Ezra Levant’s May 22, 2018 episode slams Canada’s Trudeau government for allegedly enabling 50,000 U.S. illegal migrants via open-border policies tied to George Soros’ funding, while downplaying attacks on conservatives like Faith Goldie’s assault by masked protesters. He contrasts this with the Mueller investigation’s $20M cost, led by a Democrat-heavy team, questioning its legitimacy amid claims of Obama-era surveillance and Rosenstein’s conflicts. Praising Trump’s Venezuela executive order—blocking Maduro’s financial assets and targeting Iran/Russia-backed corruption—Levant argues it’s a rare principled stand after years of U.S. complicity with Chávez, like Obama’s 2009 Summit of the Americas high-five. The episode blends immigration chaos, political hypocrisy, and geopolitical strategy to expose systemic failures in both Canada and the U.S., framing Trump’s actions as a necessary corrective. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a pack of antifa thugs assault a conservative journalist while police stand by idly and the mainstream media laugh.
It's May 22nd, and you're watching The Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I want to show you a group of left-wing men and some women wearing masks attacking a conservative woman in public.
In fact, not just in public, but with national TV news cameras capturing every moment.
Oh, and police standing right there too.
And not one of them lift a finger to stop it.
In fact, they sort of had a good laugh about it.
Let me set up the story a bit first.
Last year we did an undercover investigation at the sophisticated human trafficking going on at the border between New York State and Quebec, particularly on Wroxham Road.
That's really an unguarded border between the two countries.
It literally does not even have a fence.
It's just a small ditch.
Our reporter was Faith Goldie.
We parted ways with Faith last August, but her journalism here speaks for itself.
She showed taxi companies, bus companies, all built around smuggling foreigners across that illegal border crossing.
But the word smuggling implies something secret or hidden or underground.
That's what was so shocking about Faith's report.
It was all pretty much out in the open.
When you charter a massive bus and make regular trips up from New York City and you're not really sneaking around, you're just walking right in and why not?
It's not like the U.S. police mind.
They're getting rid of so many illegal migrants, tens of thousands, including many criminals.
I used to laugh at that phrase, self-deport, the idea that illegal migrants would actually deport themselves from America.
I mean, what a joke.
Yeah, well, thanks to Justin Trudeau, it's actually happening en masse.
This foolish tweet here, inviting the entire world just to come to Canada, combined with the luxury concierge service provided by the RCMP and by border guards.
Well, really, what illegal migrant in the U.S. wouldn't self-deport to Canada.
And now, Trudeau and his immigration minister, the Somali-born Ahmed Hassan, they've gone one step further.
They now offer free health care, jump to the front of the line health care for catastrophic illnesses for any illegal migrant.
Here's a guy who just waltzed into Canada illegally with stage four cancer.
He calls himself a stateless Palestinian refugee, except that's not true.
He's in Lebanon, which is a peaceful enough country.
And then, of course, he moved to America, which is a great country and peaceful.
But to him, Canada's even greater because we're going to give him a couple hundred grand worth of health care.
Oh, and we brought his wife and kids in too, and they go straight to the front of the line.
So yeah, it's no surprise that about 50,000 illegal migrants in the U.S. have self-deported to Canada, every one of them breaking our own laws by coming in at an illegal crossing, where our police have been ordered to act like concierges and bellhops and luggage boys.
It's a shambles on purpose, though.
This is not an accident.
As you may know, Justin Trudeau has met several times with George Soros, the billionaire globalist, who funds dozens of left-wing lobby groups and has a special focus on mass open borders migration, especially Muslim migration.
In late 2016, Trudeau signed a contract with Soros' New York-based lobby group to help develop Canada's migrant policy.
And not just the policy, the propaganda too.
Here's part of that agreement.
This is taken from the Government of Canada website.
Provide a vehicle that mobilizes citizens in direct support of refugees and encourages a broader political debate that is supportive of refugee protection.
Sorry, that's not immigration policy.
Mobilizing citizens and political support for open borders, that's ideological campaigning that we are paying Soros to do.
So it's a mess.
Quebec has had it.
So Trudeau is shipping migrants from Quebec by bus to Toronto.
John Torrey, the Toronto mayor, is complaining.
He says all the homeless shelters are now full up.
Half of all street-level social services are being taken up by these Americans.
Actually, what a laugh there.
They're not American.
There would be Americans who didn't measure up to America's immigration laws and were going to be kicked out.
But Trudeau will take anyone.
So yeah, if you're hungry or homeless in Toronto or you need treatment for your stage four cancer, know your place, buddy.
Get in line behind the Trudeau-Soros migrant lineup.
What are you, a racist?
Today there's news that the RCMP is warning that this self-imposed migrant crisis is going to cause major problems for the force.
Our CMP officers are not trained as border police, and they're certainly not trained to be bellhops.
I can only imagine how demoralizing it must be deliberately, literally, to be told not to enforce the law.
In fact, to assist in law breaking at the political order of Justin Trudeau.
Well, police say it's stressful and irregular for their members.
Not just that.
They specifically warn that it's taking resources away from serious crime projects.
So, you know, I mean, these cops aren't meant to be bellhops.
They're meant to go out and solve crimes, fight crimes, stop murders, break up drug gangs, whatever.
But that's falling by the wayside.
Trudeau doesn't care.
He loves this instead.
He signed a contract with George Soros for this.
This is not a mistake or an error.
It is the plan working.
All right, so that's the background.
I say again, Faith Goldie left us last year after months after she did her border investigation.
She's not with us anymore, but that's irrelevant to today's story.
Over the weekend, Faith, on her own, went to the same border crossing to report on the scene.
Since her visit last year, it's become a veritable refugee camp with semi-permanent structures.
This is not a temporary blip.
It's the new normal, as if Angela Merkel's disaster was a role model, not a cautionary tale.
So she went there to videotape things, and there was going to be some protesters against open borders.
It's a huge issue in Quebec, a mainstream issue.
Politicians there aren't as cowardly and politically correct as they are in English Canada.
That's why Trudeau is sending the migrants to Toronto, because he doesn't want to pick a fight in Quebec.
So there's some closed border protesters and some open borders protesters, and Faith went there with a camera, and everyone knows where she stands on the issue.
Conservative Insults and Police Response00:09:23
There were a ton of other mainstream media there, too, and a ton of police, both regular police and full body armor wearing riot police.
And in the middle of it walked Faith, who can't weigh more than 120 pounds, and she had some guy walking with her too.
So Faith and some middle-aged guy and a mob of alt-left protesters, antifop they call themselves, many of them wearing face masks.
And look at what happened.
She was assaulted and battered.
They hit her, smacked her, kicked her, smacked the camera phone out of her hand, pushed her, chased her off the public street.
Take a look.
show you from various angles.
Do you see all that?
Do you see all the mainstream media there?
With all of their cameras, they caught every moment.
They caught every punch and every kick and every shove.
Take a look again.
Take a look.
And did you see the police car?
In the back, that white police car, and the police.
There were riot police there, too.
How many feet away, so close?
I'll show you another clip where you can see the police so close they could almost touch her.
And yet, none of them lifted a finger.
Now by the way, the RCMP's motto is maintain le droit.
That's from the French, obviously.
It literally means maintain the right or uphold the law.
Drois means rights, duties, powers.
Uphold the law.
Did the police uphold the law?
No, they did not.
They didn't even uphold the peace, which is different.
Keeping the peace would have meant interposing themselves between Faith and her attackers, not even arresting them, but just not letting them hit her.
But they didn't even do that.
They just got paid a lot of overtime to dress up really cool and stand there and literally do nothing.
Oh, not quite nothing.
Here's the CBC's Jonathan Monpetit.
He was there.
He didn't report on the woman getting beat up and cops doing nothing.
Beat ups a bit, were pushed around and shoved and kicked, and the cops doing nothing.
Now, he had the footage.
He saw it all for himself live, too, and he thought, she deserved it because she's far right.
So in the liberal mindset, she had it coming.
Here's his tweet.
He said, he said, it was funny.
He said, border demo, all done.
Highlight for me, seeing Faith Goldie get scolded by a serte de Quebec officer for using her cell phone while driving.
So that's what shoving and kicking a girl is now, a demo.
And he thought it was hilarious that Faith Goldie was scolded for using her cell phone.
Yeah, I'm guessing she was on the phone trying to call someone who either cared about her safety or maybe even cared about the rule of law because no one on the scene did.
Not the male feminist reporters, not the CBC, not the police who stood there like potted plants.
I'd probably be calling someone too if I were just assaulted in public on camera and no one did anything.
But hey, no distracted driving young lady.
By the way, the footage I showed you was uploaded by various people onto Twitter and Twitter took it down.
They banned it.
They claimed it violated the privacy of the antifa thugs who hit faith.
Now that's not true.
Of course, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy when you're in a public place, especially at a protest where your own organization is literally advertised to the media to cover the protest.
There's no privacy.
They have their faces covered anyways, as male feminists sometimes do when they punch women.
That's the antifa calling card, the coward's calling card.
So no privacy to be violated, and they're criminals.
But Twitter agreed with Jonathan Monpetita, the CBC, best not to show a woman getting attacked, because that undermines the narrative.
After all, the far right is violent, not the far left.
That was what the CBC reporter said publicly, and it was liked on Twitter by all sorts of other journalists, including, for example, Rosemary Barton, the CBC's feminist political boss.
She liked it.
It's weird that way.
The CBC is fine with men punching women if it's a feminist man.
Leftist man.
They love Jean Gemeshi.
CBC even set up a war room for Gameshi to discredit his accusers.
They only fired Jean Gemeshi when he made the legally foolish move of confessing his violence in a weird Facebook post.
They stood by him until that moment.
Same thing here, but more so.
They hate Faith because she's right-wing, and so they're pleased that she got hit.
Not even secretly pleased, because why be shy about it?
All the fancy people agree.
It's like when Sheila Gunreed was punched in the face by Deion Bewes, an NDP activist in Alberta.
He was convicted of a crime and then lost a civil suit brought by Sheila, but the media call him the victim because he got some mean comments on Facebook for punching a woman.
He's a CBC hero, though, a male feminist.
Or when Lauren Southern was grabbed by a male transsexual activist at U of T, he was the hero to the CBC because they hate Lauren Southern.
They're fine with him being punched by a man.
Again and again, conservative women are physically attacked.
Again and again, at the very least, the media ignore it, but quite often they cheer along.
But oh my god, if you so much as insult a CBC reporter, we need a national manhunt and you've got to go to jail.
There's a strange prank out there and I absolutely don't support it.
But let me explain it to you.
It's going up to reporters.
Men usually do it, but I've seen women do it too.
Going up to a reporter who's doing a live broadcast on the public street and then shouting at them so to be heard on TV, F, U-C-K, her right-in-the-p, U-S-S-Y.
I won't pronounce those swears.
I think this whole shtick of running up to people and shouting while they're doing a live TV hit is a lazy man's version of the 1970s phenomenon of streaking, you know, when people would get naked and run across a baseball diamond, just a stupid, slightly obscene stunt.
I think that's what F her right in the P thing is.
I think it's rude, absolutely.
But it's not an assault.
It's not battery.
You're not touching anyone.
You're not threatening to touch anyone.
It's someone making a vulgar swear and then running away.
It's not being hit or kicked or pushed or assaulted or battered or having your camera stolen or even being threatened.
It's just mean, but in the manner of a bad practical joke.
But look at this.
There's just a small sample here from the CBC.
Another F her right in the P incident in Newfoundland.
CBC Fost complaint with police after incident involving reporter caught on video.
So someone swore at you and you're calling the police and the CBC does a whole thing about it.
Why, yes, again and again and again.
Here's another one.
Police are investigating F her right in the P insult hurled at a CBC journalist.
Now look, the CBC can insult you and me every single day, but if you insult them, oh my god, they're going to call the police.
Here's another one.
F her right in the P isn't about social media, just criminal harassment, CBC Radio Media Panel says.
Well, then if they say it, it's settled.
It's a crime to insult a reporter if you swear.
Because the CBC says it's mortifying.
Really?
That comes from the root word mean you could die.
Would you die from being insulted?
You can be killed from being hit, but I don't know about being insulted.
All these CBC reporters are sick of it, sick of it, sick of it, so they call the cops, and the cops are only too happy to oblige.
I mean, the media mob wants a scalp, and police like positive press coverage, so they know what to do.
Here's another tweet, in case you missed it.
Calgary police fine a man who yelled F her right in the P at a CBC reporter.
Because at the end of the day, it's about a social sickness, people, and reporters are the real victims.
They're the real heroes.
I say again, look, I am not for shouting vulgar insults at journalists, but that happens literally every day to our journalists.
Every time we're covering something in public and a leftist is there, every time.
And it's not some weird, childish, impersonal prank and then running away.
It's swearing at us, almost always accompanied by pushing, shoving, kicking, punching.
That doesn't yield police charges.
That doesn't get moral support from the CBC or the mainstream media.
It doesn't even get a mention.
It gets a laugh.
Because really, to the mainstream media and to too many police forces, conservatives deserve to be punched, don't they?
Stay with us for more.
Department Justice Controversy00:11:47
Welcome back.
Well, it is the one-year anniversary of Robert Mueller's special prosecution into Russian collusion in the Trump campaign.
$20 million is what's reportedly spent, but we don't really know because it's a secret.
We don't know the terms of his investigation.
There is no limit to it.
And what limits there are are a secret.
But what we do know is that Mueller's staff are overwhelmingly Democrat.
And his official mandate looking for Russian collusion, well, that's not actually a technical term for a crime.
It's a made-up word.
There are crimes involving foreign powers, but after a year of hunting high and low, Mueller hasn't found any.
Well, Donald Trump has clearly lost his patience.
Let me show you a few tweets from the president.
These were a couple days ago, over the weekend, I think.
If the FBI or Department of Justice was infiltrating a campaign for the benefit of another campaign, that is a really big deal.
Only the release or review of documents that the House Intelligence Committee, also Senate Judiciary, is asking for, can give the conclusive answers.
Drain the swamp.
Trump was referring to revelations that Mueller's predecessors actually planted people within the Trump campaign proactively.
Before any of these claims of Russian collusion, they were spying.
And this is what was once denied is now being justified by the mainstream media.
Let me read one more clip, one more tweet.
I hereby demand, and we'll do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI, Department of Justice infiltrated or surveilled the Trump campaign for political purposes.
And if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama administration.
Now, Trump went on with a series more tweets getting increasingly particular and tough in his language.
And indeed, he did have that meeting with the agencies he referred to.
Helping us figure out a little bit of what's going on is our friend Joel Pollock.
He is the senior editor at large at Breitbart.com.
Joel, I didn't possibly do justice to what's been going on here.
I talked about Robert Mueller's investigation, but that doesn't properly give folks the background on this spy business.
Can you give us one minute on that?
Well, there are a bunch of new allegations floating around that revolve around an academic in Cambridge who reportedly approached the Trump campaign and was an informant for the FBI.
The president has accused the Obama administration of New York Times is trying to split hairs by saying, well, informing is different than spying.
Go figure out what they mean by that.
But essentially, it does look like the former administration was trying to gain information on an opposing presidential campaign and was doing so under cover of the question of Russian collusion.
It's very odd.
We don't know all the facts on this yet, and we still have to wait for more facts to come out, but certainly it looks very bad.
And if it's as bad as it looks, then it would appear that the Obama administration violated democratic norms and actually spied on the opposition.
We haven't seen something like this since Watergate, and that's the appropriate comparison I think the president is drawing.
Of course, we don't know the facts yet, or all the facts.
We know some of them.
The problem is that the Justice Department has been stonewalling in terms of turning over documents to Congress as requested, and instead they've been leaking to friendly mainstream media publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
So we're in a bit of a quandary as to what to believe, but it certainly looks bad.
And it looks worse when you have members of the Obama administration saying, well, if this was done by our intelligence services or our law enforcement services, that it ought to have been done.
They have to have had a good reason to do it.
They have no qualms whatsoever about the propriety of surveilling or informing on an opposing campaign.
And then some, like Eric Holder, the former attorney general, have said it's wrong even to question what they were doing, that it's a danger to democracy for Congress and for others to want to know what the Justice Department was up to.
That's the James Comey line.
And that's also just false because obviously we want some public oversight over what our intelligence and law enforcement agencies are doing.
So it's all a mess.
The upshot of it all is I think the public will now distrust the Mueller investigation even further because not only does it seem not to have been based on any real intelligence, but also now it seems to have existed alongside an attempt by the Obama administration at the very least to find out about Trump connections to Russia, which turn out not to have existed, or to set Trump up.
It's possible that many of these contacts were in order to establish some sort of pretext for believing there was some kind of relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and then later asserting that there was one in order to get broader surveillance or merely just to leak the suspicion to the media.
So we've got the Obama administration behaving very badly.
There's some intimation that it might have been well known in the White House that this was going on, the Obama White House.
So it's all a jumble.
It's very hard to explain it to anybody, but essentially it makes the entire Mueller investigation and the Russia collusion theory look even worse and look even more like a partisan hit job, with the result that I think the public is going to discount anything that Mueller comes up with from here on forward.
Yeah.
You mentioned Eric Holder, the former Attorney General under Barack Obama.
It was so surprising for him to come out so forcefully.
Don't ask any questions.
It's inappropriate.
I mean, he was running so hot on that.
His denial that anything was wrong, just coming out of the blue just to weigh in so fiercely, to me, telegraphed that he was extremely nervous about this.
Like, that's just how it came across.
He protested too much, so to speak.
John Brennan, the former CIA director under Obama, almost threatening politicians if they went along with this.
You referred to Watergate, and so has Donald Trump.
I think it's actually one degree worse.
And here's my reason for that.
Watergate was a private break-in.
It was a private criminal act sneaking in to the election, the party office to steal things.
So it was spying.
It was breaking and entering.
It was done with the knowledge of the president, but it wasn't done using the instruments of the state.
It was a break-and-enter.
You know, flashlights in the dark.
This is worse than Watergate in this way, if it's true, if these allegations are true.
Because to actually corrupt the police and the Department of Justice and whatever security and spying apparatus to use them against an enemy.
So they weren't using criminals to break and enter.
They were using legal processes.
In many ways, I think that's worse, Joel, because it actually rots the entire instrumentality of law and order.
I think the Watergate analogy fits.
Well, one thing that's in common between this case and Watergate is that the Nixon administration had no real reason to believe they were going to lose the election in 1972, yet they were party to this cover-up, at least, of the break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
Likewise, the Obama administration, they thought they were going to win or their preferred candidate was going to win, Hillary Clinton was going to win.
So it's all driven by a need to control.
And a lot of critics of Obama remarked on this while he was in office that he had an and to checks and balances on his power, he needed to control everything.
Whether it was him or the people that worked for him, like Valerie Jarrett, we don't know.
But there's a common obsession with control.
They thought they were going to win.
The polls all said they were going to win, yet they had to be certain they were going to.
In the event they lost.
And what's amazing is that we wouldn't have found out about any of this if Hillary Clinton had won.
There'd be none of these investigations, none of this accountability.
Right now, it looks like the Department of Justice and its various branches, the FBI and so forth, were so hopelessly politicized by the Obama administration that that itself is a problem that's just absolutely staggering and it's going to take decades to fix.
The idea that you have an embedded bureaucracy that votes with its extraordinary power for a Democratic candidate, in a sense, that's just remarkable and it's frightening to many people.
And I think that that's going to take some work to address.
Right now, I think President Trump is deeply frustrated with people in charge of the Justice Department, not just Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, who's trying to still be a middle-of-the-road law and order kind of attorney general, but Ron Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who's really playing a very bizarre role in all of this.
He's frustrating the president significantly, not only because he's running this investigation and at the same time keeping the president from getting documents that he wants, but he's also a witness in the investigation against the president, and yet he's running it.
So there's all kinds of conflicts of interest here.
Very difficult to sort out what's actually going on.
But the upshot, again, is that I think the public is starting to tire of the Mueller investigation and to believe it's not going to lead to anything except a political conclusion.
Yeah.
Let me show a quick clip.
You mentioned Rod Rosenstein, he's the Deputy Attorney General.
For reasons that I will never understand, Jeff Sessions, who was a Trump loyalist, recused himself for any of these matters and basically let Rosenstein set it up.
I first encountered his name when he wrote an official memo firing Jim Comey.
And it was a scathing on-the-point memo.
But for him to be running things, as you say, running this Mueller investigation, but not providing information to Trump when Trump has the executive power over the police and the Department of Justice is so weird.
Let me show you a quick clip, Joel.
I know you've seen this before.
Donald Trump today was meeting with the president of South Korea, and another journalist and a journalist said, well, how do you feel about Rod Rosenstein?
And take a look at his answer.
Do you have confidence in Rod Rosenstein?
What's your next question, please?
I'm a reporter for the Constitutional Commission.
No, excuse me, I have the president of South Korea here.
He doesn't want to hear these questions, if you don't mind.
You know, Joel, it reminds me of Donald Trump when he was the host of The Apprentice.
His shtick is firing people.
It's not just a shtick.
He does it.
I mean, he's probably fired more cabinet appointees and senior staff.
I mean, he loves firing people.
He's not afraid to do it.
He calls it shuffling the deck.
If I was Rod Rosenstein, I would take that as a very grave signal that maybe your days are numbered.
Well, it would be very difficult for the president to fire him.
I just think he didn't want to be pinned down on having any kind of confidence in him.
I think that his appointment has proved to be very frustrating to the president.
President appointed him on the advice of people who knew about the available personnel.
He's a Republican, nominally, and he had a very good track record.
I watched his confirmation hearing myself, and I was very impressed by him.
But he has turned out to be an institutional man.
He is defending the entrenched power of the bureaucracy and the prerogatives of bureaucracy.
Even though, again, bizarrely, he's the one who justified firing James Comey.
So we're basically through the looking glass here.
And it's very hard for ordinary citizens, even very well-informed people, to make head or tail of it.
Democrats' Witch Hunt00:04:01
I think that basically what it amounts to is that the Democrats have been able to run a witch hunt, to use President Trump's term, through the special counsel.
There was no way for Jeff Sessions to avoid recusing himself, unfortunately.
I think the rules of the Justice Department would have made him do that.
And perhaps that should have been a consideration before he was appointed.
But the investigation, the special counsel's investigation, has far exceeded its mandate.
It's long outlived its purpose.
It has uncovered no evidence of Russia collusion.
And it's now being run essentially as a political vehicle for Democrats to turn to impeachment if they regain their position in the House of Representatives.
And I think that's what people need to know about it.
That's what they do know about it.
And that's going to have a political judgment, I think, in November.
I think voters are going to come to the polls to decide whether or not this is a course of action they continue to want the government to pursue.
And I think they're going to vote no, which is why I think Democrats are trying to back away from impeachment because they see it's a loser.
But I think that's where all this is going if the Democrats win back their majority.
And so I think that ultimately this is going to have a political verdict.
I think if the midterm elections go Republicans' way, that more than anything else will put an end to the Mueller probe.
Yeah.
We've taken so much of your time, Joel.
I appreciate it.
But I just have one more question because this whole Mueller thing, this Russia collusion thing, it's been a year now.
It's such a distraction.
Time, energy, money, mental space.
But the president keeps having successful weeks.
I mean, just give me 30 seconds on his deal with China.
Everyone was saying, oh, this China thing's falling apart.
Trump announced some negotiated adjustment to the trade deficit, where China would basically agree to import hundreds of billions of dollars more in American goods without a trade war.
Can you give me 30 seconds on that?
Well, I think the negotiations are still ongoing, but the idea is that China would agree to buy more of our goods, especially agricultural goods.
Remember that the farming sector in the United States was probably the one sector of Trump's support that was hardest hit by the decision to stay out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that multilateral trade deal in the Pacific Rim that Trump didn't like.
Even Democrats didn't like it.
But the farmers like it because they want to be able to sell their products more cheaply abroad and especially in the Asian markets.
So what Trump basically achieved was a commitment from China to buy agricultural goods from the United States without rejoining the trade, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and to do so in exchange for some concessions on perhaps steel and aluminum.
I don't know all the details of it.
It's still very much up in the air.
And Trump today is saying there weren't deals reached on certain points.
So we don't know.
But basically, what is interesting is that China is, for the first time, forced to make concessions to the United States on issues of trade.
No president in the last 30 years has stood up to China the way President Trump has.
People are criticizing the terms of the deal.
Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, one of Trump's rivals in 2016, said that Trump is basically getting played by China.
China is getting the better of some of these deals.
We don't know.
I actually don't, and I personally don't know enough to judge.
But what it is interesting is that the Chinese are at least being asked and seem to be complying with a request to make some concessions to American industry and to agriculture, which I think is a big step in the right direction.
Yeah.
You know, I've said before that Barack Obama is probably the worst negotiator in American presidential history, whether it was Ukraine or Iran.
And Trump, whatever else you can say about him, the guy is used to elbows up dealmaking in Manhattan real estate.
I can't imagine a trickier business.
Whatever concessions he gets from China is more than zero.
And I think he's had a great week.
Joel, I've kept you so long.
I love talking to you.
We'll have to let you go because you have real work to do there at Breitbart.com.
We're always glad to have you joining us.
Thanks for the time today.
Thank you.
All right, there's our friend Joel Pollock, Sr., editor-at-large at Breitbart.com, and a real Trump follower.
Very, very interesting thoughts there.
I wonder what will happen with this Mueller investigation.
Venezuela's Oil Strategy00:13:09
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Welcome back.
Well, we follow Venezuela fairly closely here at the Rebel, even though it's very far away from our home base here in Toronto, geographically speaking.
But the people have suffered so much through the brutal socialist regime.
And at the same time, that they suffer from the socialism and the military authoritarianism, the restrictions of civil liberties and free speech, at the same time, there has been a campaign by Hollywood celebrities, but also left-wing politicians from Bernie Sanders to our own Canadian NDP to whitewash the atrocities in that regime.
Even though they're now literally on the brink of starvation, the average Venezuelan has lost more than 18 pounds due to malnourishment.
That might sound great if you're fat like me, oh, losing 18 pounds, but when an entire country loses 18 pounds because of malnutrition, it is horrific.
That is a famine in a country that has, depending on whose reserves you count, the first or the second largest oil reserves in the world, either number one or slightly behind Saudi Arabia.
Well, we've been frustrated by how Venezuela treats its own people and how America under the Obama regime has treated Venezuela with kid gloves.
So it's refreshing to see an executive order just yesterday by President Trump.
And I'd like to read it to you, and then we'll talk to our key ally on Venezuelan matters in a moment.
But let me read to you the news from Donald Trump.
It's an executive order.
And he says, I have signed an executive order to prevent the Maduro regime from selling or collateralizing certain Venezuelan financial assets and to prohibit the regime from earning money from the sale of certain entities of the Venezuelan government.
The United States remains committed to the Venezuelan people who have suffered immensely under the Maduro regime.
We call for the Maduro regime to restore democracy, hold free and fair elections, release all political prisoners immediately and unconditionally, and end the repression and economic deprivation of the Venezuelan people.
I found that very compelling.
And I note the terminology, Maduro regime, to personalize it as an authoritarian versus standing with the Venezuelan people.
I notice the reference to civil liberties and democracy.
I'm very pleased with this.
It's a symbolic step with a little bit of bite, but I think the symbolism is what's so valuable to me.
Joining us now to give us a more expert take on the subject is our friend Joseph Humeer.
He's the executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society.
Great to see you again.
Joseph, what do you make of this executive order?
I'm encouraged by it.
Is it a step in the right direction?
Is it too little?
Or is there some real bite to it?
Hi, Egypt.
It's great to be on the show again.
No, this has got a tremendous amount of bite.
This is one part of a multifaceted strategy that the Trump administration is implementing along with regional allies on the crisis in Venezuela.
So the strategy is basically designed to take away all the stability that the regime holds from its financial benefactors, meaning it's extra-regional financial benefactors, Iran, Russia, China, but also its ties to illicit enterprises and all kinds of corruption schemes that it's been involved in over the last 20 years under the Chavez administration.
So it's very strategic.
I think you'll see more of this.
They also sanctioned one of the top guys in the Venezuelan power structure.
His name is Dios Daro Cabello.
He's pretty much the leader of a cartel in Venezuela that's a military cartel.
And so this is part one action along a series of actions that are moving in this direction.
Now, I do have one critique with it, and not just with this executive order, but in general with the strategy, is that there's a premise behind the Trump administration, I think the intelligence community writ large, that the regime, the Venezuelan regime, the Maduro regime, wants to maintain power and that their only goal is to keep power and keep control.
And while that could be the case, I think it could be also a false premise because maybe the regime is not just worried about keeping control, but they want to start a war.
And so Hugo Chavez kind of proved this to me because Hugo Chavez, if all Hugo Chavez cared about was keeping power, he would not have ran the stump his last year when he was in stage for cancer.
He would have not gone to Cuba for medical treatment.
He would have actually cured the disease that was killing him.
But he decided to continue to advance the revolution because it was more important to him than his own personal health, which led to his death.
So to me, there are some very hardcore revolutionaries in Venezuela that are tied to hardcore revolutionaries in Iran and Russia and other parts of the world.
And the time of the calculations has been made.
It's time for conflict and it's time for war.
And then that the war in Venezuela, civil war, quote unquote, will be designed to export more refugees and destabilize the rest of Latin America.
So if I'm right, that's bad news for everybody.
If I'm wrong, hopefully the Trump administration is correct on this.
I hope I'm wrong.
Well, this is very interesting, and it goes to the revolutionary nature of so many of these socialist strongmen.
Now, I know that Venezuela in the past has tried to destabilize some of its democratic neighbors, including, if I'm not mistaken, Colombia.
When you say a war and you refer to Iran, which has a bizarrely close relationship with Venezuela, what would the war look like?
I mean, I know they have a slow burn civil liberties war against their own people, and Cuba helps provide the shock troops.
But do you mean war like an international war?
Or do you mean...
Yes.
What do you mean?
It'll be an extension of the conflict in Syria.
Venezuela and Syria are snapping to one another, not just in terms of their governments, but in terms of populations.
I mean, I think I mentioned, if not on your show and other shows, that there's populations in Syria.
For example, one city, Azawaida, that has a 65% Venezuelan-born dual citizens.
350,000 Venezuelans live in that city.
In certain cities in eastern Venezuela, you have hundreds of thousands of Syrians.
I mean, they've created a linkage between these two countries because they look at them as proxy wars on behalf, mostly behalf of Iran.
Well, so who would they fight against?
I mean, I know it's very hard to be a Venezuelan, let alone to be a Venezuelan democracy activist.
So I see that, I mean, the phrase civil war, but in a way, Maduro has already won the civil war, like he's the boss of Venezuela.
Are you talking about a war against neighbors?
Are you talking about exporting violence to the United States?
I just want to understand a little bit more about this bad news scenario that you think could be looming.
No, sure.
No, I'm talking about both.
So the civil conflict, civil war, if you want to call it, in Venezuela, kind of already happening.
And it'll just get worse when the military decides to clash with the Venezuelan, with the Maduro regime.
And that's inevitably going to happen because the kind of conditions have been set for that over time.
But they're also, if you follow the Venezuelan military doctrine, Plan Sucre, Plan Zamora, things that they've articulated, and Chavez has said this many times, and Maduro has continued it.
The war that they've always wanted to create is with Colombia.
Because on a strategic level, what Venezuela, what the Bolivarian Revolution that Chavez created was all about was about redrawing the map and redrawing Latin America so that they create one country.
It's called Gran Colombia.
It's a throwback to a history from Simon Bolivar's time to basically unify the Latin American people against the United States.
This is an extension of the concept of Greater Syria and the Middle East and the Nazareth pan-Arab socialist nationalist movements in the 20th century of their time.
So they have a strategic plan.
The question is, can they get there?
If it was just Nicolas Maduro and his people, I'd say probably not.
But they have the backing of some of the most advanced revolutions in the world, including the Iranians and the Russians.
So I think that's the goal.
Well, I tell you, such intrigues.
And I would normally say, well, that's fantastical.
But the information you've provided to us in our past conversations about the deep linkages between Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, including, was it the vice president of Venezuela who deep ties?
It's shocking.
I would put it to you, 99.9% of people in Canada, United States do not know about these deep ties.
I mean, they may have seen Chavez and Maduro meet with the Iranian bosses, but I don't think they know that those ties go all the way down to the grassroots level.
I have a question for you.
You talked about some of these financial structures and cartels and companies.
I'm familiar with some of the larger oil companies.
Of course, there's a state company called Peta Veza, which is a huge, huge oil company.
There's even a gas station chain in the United States called Sitco that was acquired by Venezuela.
Has Donald Trump and his administration focused on those two big entities at all?
Or is it just on some of these other financial infrastructure companies you talked about?
They have, they haven't gone the full borders.
They haven't sanctioned this entity, Peta Vesa, or all its subsidiaries, but they have actually sanctioned the individuals that run these companies.
So by extension, if you sanction the CEO of Peta Vesa, it's almost like a sanction on Peta Vesa without having to sanction the actual company.
But what concerned the U.S. and I think other parts is the way Petavesta has been used as both a slush fund throughout the years to prop up other dictators throughout Latin America and a massive money laundering scheme.
I mean, to the point that I think, you know, the Venezuelan government got so good at using Peta Vesa to launder money, they forgot it was designed to export oil.
And so their oil exportation went kind of plummeted while their money laundering went rampant.
And the Russians actually got involved as well.
Because there's a lot of debt and oil debt, particularly between the Venezuelans and the Russians, the Russians decided to set up a collateral deal.
Well, they would try to service the debt in terms of buying out collateral, acquiring collateral from the Venezuelan government.
And one of those was Sitco.
And that caught the policymakers here in the U.S. because they were worried that if the Russians own 50% of Sitco, it's like having a Russian gas station here in all kinds of pockets of the United States.
And so they didn't like that.
But the Russians ended up just, it was actually a trick.
The Russians ended up leveraging that collateral to buy more or to attain more control of the heavy crude oil fields inside Venezuela, which was called the Orinoco Belt.
So the Russians actually, the Russians and Chinese control a lot of that.
That's incredible.
I mean, depending on whose assessment of world reserves you trust, it's generally considered that Venezuela has the largest reserves, even more than Saudi Arabia.
And it's actually similar to Canadian oil sands oil in terms of its heavy oil.
It's huge.
And the fact that Russia or Iran or Cuba might have their clause in that is terrifying.
I want to close with an image.
And you know this one well, Joseph, because we're talking about Trump slowly rising the challenge, at least rhetorically, bringing some sanctions.
I think it's important that we remember that during the Obama administration, he had not just, at least in the early days, not just a friendship with Hugo Chavez, but it was a sort of a spirit of revolutionaries together.
I mean, when world leaders meet, they usually shake hands.
Sometimes they hug.
But look at this image here.
And I know you've seen this a hundred times, Joseph.
It's sort of, you know, high-fiving and embracing between Barack Obama on the left there, Hugo Chavez.
And in the background, you can see a younger Nicholas Maduro who succeeded Chavez.
That chummy friendship, that Marxists against the West, like they were ideological allies.
There was love in Obama's eyes.
There really, or admiration, there really was there.
I thought that was a great shame to the United States.
And I feel like the tone of this executive order is a fitting rebuke.
I don't know.
I just felt like ending on that note.
Do you have something you'd like to say about ending that?
Yeah, absolutely.
Do you know what's most ironic about that picture?
And I agree with you.
There's an ideological kinship between Obama and Chavez and probably several other of these kind of socialist sympathizers throughout the world.
But what's most ironic about that picture is that the picture was taken at a conference called the Summit of the Americas that's organized by the Organization of American States.
The United States funds the Organization of American States upwards of 60% of their annual budget.
So this is like taxpayer dollars going to organize a summit where two, one of the most anti-American actors that ever existed in Latin America is basically hugging the U.S. president.
So that is ironic in my mind.
And it shouldn't be funny, but you just got to laugh at it at a certain point.
Yeah, well, I guess it's like America funding so much of the atrocities at the United Nations building in New York.
Well, Joseph, I know you and I have talked many times for many years now, actually, about Venezuela.
And it's often bad news.
Taxpayer Dollars and Anti-American Hugs00:04:27
We didn't have time to talk about the latest vote there, but we'll do that on another occasion.
I hope that this executive order by Donald Trump is a baby step towards speaking, you know, calling evil by its proper name.
I think you have to get your language and ideas first before you can take steps.
And I find this a refreshing change from the high fives that Obama gave Chavez and Maduro.
Great to see you again.
Thanks for fighting this fight in Washington with the lawmakers.
I know you try so hard to wake them up on this.
And thanks for doing that.
Absolutely.
Thanks, Ezra.
Absolutely.
And we'll continue the conversation.
I think we will.
That's great.
Well, Joseph Humeyer has joined us again, very educational as always.
He's the executive director of the Center for a Secure and Free Society, telling us about a small step by the Trump administration to take sanctions against the Venezuelan regime.
Stay with us.
Your letter's next on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
On my special interview yesterday with Conrad Black and his new book, Donald J. Trump, A President Like No Other, Moyes writes, I thoroughly enjoyed and was very much educated by your interview with Conrad Black.
I rather thought that he was a bit of a conceited person.
He proved me wrong, and I'm humbled.
He was certainly congenial and very engaging with you, Ezra.
I'm so glad you had him on.
And I, as you said for nearly an hour, the time flew by.
Thanks again, Ezra.
Most sadly, RPM is just a flake like Barack Hussein Obama and both lovers of godless radical Islamists.
God deliver us.
Well, Moyes, I gotta admit, I'm a bit of a fanboy, and I think I got too excited.
And I don't know, some other folks said I sucked up a bit.
I probably did.
I tell you, there's two interviewees that I get sort of a fanboy with.
Conrad Black and Jordan Peterson.
And I won't lie, but I thought he had, first of all, I think I let him speak at least 50% of the time.
That's a good rule of thumb for me.
If a guest is speaking 51% of the time, it's a miracle, and it was good to hear from him.
But look, I'm a fan.
What can you say?
I think he's literally like the only other pro-Trump journalist in all of Canada.
So, you know, I wanted to enjoy every minute.
Deborah writes, excellent interview with Lord Black.
I'm a huge fan of his and we'll have to pick up his book on Trump.
I read his column each week and I find it disturbing how many comments are attacking his character due to his legal battles that landed him in jail.
Well, that's the thing about Conrad Black.
He's so resilient.
I can't believe he still has his spirit after the ringer he was put through in the States.
Robert Wright, Black is right.
Trump is making fewer errors.
Trump learns quickly and makes appropriate adjustments.
On the other hand, Junior keeps doubling down on stupid.
Well, yeah, and I think I was alluding to this with Joel Pollock today.
Donald Trump shuffles the deck.
That's the phrase he says.
If he's got an executive or a lieutenant that's not working, he'll read them the Riot Act.
If it doesn't get fixed, he tosses them out.
I think he shocked everyone during the 2016 presidential election campaign where he changed his senior campaign staff, what, like four months before the election, and everyone thought, you're crazy, you're doomed.
Well, no, I think he realized he was doomed and he had to shake things up.
He put a Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, and I think they won it.
I think they won it.
And in fact, when you think about it, the set-in-stone campaign team around Hillary Clinton, part of the problem is they were just too comfortable.
They were in a mental rut, a psychological rut.
They believed their own BS.
They were ignoring what they were hearing on the ground.
You got a campaign in Wisconsin.
You got a campaign in Michigan.
And they just, so who won there?
The guy with his unconventional style, firing people.
I think you're right that he has learned a lot on the job.
He's replaced swamp creatures like Reince Priebus as his chief of staff with people who just get her done.
And he is learning.
And if you take away all the storm and fury and you look at the substantive results of his first year and a half, he's done more than any president in recent memory has.
And that's despite this massive distraction of the Mueller Inquisition.
So I think he's actually on track to be a great president.
And as Conrad Black says, he's certainly a unique personality.
And people on the left and the right can agree to that.
256 Breezy Pages On Trump00:00:39
I would encourage you to buy the book.
It's very quick reading.
You know, I was just looking.
Some of Conrad Black's recent books have more than a thousand pages.
I'm not saying don't read it.
I'm just saying, who's got the time to read a 1,200-page book?
Not me.
But 256 breezy pages about Donald Trump, I'll read that.
And I did.
And I got to say, I mean, I know I'm enthusing here again.
It's just a bloody good book.
Maybe I went in with low expectations, but it's a good book.
I was worried because I've seen his books before.
They're that thick.
This one is not that way.
All right, enough book sales.
I just have to say it was great.
And yes, this is that fanboy side of me coming out.