was told to stay inside, unless, of course, COVID doesn't go after you when you're a BLM protester.
[00:54:13]  So the hypocrisy knows no bounds here.
[00:54:16]  And the reality is this Justin Trudeau is gaslighting not just my fellow Canadians, but the entire world right now.
[00:54:23]  You heard him go on television and say this is for freedom.
[00:54:26]  How exactly could restricting our civil rights and civil liberties lead to more freedom?
[00:54:34]  It's just all these mind games that get done to make us not realize what is going on, including focusing, by the way, on the mainstream media corporations who love to make martyrs and victims out of their journalists who tow the government's line on all of these issues.
[00:54:50]  And meanwhile, the vast majority of these protests with these truckers were annoying, from what we've heard, for the local citizenry.
[00:54:57]  But it's not like the truckers were going after the locals, trying to hurt the locals, looking for opportunities to create havoc or cause violence.
[00:55:06]  And as you point out, He sends the cops in and treats them like they're violent criminals.
[00:55:12]  And now we are seeing skirmishes, like we saw some woman get trampled by a police officer on his horse.
[00:55:18]  This is sound bite four.
[00:55:20]  You can hear some of the dust up for our audience at home.
[00:55:23]  Oh, come on through.
[00:55:25]  Come on through.
[00:55:27]  What is happening here?
[00:55:28]  Wow.
[00:55:29]  What is this lady doing?
[00:55:30]  Trampling.
[00:55:31]  Trampling horses.
[00:55:33]  Stop it.
[00:55:34]  Stop it.
[00:55:34]  What?
[00:55:35]  Oh, my God.
[00:55:40]  You can see bodies on the ground and the horse is going right over them.
[00:55:44]  They just trampled that lady.
[00:55:47]  They just fully trampled that lady.
[00:55:49]  They just fully trampled that lady.
[00:55:51]  And Jamil, this is what people are saying now, from our Wall Street Journal to the more right leaning pundits in Canada, like I was talking about Ezra Levant.
[00:56:01]  Saying this isn't necessary.
[00:56:02]  Like, this isn't, they're treating these truckers like they are like this some sort of crazed band of bandits out there setting fires and causing havoc and looting stores.
[00:56:14]  And they weren't.
[00:56:16]  You're right.
[00:56:16]  And it's not even just, you know, pundits or journalists who are making this point.
[00:56:22]  Even premiers in Canada, which is the equivalent of a governor in Alberta, Saskatchewan, they're making the exact same point.
[00:56:29]  You know, Justin Trudeau referenced the trade corridor.
[00:56:33]  Between Michigan and Ontario, that was blockaded a couple weeks back.
[00:56:38]  And they were able to resolve that blockade without him, you know, using the suspending our civil rights and using the Emergencies Act to pit police officers against citizens.
[00:56:49]  So it's very bizarre that they've proven they could resolve these things without the violence, without the manipulation of our laws and our liberties.
[00:56:58]  And yet he's now arguing that he has to do this in order to clear a few blocks in our capital city.
[00:57:05]  You had the Deputy Prime Minister, Ms. Freeland, come out last week and warned that what they were going to do to the bank accounts and so on.
[00:57:14]  I'll play you that, but indeed it appears they're doing it.
[00:57:17]  Here she is.
[00:57:18]  Soundbite one.
[00:57:19]  If your truck is being used in these protests, your corporate accounts will be frozen.
[00:57:27]  The insurance on your vehicle will be suspended.
[00:57:32]  The consequences are real and they will bite.
[00:57:39]  And not just the truckers, but anyone who donated $25 to them.
[00:57:43]  $50, we're hearing reports of people being fired from their jobs once it's emerged that they donated $50 to support what?
[00:57:50]  Freedom, to support some pushback on the vaccine mandates.
[00:57:53]  That's what it started as, and it became more about government authoritarianism.
[00:57:57]  But that's a protected political view, at least it would be here in America.
[00:58:02]  As it should be.
[00:58:03]  What's happening with the freezing of bank accounts, you're right, Megan, there are stories of single moms who work at diners.
[00:58:10]  Who donated $50 and have now had their bank accounts frozen.
[00:58:13]  I mean, the impact this is having on working class and middle class families is significant.
[00:58:19]  And it is a way of just cracking down on political dissent.
[00:58:23]  You know, Christia Freeland, our deputy prime minister, who you mentioned, she was a journalist and a writer.
[00:58:30]  Before she got into politics, she covered countries all around the world that did this kind of stuff to their citizens.
[00:58:36]  And before she got into Trudeau's government, she probably would have opposed these things.
[00:58:40]  But this is what happens when power is at your fingertips.
[00:58:44]  We've seen from Justin Trudeau, we've seen from Christia Freeland, an appetite for power that transcends principles, values, and ethics.
[00:58:53]  He, the Wall Street Journal put it as follows Mr. Trudeau criminalized a protest movement, deputizing financial institutions without due process or liability to find and freeze personal accounts of blockaders and anyone who helps them.
[00:59:08]  These extraordinary measures are a needless, Abuse of power.

=== Power and Accountability (03:00) ===

[00:59:12]  Now, I'd like to think if that happened here, I mean, that is extreme freezing the personal bank accounts of people making a $20 donation.
[00:59:21]  I like to think we would throw that politician out on his ear.
[00:59:24]  But Canada is extremely liberal.
[00:59:27]  Trudeau's party is liberal and in charge.
[00:59:30]  So, what are the odds that this actually does come back to haunt him politically in any way?
[00:59:34]  It's a great question.
[00:59:36]  And I think it's important to note, Megan, that a lot of this crackdown on the trucker convoy began with American corporations like.
[00:59:44]  Go fund me.
[00:59:46]  So we've seen the thread that we're seeing in Canada does go back to the United States.
[00:59:51]  It does go back to woke corporations.
[00:59:54]  It goes back to this overwhelming desire from some people in positions of power to want to control what we say.
[01:00:01]  When we say it, how we think.
[01:00:04]  And so we do worry about this expanding beyond just the 30 days that Justin Trudeau has asked for this power.
[01:00:12]  They've already alluded to the possibility it could last for months.
[01:00:15]  We worry about it happening to our brothers and sisters in other countries, like in the United States, because we've seen collaboration between American corporations and the Canadian government to make these sorts of things happen.
[01:00:28]  So it's a scary idea that there aren't enough checks and balances.
[01:00:32]  And this is not a common feature.
[01:00:35]  In Canadian democracy, the only other times this has been used, this power that Justin Trudeau is invoking now, is during world wars or when there was a terrorist attack and Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre Trudeau, was the prime minister.
[01:00:49]  So it's been decades since this power was used.
[01:00:52]  And I think it is revealing that he is so quick and hungry to have this power himself.
[01:00:59]  My hope is that enough Canadians and, frankly, also enough people outside of the country like yourself will draw attention to this so that he feels some accountability.
[01:01:08]  But unfortunately, he's proven to be someone who likes to avoid accountability at all costs.
[01:01:13]  Oh, right.
[01:01:14]  He put his tail between his legs and hid rather than speaking with the truckers and hearing them out.
[01:01:19]  Even at a time when COVID is receding and the restrictions are coming down one by one, even then, he couldn't even make it look like he was talking with them and extending an olive branch.
[01:01:29]  He had to just call them racists, try to dismiss them, and then try to ruin their lives.
[01:01:33]  I'll tell you something, Jamil.
[01:01:35]  If that happened here in America, if the Biden administration has the nerve to try to do Any of this to this trucker convoy that's starting to organize here domestically.
[01:01:45]  In the wake of giving BLM a total pass on the rioting and the looting, and in too many cases, the physical violence and even murders we saw happen, all hell is going to break loose.
[01:01:57]  They will be forced to pay at the ballot box this November in a way that they're not even anticipating.
[01:02:04]  There's no way the American people are going to allow that double standard.
[01:02:06]  All right, stand by because you mentioned these woke corporations, which are ruining your country and mine, and it is corporations.

=== Growing Up Without a Dad (05:48) ===

[01:02:13]  And I've read that in your Substack.
[01:02:15]  It's not just these individual journalists that we can call out as being pernicious forces.
[01:02:19]  It's the corporations that back them up, that want to exploit these divisions between us to line their pockets or make themselves look better and then watch the rest of us fight.
[01:02:29]  And Jamil's fallen victim to that himself.
[01:02:31]  He's been the target of said corporations and has got some thoughts on it.
[01:02:36]  You know, it can happen to anybody.
[01:02:38]  And he'll tell his story in just one second.
[01:02:45]  Jamil, let's talk about you because your personal story is really interesting to me.
[01:02:49]  You're a young guy, right?
[01:02:50]  34 years old?
[01:02:51]  Yes, that's right, Megan.
[01:02:52]  Okay.
[01:02:53]  And as I understand it, you wound up at Yale Law School with our pal, JD Vance.
[01:02:59]  I did.
[01:02:59]  Yeah.
[01:03:00]  We were classmates together, and he was my best friend at Yale and really happy to see his success.
[01:03:06]  That's amazing.
[01:03:07]  So you're Canadian.
[01:03:08]  Were you born and raised in Canada?
[01:03:09]  Yeah, in the Toronto area.
[01:03:12]  Living in New Haven, Connecticut was my first time outside of Canada.
[01:03:16]  Okay.
[01:03:16]  So, and how did you do that?
[01:03:18]  Like, how did you make it into Yale Law School?
[01:03:20]  He's got such a fascinating story.
[01:03:21]  What's your story?
[01:03:23]  Yeah, mine is also, you know, an unlikely journey.
[01:03:27]  I was born in Toronto.
[01:03:29]  My father is from Kenya.
[01:03:31]  He immigrated to Canada.
[01:03:33]  And my mother is the daughter of Irish, Scottish immigrants after World War II.
[01:03:39]  So, I was raised primarily by my mother.
[01:03:41]  And I was just, you know, like a lot of kids struggling, getting into trouble, not fitting in.
[01:03:46]  When I was in high school, they actually declared me illiterate.
[01:03:51]  Because I couldn't read and write at grade level, or at least that's what they thought.
[01:03:55]  So I struggled a lot in school, and it wasn't until getting out of high school that I. Was able to turn things around.
[01:04:02]  I got some good mentors, some people believed in me, got into a different environment, and I went to community college and just kind of took off from there.
[01:04:10]  So, in less than about six years, about five years, I went from being illiterate to being JD's classmate at Yale.
[01:04:17]  So, it was a very, very quick turnaround in life.
[01:04:20]  And it took me a while to get adjusted.
[01:04:22]  Let's put it that way.
[01:04:23]  That's amazing.
[01:04:24]  Well, I mean, you've been very open about growing up without your dad and the impact that had on you.
[01:04:31]  And you've extrapolated that to the experience.
[01:04:33]  A lot of young black men have in particular of growing up in fatherless households, and there's the cultural impacts that it can have.
[01:04:42]  It's something that you're not really supposed to talk about.
[01:04:44]  You know, that like in polite society, certainly if you're a white person, you're certainly not supposed to talk about it.
[01:04:49]  You've been pretty bold in going a different way.
[01:04:51]  Why?
[01:04:52]  Well, because I think if we want to solve a lot of the biggest problems in the United States and in Canada, we need to talk about the family.
[01:05:00]  You know, I always try to help people understand that when you grow up without a dad, You look for one every time you leave the house.
[01:05:08]  And when I was a kid, I was looking for male role models everywhere.
[01:05:12]  And I didn't often have the best options.
[01:05:15]  And that had a tremendous impact on my life and a big part of why it took so long for me to even believe in myself enough to try hard in school and how someone who could go on to be an Ivy League student was considered illiterate in the only language that he knows.
[01:05:31]  Right.
[01:05:32]  So it's such a big issue.
[01:05:34]  And I really do believe if we want to solve problems and not just You know, whine and complain about grievances.
[01:05:40]  We do need to talk about what's happening in our homes.
[01:05:43]  So, the father is incredibly important, of course, as is the mother.
[01:05:48]  The family unit is probably the most important thing for a child and our first line of defense for children from the bad influences that await them.
[01:05:58]  I had Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal on not long ago talking about his latest book.
[01:06:02]  And he grew up in Buffalo, New York.
[01:06:04]  And he writes in his earlier book about how.
[01:06:09]  Could have gone either way, you know, how he could have been pulled over into a far more criminal element than the one he was really kind of being raised in.
[01:06:16]  He was, you know, being raised in a nice family that didn't want him to do anything close to illegal, but the town was, you know, kind of going another way, or at least a faction of it.
[01:06:25]  And he talks about some of his friends who got pulled into drugs and crime and died very young, and just how chilling it was for him to realize how close that was for him if he had made a couple of different decisions.
[01:06:40]  Can you relate to that?
[01:06:42]  Absolutely.
[01:06:42]  You know, I'm a big admirer of Jason.
[01:06:45]  I know his work well, and I do think he touches on a very relatable experience for me and many others who did see our peer group fail to live up to their potential.
[01:06:56]  In many cases, lack the supports needed to become the student or the innovator, the creative thinker that they could have been.
[01:07:04]  So, yes, I mean, I have friends who I grew up with who wound up in prison, who wound up in all sorts of criminal situations, and they are, none of them were less capable.
[01:07:14]  Than I am.
[01:07:16]  Frankly, a lot of the time it felt like a matter of luck, whether you wound up in the worst spot or in a slightly better spot.
[01:07:23]  So I definitely relate to Jason's experience in Buffalo.
[01:07:27]  And what I would say is, I think that's one of the reasons why I get so frustrated with political correctness.
[01:07:34]  Because when you've seen the consequences of these things in real life, when you know people who are affected by these real social issues, you just don't have time and energy and tolerance.
[01:07:45]  For dancing around the real issue because you want to solve them, you want to save lives.
[01:07:50]  And it's people who live at the top of ivory towers who have the luxury of being able to theorize about these things and point fingers at everyone else and not try to actually move things forward.

=== Life After Cancer Remission (03:11) ===

[01:08:01]  It's so true.
[01:08:02]  I mean, if you've had real problems in your life, you don't have a lot of tolerance for language policing.
[01:08:05]  It's like, let's just get to the point.
[01:08:07]  We both know what we're talking about.
[01:08:09]  Let's duke it out on whether it's a good idea or a bad idea, but stop policing my language all the time, right?
[01:08:14]  It's like only one of the many problems with wokeness.
[01:08:18]  So you graduate from Yale Law School, you start practicing law, and then life deals you yet another whopper at age 30.
[01:08:28]  In 2018, you got some bad medical news.
[01:08:31]  Tell us about it.
[01:08:33]  Yeah, it was a very tough situation, Megan, because when you graduate from law school, you sort of have this sense of life is going to be easier now, right?
[01:08:42]  Like you're making money.
[01:08:43]  I mean, you're still paying off student loans, but you're making some money.
[01:08:46]  You're living in a nicer neighborhood.
[01:08:48]  You're able to help your mom, help your sisters.
[01:08:51]  And then you just sort of get taken down a notch again.
[01:08:54]  And you get reminded that a good education and a good salary doesn't save you from hardship.
[01:09:02]  In this case, for me, it was stage four cancer.
[01:09:05]  Which just completely turned my life upside down.
[01:09:08]  I wound up for almost a year on chemotherapy and radiation.
[01:09:13]  Eventually, I did go into remission, but it was a very challenging time.
[01:09:18]  It was a time where I had very many moments where it was just me and the good Lord in a dark hospital room and praying that I'd be able to get a chance to work again, have a career, live my life.
[01:09:29]  And I'm grateful every day that I got it because you're not guaranteed it.
[01:09:35]  Even in my 30s, I'm reminded that none of these things are guaranteed.
[01:09:40]  Yeah.
[01:09:41]  Stage four lymphoma is nothing to shake a stick at.
[01:09:44]  So, you did, I mean, forgive me for not understanding how to ask about this, but did you beat it?
[01:09:50]  Did you go into remission?
[01:09:51]  I'm not exactly sure what the term should be.
[01:09:54]  No, you're right.
[01:09:54]  Yeah.
[01:09:55]  I went into remission a couple of years ago.
[01:09:58]  And it's one of those things where, for at least five to 10 years, I'm going to be tested all the time.
[01:10:03]  And I got to tell you, Megan, it is still incredibly stressful.
[01:10:08]  When I go in for these tests, not knowing what's going to come.
[01:10:11]  And especially when, which has happened many times in my case, because I had a very aggressive form of cancer, I get a lot of inconclusive tests where they don't know whether the cancer has come back.
[01:10:23]  And it takes months before I get a final answer.
[01:10:26]  And those times are just so stressful.
[01:10:29]  But, you know, that's where faith in God comes into play.
[01:10:32]  If I didn't have, you know, Jesus Christ, I'd be stressing out all the time.
[01:10:36]  And it would be hard to take the leap of faith to, to, To actually move my life forward, not knowing if I'm going to get hit by cancer again, like a truck coming out of nowhere.
[01:10:48]  My God.
[01:10:48]  And the strength that must be building, because you have no choice but to wait.
[01:10:52]  You can't rush it along.
[01:10:53]  You have no choice.
[01:10:54]  So you've got to be building strength, resilience, incredible patience, tolerance during those intolerable months.
[01:11:03]  So, I mean, as I read your story, it's struggle after struggle that you overcome through faith, through family, through grit, initiative, character.

=== Corporate Silence and Wokeness (15:04) ===

[01:11:13]  And then you get this extraordinary opportunity, like two years after your diagnosis from Bell Media.
[01:11:21]  Bell Media, that's up in Canada, I guess.
[01:11:24]  And they come and they say, How would you like to host a primetime radio show for us?
[01:11:30]  And you're like, Hell yes, right?
[01:11:32]  I mean, like, you must be excited about this.
[01:11:35]  Yeah, I was very excited, you know, for a number of reasons.
[01:11:39]  As you noted, because it was just a couple of years after cancer and it's, you know, it's, it's, It was just a good feeling to be like, you know, I never knew if I was going to be able to use my voice again to now being able to use it, you know, on this platform.
[01:11:53]  So I was very excited about that.
[01:11:55]  And I was also very excited, Megan, because of the timing.
[01:11:58]  You know, George Floyd was just killed at this point in 2020.
[01:12:03]  In the summer, and Black Lives Matter was all over the news, all over the media.
[01:12:08]  And there was this sort of groupthink, this moral panic that was taking hold, where it seemed like everyone was afraid to disagree with them over some really important issues, including some of the family stuff that we talked about, by the way, since Black Lives Matter has been pretty openly against the nuclear family.
[01:12:26]  So when I got this chance to host the radio show, I'm thinking, wow, like I get to actually provide a voice to push back on some of that stuff.
[01:12:34]  Because it's really important.
[01:12:36]  And because I was seeing all these images coming out of Washington, D.C., there's a church set on fire and other parts of the United States, police stations are setting fire.
[01:12:45]  In St. Louis, a black cop was killed.
[01:12:47]  And I felt like we needed some course correction.
[01:12:51]  We needed to balance out the conversation.
[01:12:53]  So, yeah, I started off very excited about that job.
[01:12:57]  And then, I mean, we've heard the story before.
[01:13:00]  Now, I will admit it doesn't often happen to a black man with your backstory.
[01:13:05]  I mean, it's just egregious.
[01:13:07]  But we've heard this story before.
[01:13:08]  Then, once they got to hear your more heterodox views, right, that you did not sound like Don Lemon, you sounded more like Jason Riley, they were not so hot on you suddenly, Jamil.
[01:13:23]  Yeah.
[01:13:24]  You know, as the months went by, it started to feel like there was an expectation from some of the senior management at the company who managed the iHeartRadio talk network in Canada.
[01:13:38]  And they sort of, it was almost like, You know, you're you, you're we, you aren't the black guy we were hoping for, right?
[01:13:45]  Like, there was this, you could just say these other things, everything would work out great.
[01:13:48]  Yeah.
[01:13:48]  Like, and, and in some way, I think it's because, and, and I would imagine you may have experienced this at times in your career too, Megan, as a woman, where there's this sort of sense of as the workplace becomes more diverse, or as a radio station or a TV station becomes more diverse, there are people who think they sort of get to control what the new person gets to say.
[01:14:10]  So, in my case, as a black person, there were people who seemed to think, They knew what a black man with a radio show was supposed to think about all these different issues.
[01:14:18]  And when I did not go in the direction they wanted, it just built up over time this sort of resentment and this frustration towards me, which started to boil over about a year in, where it became obvious that, you know, when we were approaching our national independence day in Canada, for example, they wanted us to go on the radio and repeat Justin Trudeau style talking points, apologizing for our country.
[01:14:44]  Calling our country racist.
[01:14:46]  And I just wasn't willing to do that.
[01:14:48]  I mean, you know my story, Megan.
[01:14:49]  How many countries in the world does a kid get declared illiterate in high school and then get a chance to change his life?
[01:14:57]  In most parts of the world, if you screw up as a kid like I did, you're toast.
[01:15:01]  You don't get a second chance.
[01:15:03]  And so, how could I be so ungrateful, so resentful to my own country?
[01:15:07]  And just this media company, Bell Media, just was full of senior management who couldn't understand that.
[01:15:14]  So, how did that, that?
[01:15:15]  Get communicated to you?
[01:15:16]  You know, do they sit you down and say, here's what we want you to say?
[01:15:19]  Or like they suggested to you, like, how do you know what they want you to say?
[01:15:23]  And how do you know they're unhappy with what you did say?
[01:15:27]  Well, sometimes it is sort of the unsaid vibes you can get from people, right?
[01:15:33]  And I think we all have experienced that at work where someone's just giving you looks or treating you in a way where it's clear you're not being valued.
[01:15:40]  But there were some moments where it became very clear.
[01:15:43]  So, for example, we were actually asked in the summer of 2021.
[01:15:48]  To air clips the day before our Independence Day, decrying our country as racist, going on the radio and playing clips from all sorts of activists and academics.
[01:16:00]  You know, in my view, Unfairly criticizing our country.
[01:16:05]  And I didn't do that.
[01:16:07]  I just refused to do so.
[01:16:09]  There were other times where we were asked as employees to join equity consultations where we were going to be divided up based on our gender, our race, our sexuality.
[01:16:19]  I think some of us probably would have had to attend three or four of those meetings to cover all of our identities.
[01:16:25]  And I just refused to participate.
[01:16:27]  And I said things to them in emails where I said, hey, I understand you're doing this diversity, equity, inclusion thing.
[01:16:34]  But could we also think about diversity of thought?
[01:16:37]  And I would get no replies to that.
[01:16:39]  They just refuse to talk to me about those sources.
[01:16:41]  So, no.
[01:16:42]  Okay, God.
[01:16:43]  What do they want the mixed race people to do?
[01:16:45]  Like, if you could just have the white affinity group and the black affinity group sitting right next to each other, that would really help me out.
[01:16:50]  I'll just sit on the little line there and I'll please everybody.
[01:16:54]  Yeah.
[01:16:54]  And that's the thing.
[01:16:55]  It's like when they bring this stuff into the workplace, this diversity, equity, inclusion stuff, it forces you to be at odds with your employer if you don't go along to get along.
[01:17:06]  And in good conscience, I just couldn't participate in these things.
[01:17:09]  So you could feel the tension growing because I was not being welcomed to share my perspective on these issues.
[01:17:16]  And they're making you think about your race, which is not necessarily something you want to think about while you're doing your job.
[01:17:22]  Or in my case, your lady parts or your sexuality.
[01:17:25]  Maybe you don't want to be thinking about that while you're at the office.
[01:17:27]  Maybe you want to be thinking about inflation or the trucker convoy or something other than your immutable characteristics, which used to have no place in the workforce.
[01:17:38]  Exactly.
[01:17:39]  And that's, you know, the right that we should all have, you know, regardless of your background, your gender, your identity, you should be able to make those choices of how much do you want that to be part of your experience at work.
[01:17:51]  And these big corporations are giving you no choice.
[01:17:54]  They're forcing this political agenda on all of us.
[01:17:57]  So, how big, like in the United States, we have so many amazing, as I said, heterodox thinkers within the Black community, mixed race, whatever, who they do take a beating.
[01:18:09]  You know, I mean, Jason, we've been talking about Larry Elder, he was called the Black.
[01:18:12]  Face of white supremacy when he ran for governor of California.
[01:18:15]  Clarence Thomas is called, you know, an Uncle Tom all the time, Supreme Court Justice.
[01:18:19]  I could go on.
[01:18:20]  And Candace Owens, they just take it in a way that's especially cruel and diminishing.
[01:18:28]  So, what's it like in Canada?
[01:18:30]  Do you have like a strong contingent of, you know, black thinkers who just refuse to go along to get along?
[01:18:37]  Well, we do sort of under the radar.
[01:18:41]  We have those members of our community, academics, Uh, conservative activists, thoughtful, heterodox thinkers.
[01:18:50]  Uh, unfortunately, above the radar, uh, and I don't mean this to make myself seem more important than I am, I was kind of the only one.
[01:18:58]  I mean, we have a few people who are politicians, black politicians from the conservative party, who are insanely valuable.
[01:19:06]  Uh, Leslyn Lewis, Casey Maddo, for example, but in the media space, it just is me, and that's why I was such a target.
[01:19:14]  Like, I was the only person from the black community to have anything but a far left.
[01:19:20]  Perspective in mainstream media.
[01:19:22]  And that's one of the reasons why I've gotten more support, frankly, from American media since I got fired than Canadian media, because a lot of people in Canadian media are afraid they're going to lose their job if they even talk about what happened to me.
[01:19:36]  There is a very repressive culture when it comes to true diversity of thought in Canadian mainstream media.
[01:19:44]  And that's one of the reasons why in Canada we have such rosy, glowing coverage of someone like Justin Trudeau.
[01:19:50]  Mm hmm.
[01:19:51]  So it's just strange to me because I guess it was Bell Media for whom you worked, but they're connected in some way to iHeart Canada because iHeart America, they're very prof. Free speech.
[01:20:02]  I mean, that's who produced Rush Limbaugh for all those years and stood by him.
[01:20:07]  And so it's, I guess, there's obviously a dichotomy between the way the American group and the Canada group work.
[01:20:14]  So, how long did it take for them, Bell Media, to come to you and say, you're fired?
[01:20:20]  Well, it took them about a year and a half.
[01:20:23]  As we got close to the end of last year, right before Christmas time, some of the executives just got a lot more aggressive.
[01:20:32]  With trying to change the content of my show, including sending some accusatory emails, which I still to this day can't believe they put in writing.
[01:20:41]  And this is one of the reasons why I'm allowed to go out and talk about this, and they can't sue me because I could prove everything I'm saying.
[01:20:47]  They put in writing their desire to question my commitment to diversity and inclusion because I would talk about things like Dave Chappelle or JK Rowling and their views on gender ideology because I refuse to condemn.
[01:21:03]  Other people in the black community who are unvaccinated, like they really tried to push a certain political agenda on me in writing, and I just rejected it and I refused.
[01:21:14]  So they pulled me off the air and they said, Oh, in the new year, we'll have a meeting, we'll work out these issues.
[01:21:21]  I showed up to that meeting in early January, and the people, the executives, the management who are supposed to be there to talk about diversity and inclusion, they didn't even show up.
[01:21:31]  Instead, it was a human resource.
[01:21:33]  I've got to ask you, are these white people?
[01:21:35]  They are all white people.
[01:21:36]  Yes.
[01:21:37]  Of course they are.
[01:21:37]  All white liberals.
[01:21:38]  Of course.
[01:21:39]  Of course.
[01:21:40]  It's perfect.
[01:21:42]  Exactly.
[01:21:43]  And so the human resources person is the one who I find when I show up to the meeting.
[01:21:49]  And she tells me, oh, there's been a restructuring and you're no longer needed.
[01:21:53]  And I said to her, like, okay, well, are we going to get to talk about the issues that led to this point?
[01:21:59]  Because for me, that's the most important part.
[01:22:02]  Like, I'm a lawyer.
[01:22:04]  I never.
[01:22:06]  Expected a radio show.
[01:22:07]  I don't feel entitled to a radio show.
[01:22:09]  If this was a business decision, I'd be happy to accept it.
[01:22:12]  But this is clearly a political decision and they're trying to pretend otherwise.
[01:22:16]  And again, this is why they have never sued me.
[01:22:19]  They've never sent me a cease or desist letter.
[01:22:21]  They don't even try to stop me from talking about this because I can prove everything I'm saying is true.
[01:22:27]  Plus, can you imagine if you actually then had the right to discovery and got to see what they were saying between themselves?
[01:22:33]  I mean, it's almost worth it just to see.
[01:22:38]  So you got fired and then you started.
[01:22:39]  Posting on Substack, which everybody should check out.
[01:22:41]  Well, first of all, let's just do some business.
[01:22:43]  How can they find you on Substack?
[01:22:45]  Yeah.
[01:22:45]  So just my name, Jamil Giovanni at Substack.com.
[01:22:49]  Okay.
[01:22:50]  And all my social media, you can find it there too.
[01:22:53]  One of the things you questioned was whether they then came back and tried to buy your silence because once they started reading what you were posting on Substack, which was very open about all of this, what happened?
[01:23:06]  Yeah.
[01:23:07]  Well, you know, they actually sent this before I went public because I think they were, they, Probably did their due diligence and realized they screwed up big time.
[01:23:16]  And so I think legal and HR probably got involved and they were like, What the heck are you guys doing?
[01:23:22]  Yeah.
[01:23:24]  So they sent me what they called a quote paid opportunity, which is a very weird phrase that I've never encountered, by the way.
[01:23:33]  They sent me an email offering me a paid opportunity to write for one of their other media properties, which is called CTV News.
[01:23:41]  And they asked me to write columns for them.
[01:23:43]  And so I responded like, You know, this maybe address the reasons why you just fired me.
[01:23:50]  Like, are we going to work out those issues before you offer me more money?
[01:23:54]  And they just never responded.
[01:23:56]  So I think it was their attempt to see would I be willing to take a payout, but without actually.
[01:24:02]  You know, saying so.
[01:24:04]  And I just thought it was very insulting because, to your point earlier, these are, you know, white liberals who are questioning my commitment as a black man to diversity and inclusion and then expecting me to just take their money whenever they offer it.
[01:24:17]  I think they owe me and frankly my community a lot more of an explanation than that.
[01:24:22]  Yeah.
[01:24:22]  And, you know, they would have just taken your articles and buried them just so that they could say, oh, you know, we gave him, you know, another platform, whatever, you know, didn't guarantee the number of readers that he would get.
[01:24:33]  So we've seen that happen before.
[01:24:35]  Okay, so you decide to start writing about it on Substack, and not just this, but just all these issues where you can say whatever you want.
[01:24:41]  God bless Substack, because you can still say whatever you want on Substack.
[01:24:44]  And one of the points you were making was what I mentioned in the tease, which is we have to stop just blaming individual journalists who are lecturing us on wokeness and how we need to be better people and all that, in their view, right?
[01:24:57]  All these people who have terrible sins in their own past that nine times out of 10 we find out later they're covering up.
[01:25:03]  And you're saying we've got to look behind.
[01:25:06]  Beyond them and look at the companies themselves and why they go woke and what we can do about it.
[01:25:12]  Can you expand on that?
[01:25:14]  Yeah, what I mean by that is, you know, Megan, and I know you've encountered a lot of, you know, nasty comments on social media.
[01:25:20]  We all do as public figures.
[01:25:23]  And mainstream media corporations, in my view, love that because it allows for them to draw attention to people criticizing their employees, the journalists, as opposed to addressing the bigger issues.
[01:25:36]  At the corporations themselves.
[01:25:38]  You know, a lot of these journalists, frankly, are foot soldiers for the status quo.
[01:25:42]  They don't have a ton of power.
[01:25:44]  A lot of these businesses, because they haven't adapted to new technology, are dying, they're shrinking.
[01:25:50]  And so when you get mad at a journalist, it's almost like getting mad at the person at the front desk as opposed to the person who orders that person at the front desk to say and do certain things.
[01:26:01]  So the issue with these corporations, like let's take Bell Media, for example, they have in their governance documents, A lot of left wing talking points, including points about systemic racism and suggesting that Canada is a racist country.

=== Left Wing Corporate Control (03:47) ===

[01:26:17]  So that stuff trickles down.
[01:26:19]  I mean, if the corporation is going to take these sort of woke positions, you can't expect the employees to be any different.
[01:26:26]  And so, unless we're addressing the parent companies, unless we're addressing the governance of these organizations, which absolutely has a political agenda, and you can read about some of that from authors like Vivek Ramaswamy and his book Woke Inc.
[01:26:41]  This political agenda is what is often determining what we wind up seeing on Twitter or hearing on the radio or watching on television.
[01:26:49]  But until we address the woke agenda at a corporate level, we're still just fighting with foot soldiers, and that's not getting us anywhere.
[01:26:57]  I like the way you put it.
[01:26:59]  This is part one of you posted this on February 1st on Substack.
[01:27:03]  Wokeness, a political agenda with a superficial commitment to diversity and inclusion, has become a global ideological movement.
[01:27:12]  What I liked about this is calling wokeness a political agenda because its proponents would have us believe it's an ethical code that if we don't share, we're bad people.
[01:27:24]  It's not.
[01:27:26]  Exactly.
[01:27:27]  And the evidence is clear.
[01:27:28]  When's the last time you saw any of these left wing corporate media outlets or left wing activists defend Clarence Thomas when he's bad mouthed, or defend someone like Kyrie Irving, who's had his job threatened because of the vaccine mandates, or the Uh, you know, majority of black New Yorkers who have not gotten vaccinated.
[01:27:51]  None of these left wing outlets defend any of these people.
[01:27:54]  Woke corporations do not have the interests of black people, women, the LGBT community, whatever group you want to talk about.
[01:28:03]  They're not interested in all of us.
[01:28:05]  They're interested in the fraction of us who share their politics.
[01:28:09]  And to the extent that we become politically inconvenient, they no longer have any interest in defending us, representing us, doing anything for our families.
[01:28:18]  That is what makes it a political agenda.
[01:28:20]  And we have to call it out.
[01:28:21]  You're absolutely right, Megan.
[01:28:22]  It is not about ethics at all.
[01:28:25]  So, what do you do?
[01:28:27]  You could not buy Coca Cola, you could not buy Nike.
[01:28:30]  There are so many corporations we could go down the list.
[01:28:32]  What else could be done?
[01:28:34]  Well, there are three ideas that I would recommend.
[01:28:38]  So, the first one is the social activist investors like BlackRock, for example, that push corporations to adopting this kind of political agenda.
[01:28:50]  There have been proposals to deny them the kind of shareholder limited liability protections they have because they are using what should be a for profit business organization to promote a political agenda.
[01:29:04]  So, pushing back on that is one option.
[01:29:07]  The second option is something that my friend JD Vance has talked about, which is making it easier for employees to sue their employers when politics is forced upon them, such as diversity and equity training, white privilege talking points, things like that.
[01:29:25]  The third thing I think we can do, and this is one that US Senator Marco Rubio has been pushing for, is making it easier for shareholders to sue CEOs when those CEOs use the company.
[01:29:38]  To pursue a political agenda.
[01:29:40]  The idea being, of course, that if you are a shareholder, you are probably losing on money by a corporation instead of focused on doing its job, trying to wade into political issues that have nothing to do with its actual economic purpose.
[01:29:54]  So there are solutions that require the political will to take action.
[01:29:59]  And I've been organizing with some business leaders and policy experts in Canada to do that.

=== Supporting Independent Voices (02:06) ===

[01:30:04]  I've been having conversations with people in the US.
[01:30:07]  I do believe we can get this done, but we're just going to need some politicians with guts.
[01:30:12]  I love that it's a white guy from Appalachia, poor as they come, dirt poor family.
[01:30:18]  If you read his book, Hillbilly Elegy, which you must if you haven't, not you, but America, a mixed race guy from Canada who grew up in a fatherless home, and a Latino with the Cuban American roots who are pushing the solutions to that, right?
[01:30:33]  This is not like the raise the martini flag crowd at the country club, all white men who are like, oh, you know, no, we've got to stomp out the whiteness and the wokeness.
[01:30:44]  This is a different kind of crew because It's people like you who are being told you're less than because of your skin color.
[01:30:51]  And I've seen it so many times black people, brown people, Asian people, white people, all forming groups together to push back against this nonsense because none of us likes what they're saying about us, about our children, about our countries.
[01:31:04]  So glad that you're doing what you're doing, Jamil.
[01:31:06]  Everything, you know, it's like things tend to work out as they should.
[01:31:09]  You didn't belong at Bell Media.
[01:31:10]  I think you're going to run for office and hopefully turn that situation up north around.
[01:31:16]  Well, I do hope that we can and will turn things around, Megan.
[01:31:20]  And honestly, I can't speak for all of Canada, but so many of us are grateful for people like you who have drawn attention to this because the mainstream media in our country has been putting so much of this stuff underground, burying it.
[01:31:34]  And it's folks like you who are drawing attention to the real issue.
[01:31:37]  So thank you.
[01:31:38]  Well, it's our honor to be able to do so.
[01:31:40]  We'll continue to follow you, Jamil.
[01:31:41]  Go support him on Substack now.
[01:31:44]  We've got to keep independent journalists and commentators going with our support.
[01:31:48]  Otherwise, they fade away and people like Bell win.
[01:31:51]  By the way, we did reach out to Bell Media and heard they don't comment on personnel issues.
[01:31:56]  Tomorrow we've got Dr. Joseph Ladapo.
[01:31:58]  He's the Surgeon General of Florida.
[01:32:00]  Everybody loves him.
[01:32:02]  Some people don't, but we do, and you don't want to miss it.
[01:32:04]  That's tomorrow.
[01:32:07]  Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
[01:32:09]  No BS, no agenda, and no fear.