Facebook’s leaked "cult-like" censorship video exposes its liberal employees—mostly San Francisco-based, with no conservative representation—defining truth and hate speech, despite no consensus on either, while ignoring $100K Russian election ads amid a $2B campaign. Meanwhile, Ontario Premier Doug Ford repealed a sex-ed curriculum pushed by Ben Levin, later convicted of child pornography charges, sparking parental backlash over topics like 112 genders and masturbation. Near Toronto’s official drug sites, Sammy Barcelos and Sue Ann Levy condemn unchecked lawlessness, while Tanya Granick Allen’s displaced candidacy highlights Ford’s broken promises. Trump’s NATO critiques reveal the U.S.’s long-standing defense role for Canada, questioning whether allies now exploit its protection without reciprocity. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Facebook produces a propaganda video about their plans for censoring propaganda.
It's much more terrifying than anything I've seen from a government.
It's July 12th, and you're watching The Ezra LeVance 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.
What did Facebook do wrong in the 2016 U.S. presidential election?
If you believe this man, Christopher Wiley, Facebook sold private information about its users to political campaigns.
Information Facebook didn't tell their users what they were going to do with it, and they didn't have permission to do that with it.
In the case made famous by Wiley, if you took one of those fun little Facebook quizzes like, what character from Star Wars are you, or whatever, it was really a psychological profile.
You probably thought it was just a fun way to pass the time, but it was really a personality test, a psychological test, finding out about you, and then that information was sold to political campaigns.
But what's more, all of your friends list was sucked up with that and sold the campaigns to.
That's what he accused them of.
Now, just this week, Facebook paid a fine in the United Kingdom of half a million British pounds.
It's just under a million bucks Canadian, which is a laugh, of course.
I mean, the company is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
And of course, Facebook has been doing this for years and will surely continue to do it.
Here's a Barack Obama campaign executive boasting about how they sucked in the entire Facebook database in 2012.
So Facebook, 2012 election, had the ability for people to opt in.
The Obama campaign like rocked this, right?
We got people to opt in.
And the privacy policies at that time on Facebook were that if they opted in, they could tell us who all their friends were.
Okay, so they told us who all their friends were.
This is very much how local campaigns work, right?
People sit in a room, it's a really small thing, all of their biggest supporters sit around the table and they like circle the names of the people that they know and that they're going to outreach to and they figure out how to fill in the gaps of the people that they don't know.
The Obama campaign just did this on a digital, in a digital level, on a much larger level, but we were actually able to ingest the entire social network, social network of the U.S. That's on Facebook, which is most people.
So yeah, it's not exactly news what they were doing in 2016.
What made it of interest to journalists this time though was that the Trump campaign was just better at it than the Hillary Clinton campaign.
That's why it's angry news now, but back when Obama did it, the media party were impressed by Obama's cleverness.
So is that something wrong that Facebook did?
Yeah, I think so, but that's not what Facebook was really blamed for in the media that much.
It was a bit of a thing, the privacy thing, but not that big a thing.
The big thing, and it continues to this day, is fake news.
Trump won the 2016 election on Facebook.
It is true, and he used lots of data.
It's true.
But the left wants to say that Trump won through lies and fake news and through Russian propaganda.
That Russia thing, that's the basis for this whole empty Robert Mueller witch hunt.
It's the basis for all sorts of insinuations that Donald Trump, the all-American super capitalist, is actually a spy for the Russians.
It's reached levels of insanity that are breathtaking.
Here's an article in last week's New York magazine speculating that Donald Trump has been a Russian agent since the 1980s.
I'm not even kidding.
That's what the story says.
Look at this headline on MSNBC when the author of this appeared.
Unlikely but possible that Trump has been Russian intel asset since 1987.
Unlikely but possible.
Hey, do me a favor, don't ever make fun of Infowars or Alex Jones again.
If you're with MSNBC or the fancy pants at New York Magazine, I mean, that conspiracy theory of Trump being a 30-year spy is nuts.
Now, don't take it from me.
Here's Rob Goldman, the vice president of ads for Facebook.
He reviewed all of the ads bought by Russian agents on Facebook during the whole campaign.
And he said they were trivial.
Here, don't take it from me.
Here's what Goldman, the VP of ads, said.
Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to affect the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election.
I have seen all of the Russian ads, and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was not the main goal.
Oh, really?
Oh, yes, here's more.
Let me read.
The majority of the Russian ad spend happened after the election.
We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative of Trump and the election.
By the way, I think the total ad spend by Russia was like $100,000 or so in a $2 billion ad campaign, presidential campaign.
One more tweet from Goldman.
He said, the single best demonstration of Russia's true motives is the Houston anti-Islamic protest.
Americans were literally puppeted into the streets by trolls who organized both sides of the protest.
Exactly.
So yeah, did this Russian 100 grand change the course of the United States election?
Is that really why Hillary Clinton lost the election in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Ohio or Michigan?
No.
But the left needs its narrative, not just to explain their loss in 2016.
I mean, Hillary Clinton can't accept the blame.
But to turn a crisis into an opportunity, because if they can blame Facebook propaganda for the loss in 2016, they can use that as an excuse to regulate Facebook in the future, or better yet, have Facebook regulate itself to stop propaganda from the next election.
Of course, what they mean by propaganda is anything they don't like.
I mean, it's words.
Do you call someone a physician, a doctor, or a quack?
Well, it depends on your point of view, right?
Three different people could have different views about the same doctor.
Do you call campaign material propaganda, an election platform, or a fact check?
Well, same thing, right?
What I call propaganda, CNN might call a fact check, right?
I mean, if you just call your propaganda a fact check, is it now above fact checking itself?
My point is, that's for us each to decide every day in our own lives and online.
We have to sort out all the information in the world.
What we believe, what we sort of believe, what is fact, and what we know is a sales pitch.
We are bombarded all the time.
And you know, I don't think we mind it that much.
I don't think we mind listening to propaganda if it's entertaining, if we learn something from it.
Sometimes the ads on TV are the most entertaining part of TV, right?
I mean, think of all the great ads on the Super Bowl.
They're propaganda, right?
Or they're part of a sales campaign, or maybe they're just the truth, but whatever.
Isn't it up to each of us to be the judge of them?
Same with politics on Facebook, but no, no, that's the big push.
The big push on Facebook and the left is to censor conservatives.
And thus, this week, Facebook started its Maoist struggle to purge itself of wrong ideas.
I want to show you extracts from a cult-like video produced by Facebook.
I'm sure they think it looks really normal, really thoughtful, but boy, it made Facebook look really creepy to me.
Even the sound effects, the aesthetics, it looks like a creepy cult.
Here, take a look.
Facebook and other social media sites are being criticized for not doing enough to stop ogus stories that seem to dominate the election cycle.
I mean, the big thing that happened was in the wake of the U.S. presidential election in 2016 is we just were under a massive amount of scrutiny.
That's a result of us making mistakes along the way, both in what we built and how we explain what we did, or maybe not explaining enough.
Facebook is now unveiling this new tool that will allow users to see if they at all interacted with a troll farm with ties to the Russian government.
That's a really difficult and painful thing, but I think the scrutiny fundamentally was a healthy thing.
You've created these platforms and now they are being misused.
And you have to be the ones to do something about it, or we will.
Facebook's fight against misinformation.
Really?
Is that their job?
Well, Diane Feinstein says it's their job.
The most left-wing senator in Congress from San Francisco, the most left-wing city in America, where Facebook itself is headquartered, of course.
Silicon Valley is a suburb of San Francisco.
That's their moral center.
That's their political center.
Feinstein is despised across most of America as a hardcore leftist.
But to Facebook, that's who they feel the need to answer to.
Just watch some more.
Nearly everything you see in your newsfeed, you're seeing because somebody who you're connected with or a page that you've decided to follow decided to share that.
For a time, we felt our responsibility was mostly around just trying to help organize that information that you, in some sense, had asked to see.
There was some reluctance to try to get in between you and those people.
Exactly.
So if I want to hear from someone, left, right, center, friend or foe, that's to say I could have any reason for following someone on Facebook, including that I dislike them and I want to keep an eye on them.
I mean, I follow as many political enemies as I follow political friends, and that's my own business.
I'm choosing who I want to follow online.
That's the fun of social media.
But this guy, Dan Zygmunt, the Buddhist convert who preaches a 15-hour a day spiritual fasting diet, he knows better than me about what's normal.
Now, I'm not making fun of him or his diet or his religion.
I'm just pointing out some of the characters at Facebook who are determining what's normal or not.
Dan Zygmunt is severely normal for San Francisco.
I think he's super weird.
Maybe you can pick that vibe up.
I googled most of the people in this Facebook video.
They're a bit cultish, each of them.
They're certainly all social justice warriors.
Some of them are a little bit messianic, but you heard it right there.
You used to be able to choose for yourself, but now Dan Zygmunt knows better for you.
And the rest of these San Francisco liberals do too.
One of the challenges in misinformation is that there is no one consensus or source for truth.
If you think about all of the news that you read in a day, how much of it is objectively false?
How much of it is objectively true?
The truth has this unfortunate aspect to it that sometimes it is not aligned with your desires.
It is not aligned with what you have invested in, what you would like.
And you can see that reflected inside of the content.
There's a lot of content in the gray area.
Most of it probably exists in some space where people are presenting the facts as they see them.
People consider misinformation to involve a lot of different things.
We've heard hate speech is misinformation, false news is misinformation, the speech about the government is misinformation.
So one of the things we're doing internally is defining what we're really looking at and what we can measure reliably, and then figuring out how do we communicate that in a way that puts it in the right context.
They're all describing the process by which we decide what we believe and what we don't.
And it sounds thoughtful.
I mean, these are smart people.
Lots of fancy degrees.
I Googled them.
I checked them out on LinkedIn.
But there's no normals in there, no normies.
You can get that vibe, can't you?
All leftist, of course.
All overucated.
There's a real demographic going on there.
I mean, it's the political wing of Silicon Valley.
Lots of women in their late 20s and early 30s with strong political opinions about feminism and liberalism.
Pretty different from the computer side of Silicon Valley, the engineers, basically white guys and Asian guys, all engineers, probably right-wingers if they ever thought of politics.
The Mark Zuckerbergs and the Sergei Brins, they built Silicon Valley.
They came up with the algorithms and then they handed their companies over to the liberals who were less autistic than them and more sociable than them.
The geeks sort of handed their prize over to the fashionable kids, politically fashionable.
We in journalism have a myth of objectivity.
It doesn't exist.
There's also an expectation of a myth of objectivity or neutrality in the platforms.
It doesn't exist.
Because Facebook is being manipulated, Facebook has an obligation to recognize that and compensate for that.
Hang on, who is manipulating Facebook?
Don't we choose who we follow?
Don't we choose who is allowed to be our friends on Facebook?
Isn't saying Facebook is being manipulated, isn't that a lot like saying the market is being manipulated so someone smarter than each of us has to come in and protect us?
And if you know that every single person in that building, every single person in this video knows, just knows they're smarter than you.
And many of them are smarter than you, but being smart, or at least book smart, isn't the same as being morally superior.
And even if they were that too, I'm not a child.
I don't want to be treated like a child.
If I sign up and follow some crap on the internet, I want my crap.
I don't want some net nanny telling me it's crap.
And maybe it's not crap.
Facebook's Moral Superiority Complex00:09:56
Maybe they call my political taste crap.
I'd call that weird guy's 15-hour day Buddhist fast thing weird, but I'd never tell him he can't follow that.
So why does he get to tell me what I can think?
I think an extreme that would be bad would be if a group of Facebook employees reviewed everything that people tried to post and determined if the content of that post was true or false.
And based on that determination, decided whether or not it could be on the platform.
Good idea, relieving.
But you'll see in this video later on, she has a better idea.
She'll set up a computer program to do all that censoring for her.
But then she says this.
What I think would also be bad is if we took absolutely no responsibility whatsoever and allowed hate speech and violence to be broadly distributed.
That wouldn't be taking nearly enough responsibility.
Now I'm against violence too, but hang on.
Does that mean I can't see R-rated movies like action movies or cartoon war movies or superheroes?
What does she mean by violence?
And hate speech.
What does she mean by that?
Speech that is hateful?
That's a normal human emotion.
Or speech that causes hate?
Well, you never know what will cause hate.
Does she mean speech that she hates?
I don't know.
Do you know what hate speech is?
She sure seems to, doesn't she?
Now, I follow some alt-left people on Twitter, some extreme environmentalists, for example.
I follow the dictator of Iran on Twitter.
Is he hateful?
Is he violent?
Well, of course.
So I can't follow any of them?
Can I decide?
The right answer is definitely somewhere in the middle, but that's a big middle.
We want to make sure we don't inadvertently introduce bias.
It's extra important in all of our work to kind of know your own biases, but also sort of take a step back and make sure you're listening to the other side.
Do you think they do that at Facebook?
Do you really think they listen to, let's say, blue-collar working men and women?
People who didn't finish high school, maybe cowboys, I don't know, southern good old boys.
Right-wingers, rednecks.
Do you really think they do?
Amongst the tens of thousands of Facebook employees, do you think that a single one of them wears a red Trump Make America great hat again?
Do you think they'd be allowed to?
That's half the country.
I'm sure they're full of Hillary Clinton supporters, but do you think a single Facebook staffer is a Trump supporter, at least overtly?
How about a serious Christian?
Someone pro-life, someone, I don't know, who's against marijuana and prostitution?
I'm not saying those are right or wrong points of view.
I'm just saying the true diverse range of opinions.
Do you think the people you have seen so far in this Facebook video would tolerate truly different points of view?
Do you think they really know their blind spots?
But let me skip to the most troubling part of this Facebook movie, where they list their enemies.
And there's a lot of different types of misinformation.
There's bad actors, there's bad behavior, and there's bad content.
Bad actors are things like fake accounts or foreign agents.
Bad actors.
They list fake accounts.
I get it.
Fake might be bad, but are anonymous commenters bad by definition?
Aren't a lot of dissidents anonymous?
Don't they use pseudonyms?
Weren't many of the revolutionaries in the U.S. Revolutionary War who wrote some of the Federalist papers?
Weren't some of them anonymous?
Weren't many dissidents in the Soviet Union anonymous, had pen names?
That's not fake, I guess, but it's anonymous.
And foreign agents.
I mean, I get it if you're freaking out about Russians, but this video is from California.
So is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation a foreign agent?
Is Justin Trudeau a foreign agent?
That Tessa Lyons-Lang woman who's listing the enemies, she's actually from Ottawa originally.
Is she a foreign agent?
How about U.S. environmentalist groups propagandizing into Canada?
How about George Soros?
Is he a foreign agent?
How about Facebook itself?
It's an American company, but is it a foreign agent in Canada?
Isn't a foreign agent really just whoever Facebook or Dianne Feinstein doesn't like?
Bad behavior is using tactics like spamming to try to spread a message.
All right.
Except I suppose one person's spam is another person's direct mail is another person's critically important public service announcement.
Who gets to decide, right?
And sensationalizing things?
Well, isn't that really just another word for marketing?
Isn't the job of every single newspaper editor, for example, to write the most interesting, gripping, can't-miss headline for their front page?
I don't get it.
And polarizing, as in yes, no, on, off.
Aren't there a lot of questions to which the answers are only yes, no?
Did you catch your flight?
That's a yes or no question.
Are you pregnant?
That's a yes or no question.
That's a polarizing question.
Same thing with a lot of questions in politics.
Do you want to go to war?
Yes or no.
There's no maybe.
Do you think we should have a carbon tax?
Yes or no?
There's no maybe.
Do you support Donald Trump?
Yes or no.
Isn't that what we call taking a vote in a legislature, like a parliament, calling for a division?
Isn't that how Facebook and other social media work?
You either like something or you thumbs down or thumbs up.
I guess you could sort of like something, but Facebook's own symbol is a thumbs up.
All right, a little more from the video.
And bad content includes things like false news, hate speech, or clickbait.
False news, what's that?
I know what it is.
It's an opinion that someone doesn't like.
Hate speech, we've talked about that already.
It's a human emotion that the other side doesn't like.
Graphic violence, eh?
Well, so much for half of Hollywood's movies and rap videos.
Now you can agree with every single idea here.
But your agreement and my agreement, we have different ideas how it's implemented, don't we?
That's why we both get to be different individuals in real life.
I don't want hate speech, but to me, Hate speech is that horrible leftist comedian at the White House correspondence dinner.
Or Kathy Griffin holding up Trump's severed head in effigy.
Or Samantha B swearing at Ivanka Trump so crudely.
To me, that's hate speech, but those are heroes to the left.
So who gets to decide who's banned, right?
Well, until 2016, it was you and me deciding for ourselves.
But now it's all the people in that Facebook video who are going to decide for us.
They are all liberal.
Now, I know they are, because Mark Zuckerberg confessed it when he appeared before Congress earlier this year.
Every one of these people voted for Hillary Clinton.
Do you doubt it?
Not one of them was conservative.
Not one of them was socially conservative.
Not one of them is a dissident on the right.
Not one of them respects flyover country.
Not one.
You think they'd allow a MAGA, make America great again, add in there?
So when they say they just remove bullying, you see that?
They're going to remove any bullying.
Okay, now do they mean people on the right that they don't like?
They haven't banned left-wing bullies.
Go onto social media and type in any search engine, type in assassinate Trump.
You'll find hundreds of entries on every social medium.
But that's not bullying to Facebook.
That's dissent.
That's the resistance.
Look at this culty ending to the movie.
Listen to the ending.
Listen to the music.
Look at the demographics.
Listen to this cult.
Responsibility.
With connecting people, particularly at our scale, comes an immense amount of responsibility.
Every week we talk to all of you, all of the new hires, about all the work that we're doing to try and improve the integrity of the information that flows through a newsfeed because it's important that you have that context.
And we're going to have to work together if we're going to be able to effectively address the issues that we face.
We definitely think a lot about our responsibility.
At the end of the day, we depend on our community of users, so ideally what's good for them is also good for us.
And there's sort of a natural alignment of interests.
We try to make a more interesting newsfeed because we think that's good for people.
We think that's good for communities.
And that will also be good for us and our business in the long run.
They're just trying to make you more interesting, you knuckle-draggers, you Trump lovers.
I mean, who are you to make your own world more interesting?
Don't you see these interesting people are willing to do it for you?
Misinformation is going to remain a topic, but it's going to be an arms race.
It's going to move from one frontier of the battle to a different frontier.
But in the time that I've been here, we doubled in size in my team, and we're doubling again.
So there's a great commitment to improving the integrity of our systems.
I think that we're making progress now, and that progress is going to accrue, and it's going to get better and better and better.
We're going to get interest on that progress.
But we're taking great steps every single day towards solving this incredibly complex problem.
We have to get this right, not just for our platform, but for the community of people that we serve around the world.
The problem they're talking about?
You're the problem.
You think too much, or maybe not enough for them.
You choose too much, or maybe you're not choosy enough.
You look at the wrong things.
You will be replaced by them.
They'll tell you what you can see.
They already are, but you don't even know it because they've eliminated any bad thoughts for you.
That's the future.
That's the present.
George Orwell said the future was a boot stomping on a human face forever.
No, he didn't foresee the internet.
The Problem with Curriculum Confusion00:07:18
The future of authoritarianism is smiling millennials in San Francisco with their clichés telling you to relax, relax, relax.
They'll do the thinking for you.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, Doug Ford has been wasting no time as Ontario's new Premier.
He's making decisive decisions about the most important subjects, carbon tax, cap and trade, Hydro One.
But I think he's tackled the most controversial subject of all, and he did so quickly and decisively, namely, scrapping the child sex curriculum that hypersexualized children of tender years.
He just scrapped it and reverted to the last version of the sex ed while he engages in a review.
No fuss, no muss.
He just did it.
And joining us now in studio to talk about this is the woman perhaps most responsible for this bold policy decision.
I'm talking about Tanya Granick Allen.
She's with Parents as First Educators, the president.
It's a pleasure to have you back in the studio.
Thank you.
It's great to be here, Ezra.
I have to say, this was a tough one because the media and the establishment is so unanimous that this is the test.
Are you a modern political person or not?
And Doug Ford just sort of said, boom, we're done it.
No fuss, no muss, no wishy-washy, no flip-floppery.
And it's done.
It's done already.
That's amazing.
This was a great issue because you actually did not require to pass legislation.
It's a simple directive from the minister.
It's done.
And to have that full repeal, though, I should mention that there needs to be a directive sent to the teachers saying that no component of the Wind Sex Ed should be discussed further.
For example, the unscientific gender identity theory.
That should not be mentioned.
And that should be made very clear.
And also, I know that they're reverting to the previous version.
There must always be an opt-out for parents.
So advanced notification and seeing through the repeal by always giving parents an opt-out.
Because let's face this, you'll never satisfy every parent, and every parent must have their rights respected, and that must be paramount.
Those are excellent details that ought to be added, and I agree with you that they're important.
But the center that this, and you know what?
And I think it gave people the creeps that Ben Levin, who was later convicted of trying to recruit young children to molest them, that such a person, a pedophile, would have been the deputy minister at the time this curriculum was developed.
When he was convicted, I think a lot of people said, how can you possibly allow a curriculum?
And I know he personally didn't write it, but he oversaw the ministry for a portion of that time.
Well, everything that came through his office, he signed off on.
And so he was, in part, developing the curriculum.
But of course, I'm with you, Ezra.
It's a massive red flag.
Who wants their children learning a sex ed curriculum from a convicted child pornographer?
It's absurd.
Yeah, I mean, we followed that trial and that conviction very closely.
He, I even hate to mention the details because there's so stomach turning.
chatted online with someone saying he would like to molest his own grandchildren.
I know that's so shocking to say and I'm sorry to say it and gross our people out, but when someone like that is in charge of the curriculum, how can you go with that into the schools?
It's fruit from a poison tree and it's shocking to me that it took an election to get that ripped out.
Well it's true and you know people say well are you for updating the curriculum?
Sure certainly I am and I will agree with the former Premier Kathleen Wynne that yeah updates need to happen and with modern technology things like sexting and whatnot need to be covered.
Strange though that while I guess I'll concede that it needs to be updated, she never once mentioned pornography in the curriculum.
You mentioned Ben Levin, again, convicted child pornographer.
It makes you wonder why.
Yeah, it's really strange.
And we were just talking before we turned the cameras on.
If there are some parents out there who really want to teach their children of tender years, I'm talking about six-year-olds here, about the six genders or some of the more extreme stuff, I suppose they can do that.
So this isn't stopping any parent who really loved the Ben Levin curriculum, God forbid.
It's just freeing the other 95, 99% of parents from being bound by it.
It just seems so common sense.
Let me ask you, though, what has been the public reaction?
I know the usual suspects in the media elites are freaking out.
But what's the reaction being?
I mean, you're the president of a parents-oriented group.
What's the reaction from severely normal Ontarians?
It's overwhelmingly positive.
In fact, I mean, think back to when they introduced the curriculum.
Did you see people protesting for classes on anal and oral sex or masturbation on Queen's Park?
I didn't.
I saw parents freezing their butts off in the middle of winter saying, by the thousands, saying, hey, no, this is irresponsible and sexualizes our kids.
But since the leadership and since this issue was thrust into the leadership and now we have the repeal, hopefully fully by the end of the week, we see that parents are saying, hey, we know there's a problem with this curriculum.
We hear a lot about the problems of this curriculum.
We're not sure exactly what, but there's an issue.
I need to open up the books of my kids and ask them, what are you learning in school?
And I think a lot of parents also had a lot of, they were alerted to the problems within this curriculum when kids would come home from school and they'd be discussing things around the dinner table that parents would never imagine they would have.
Oh, you're so right.
I mean, I read through the Ben Levin curriculum very carefully.
And some of those subjects, in my view, and I don't think I'm a prude at all, if you're not a grown adult, if you're not, I mean, that's like college-level maturity.
And for young kids, that was my chief beef with this, is it pushed sexuality to people who, to young kids who should be allowed to have a childhood where they're not being forced to think and talk and grapple with issues that they're just, they're supposed to have a childhood.
That's what was so irksome to me.
Not even what was being taught, but how early.
Why are you talking to, I'm not going to say babies, but these are people who are playing with dolls and not anatomically correct dolls.
Like, what are you doing?
Well, again, gender identity was introduced as a topic to eight-year-olds.
Do you know how many genders there are?
I think we're up to 112 now.
So that's concerning.
Most adults are confused by, and let's be clear here.
This is unscientific.
I'm probably part of the majority that believes children should be taught facts and scientific-based things in school, not theories that are unproven.
Well, and the left always says, oh, you're just a prude.
This is science.
I challenge anyone who's watching this without Googling it to name the six official genders that the Ben Levin sex curriculum had.
Anyway, thankfully, what we're talking about now, it is now history.
Are You Free To Share?00:07:17
Doug Ford, I'm impressed by the fact that he tackled this substantive issue.
But I got to tell you, it gives me encouragement about him as a premier on 20 different issues because now I know that when it comes to an issue that the media is unanimous about over here and the people are almost unanimous about over here, he won't bend to the peer pressure of the media.
That's the rarest thing in a politician, isn't it?
Well, I have to just say one thing, though.
When it came to my candidacy, that was not the case.
So while I'm happy to see that he is keeping most of his promises, he did break his promise to me.
And again, as to why, you'd have to ask him because I have not heard from him.
Well, I'm glad you brought that up.
I didn't want to emphasize that because the news of the day is the child sex curriculum has been repealed.
That's great news.
You're right.
That was a big beef for us here at the Rebel because in so many ways you were the kingmaker.
It was your campaign that put Doug Ford over the top for his leadership.
And I found his firing of you as a candidate, or maybe you, I don't know how it actually went down.
I found that demoralizing.
And I thought, this reminds me of Patrick Brown.
But I think now that he crossed the finish line, he's stronger.
I don't want to ask you to reveal confidences, but are you at liberty to tell our viewers, have you been in touch with Doug Ford personally or his staff since you were displaced as a candidate?
So his choosing not to recognize me as a Democratically nominated candidate in Mississauga Center, that happened May 5th.
And I reached out to Doug that day and he did not return my call or text.
I did hear from his campaign manager, Corey Tanai, who gave me the information, and I have not heard from him since.
So any particulars of that day, I suggest you invite Doug on and ask him yourself.
Well, I was more interested if you've had a rapprochement at all or a reconciliation or any more interaction.
So basically when you were sacked as a candidate, that was it, eh?
Well, my phone is always available, and I hope if he wants to reach out to me, I'm happy to take his call.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
And I have to say, you're a good sport, and you're remarkably positive, given that you earned, and you were not handed that nomination.
You had to fight for it.
It was winning.
It was very stressful.
I told Doug this after when he called to congratulate me on winning the nomination.
I said, Doug, I will do 10 leaderships before doing another one of those.
That was stressful.
But, you know, it was a wonderful experience.
I met so many wonderful people from such a diverse community and faith backgrounds who really stood unified with me on this issue of repealing the Sex Ed and on religious liberty and freedom of speech.
Well, I hope that you can become a part of the government in some way, because I think you represent a group of Ontarians.
I don't know what percentage it is.
You have an expertise in the issue of representing parents.
You obviously helped put them over the top.
Your focus on this issue, I think, is you and there's a few others who properly get credit for this change.
I hope that you are incorporated in the government in some way.
But tell me what you do.
You're back as president of Parents as First Educators.
What is that?
Is that a part-time, that's obviously a part-time NGO that you run?
Well, it represents over 80,000 supporters of an Ontario, grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents.
But I'm a mother of four young children.
I married happily.
You're pretty busy.
I'm a very busy woman.
But look, I got into the leadership for many issues, but to be an advocate for the grassroots, for free speech, for religious liberty, and for the repealing of the sex ed and whatnot.
So I was always in this for the issues.
So I never intended to run for politics.
I only did so at the behest of Doug and his team.
I followed through and then things happened.
But I will always be in there to advocate for the issues.
And in my role as Parents as First Educators, as president, is to advocate for the parents and the children of Ontario.
Well, I got to tell you, you handled that unfair defenestration a lot friendlier than I would have done.
You've been a lot more positive.
I mean, I think what happened to you was atrocious, frankly, and I said so at the time.
But you held your tongue and you were positive and you were focused on the prize, which was getting that curriculum thrown out.
Mission accomplished.
So credit to you for butting your tongue and being a team player in a way that many others wouldn't.
I hope that you will have successes in the future.
We will cover what you do.
We'll cover your projects.
We think you have an important voice.
That's proved.
You, in many ways, helped shape Ontario today, whether it's Doug Ford's own success or this curriculum.
So I'd like to say on behalf of our viewers, we think that you are an important part of the public policy conversation.
And whatever you do in the weeks and months ahead, keep us posted because we think you're a positive force in this province.
Thank you, Ezra, and to all your supporters and viewers who have either personally sent positive messages or I know who've quietly supported the parental rights and just freedom in general.
Yeah.
Well, I'm hopeful that a little bit of you is rubbed off on Doug.
I mean, I think he's a good egg to begin with.
I think he's got a good heart.
He reminds me of his brother in a lot of ways who had a big heart.
I think he's going to be good for the province.
I think you've got to stay on him a little bit, though.
I think we all do because we have, because let me put it this way, you've got a thousand journalists and other elites pulling him this way.
Everyone who can should help pull him that way so at least he can walk straight.
Well, and they're also, you know, sex that is one issue.
I mean, we have to talk about Bill 89 at some point, where children are being removed from their homes if their parents don't subscribe to gender theory and if their child wanted to change sex and they don't get them hormone therapy or surgery, the child will be removed because that's considered abuse.
Said so by the minister under Kathleen Wynne's government.
So that has to be fixed.
Yeah, well, let's talk about that.
I mean, I don't want to jump to that now.
That's such a big topic.
Let's have you back on another day to talk about that in depth.
And then there's even the federal C-16 that Jordan Peterson first brought to light.
There's so much to talk about.
The battle never ends because the other side never rests.
But Tanya, it's great to see you again.
Thanks for coming by our studio.
Congratulations on the effect you've had.
I have to say, you have had more impact on Ontario's trajectory, perhaps than anyone else other than Doug Ford himself.
So congratulations.
Well, thank you, and thanks to the parents.
This was a parent's effort.
So it's a victory for parents.
Well, great to see you again.
There you have it.
I admit I'm a bit of a fanboy.
I think Tanya has done some great work and I just said so about four times, but it's the truth, don't you think?
Stay with us, folks.
More ahead on The Rebel.
This is the neighborhood that I live in with my three children.
It's amazing, right?
Oh, awesome.
That is a clip taken by Sammy Barcelos.
You heard her?
She's a mom of three in Toronto.
Drug Shooting Zones00:09:23
A drug shooting zone, a shooting gallery in her neighborhood, but it's not illegal.
It's not being done on the lowdown.
That is the effect of one of Toronto's eight official shooting galleries, the Toronto Public Health safe injection sites.
When I hear safe injection sites, it makes me think of the phrase from Small Dead Animals, like a drunk driving lane on the highway when you have a safe injection site in the city.
Joining us now is the Toronto Sun columnist who has been writing a series about this, our friend Sue and Levy.
Great to see you again, Sue.
Thank you, Ezra.
It was a very quick clip, but it was a mum who has three young kids and all around her house, well, you describe it.
Well, I was there yesterday, so I saw it for myself.
When I arrived, her house is right beside a respite shelter.
So not only are the people shooting up, but they're coming and going and partying until five in the morning.
So they're partying, and that's allowed under the rules.
It's allowed, and lawlessness is allowed.
And these are, the people who stay in these respite shelters are, let's just say, people who've been kicked out of other shelters.
They're transients.
They're the lowest of the low.
And these respite shelters are supposed to be temporary stopgap measures, but many of them were open over the winter and now they've been extended right to the end of the year.
A lot of shelters have rules, no drugs, no, I mean, because they want to not only maintain some safety for the other clients, but they want to get these people on the back, on the path.
So they have some basic rules, a curfew, for example.
So you're saying that these, what exactly is a respite shelter?
What was the mandate of it?
Well, like I said, the respite shelter is supposed to be a temporary stopgap.
And it's supposed to just provide some of the homeless who basically to give them a place to sleep.
Three hots and a cot, I call it.
So it's basically to give them some place to put their heads.
However, as I've found out, because there are similar problems up around Park Road with the Collier Asquith neighborhood, which is right near Young and Blur Street, so right in the core of the city.
These shelters may be able to maintain rules inside, but once the people come outside, which they are, of course, doing at this time of year, there are no rules whatsoever.
Yeah.
So I can understand if it's minus 20 out, you don't want anyone freezing, even if they're very badly behaved.
But it's gloriously sunny and temperate in Toronto.
I can imagine these places are magnets, because if they're getting free food and a place to sleep, then they could save their change for, well, for drugs.
And, you know, we don't have to be shy about saying that because that's the explicit purpose of these places.
When you say that there's lawlessness there, when Sammy, the mom of three there, calls the cops, like, what do they even do?
Because if these are expressly law-free zones, what's a cop supposed to do?
Well, the cops have basically been doing nothing.
They certainly instructed to stand down around these safe injection sites.
And what Sammy has been told is that unless they're doing something, you know, criminal, they have a knife or a gun or whatever, or they've attacked somebody, they can't respond.
So essentially, they can shoot up, they can go through her gate, which they've done, break glass, now they're on her property.
Yes, and they're trespassing.
And what do the cops do there?
Now, I presume that in these shelters there are some social workers or something.
They don't do anything.
They don't do anything.
So these city staff watch as they go into Sammy's home.
They watch this, they see this.
Or they turn a blind eye to it.
Whether they see it or they don't, you know, as I said, the same thing is happening up on Park Road, 21 Park Road.
And they've complained about people taking over the parks, prostituting themselves, shooting up, leaving needles.
They've vandalized the RABA 24-hour store down the street.
The poor guy's losing business left, right, and center.
And nothing, nothing has been done.
You know, these people, they're criminals.
In some ways, they're probably also victims.
They may be mentally ill.
They obviously have addiction issues.
There's a lot of problems here.
And I don't want to be a NIMBY.
I don't want to say, well, shuffle them off somewhere.
But this solution isn't working.
You know what I'm thinking right now, Suann?
I don't know the street that John Torrey the mayor lives on.
But if this same respite shelter, I've never even heard that phrase before.
We're right next to his own precious house.
I get the feel.
If we moved it into the fanciest neighborhood in Toronto, Rosedale or a fancy part of Forest Hill or something.
He's off of Bloor.
Let's just say for the sake of argument, he's off of Bloor.
The closest respite shelter to his place is at Park Road.
There was another one up.
But I'm talking right next to him, like this Sammy, the mum.
And he had to run the gauntlet of druggies and people who are harassing her.
And by the way, when we arrived there to film these people, they disappeared like cockroaches, going back into, because they do not like their pictures taken.
Isn't that funny?
But they're doing it with impunity anyways.
I bet if this, and I don't know Sammy Barcellos, she seems like a nice lady.
She's trying to raise three kids.
You got to give her full marks for just doing the best a mum can do.
And she's got to be afraid.
What if we step on a needle?
What if the kids get hurt?
What if there's broken glass?
You know, they're bringing that onto her property.
She should be treated with the same respect as the high property tax paying Rosedale fancy pants.
Well, that's the thing.
And as her husband Michael said, and Michael was a crack cocaine addict.
Let me make that perfectly clear.
He told me this, and he said that he's been off crack cocaine for 10 years.
So he's trying to steer straight.
He's trying to steer straight.
Yeah, if he can do it, why can't anybody else?
And he doesn't understand.
He's seen this right in front of his eyes.
And what he said is that this has become the new normal in their neighborhoods.
And that's sad.
It's disgraceful and it's pathetic.
Well, here's what gets me is, again, I don't want to be heartless.
No one wants to be heartless.
But I just don't see how this solves anything.
At worst, I think it's enabling.
Yes.
I don't, like it's enabling the behavior.
Yes.
I don't know what the answer is, but this doesn't seem to be providing any solution.
Is there an ideology behind this?
Well, the safe injection sites, which started really up in Vancouver and now are spreading like wildfire right across Canada.
Hastings Street is notorious.
It's one of the worst.
It's Dante's Inferno.
So there were supposed to be four pillars, because I've studied this issue.
And one of the pillars is supposed to be rehab.
Another one is supposed to be enforcement.
There's no rehabilitation.
And that's not happening.
That is not happening.
Jeez, this.
I tell you, Sue Anne, I'm not going to press you because last time we talked, I said, come on, you got to run, you got to run.
Someone's got to bring the common sense criticism to this mayor.
And I know you do that through your journalism, and the Toronto Sun's quite good at that.
But by gosh, do you see anyone in the horizon who is thinking of running for mayor to challenge this crazy?
Like this is the, like, the great thing about Canada is we have so many different cities we can learn from each other.
Vancouver is like the laboratory that came up with the worst idea in the world.
Anyone who's been to East Hastings Street, it's so, it's there.
It's like zombies.
And it's zombies and crime, and you see people almost dying in front of you.
And Toronto's importing the bad lessons, not the good.
Is there anyone who looks like they might challenge the mayor in this year's civic election?
Not yet.
There's two weeks and three days.
Well, I don't want to put you on the spot, but boy, I'm rooting for you.
I mean, I think we need a happy warrior who's going to take it to John Torrey and not be too shy and dainty.
These are tough things.
We need a tough person to take on the mayor.
Not to mention the violence and the escalation and the shootings.
I read that there's been more shootings in Toronto than New York.
I've got to check my stats on that.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
And every other day, every weekend, long holiday weekend, there were 11 incidents.
I mean, it's sad.
What's happening?
You know, Sue Ann, I'm glad that Doug Ford is premier.
I'm thrilled.
And I think a lot of people are surprised.
You go back in January.
No one would have thought, because everyone thought Patrick Brown was running.
But him moving to the provincial level has created a void.
And I sure hope someone fills that.
And if that's you, we'll be on site.
If it's someone else who champions common sense ideas, we'll be there for them too.
Okay.
Think about it.
I don't mean to put you in the present.
Well, I sort of do.
But we'll be there.
And you know what?
You have a very important influence in the Toronto Sun.
You have had a very key role in the provincial election.
So at the very least, I know you'll keep writing about this.
But we need a champion at the ballot box.
That's the only place to get this done.
Yeah.
NATO's Unequal Pay-Up?00:03:08
All right.
Well, good luck.
Good luck, my friend.
There you have it.
You can see that I'm sort of twisting Sue Ann's arm.
Boy, I'd love it if she ran.
It wouldn't be the first time a journalist.
I mean, I think of one of the greatest journalist politicians of all time in Canada, Ralph Klein, who was a man of the people.
He became mayor and then premier.
One of the most successful because he had the common sense of the common man and he got through all the BS.
I think Toronto needs that.
All right, that's enough of pining from me.
Our friend Sue Ann Levy, you can read her columns in the Toronto Sun.
She's done a series on this.
It's gripping stuff.
Stay with us.
More ahead on the Rebel.
Welcome back.
On my monologue yesterday about Donald Trump calling out NATO countries for not pulling their weight.
Bruce writes, Trump is the first real person to confront NATO.
I find his honesty refreshing and welcome.
He didn't swear or call names.
He just told it like it is.
How I wish we had more real people in power rather than myopic politicians who only care for themselves.
Yeah, you know what?
Most of what Trump says that irritates people.
I think it irritates people.
They say it's because the style and the aesthetic approach of Trump and the tone.
Yeah, I think it's because he says blunt things, the substance of them.
I watched that exchange at NATO.
He wasn't shouting.
He was saying things that made people uncomfortable.
The words, not the tone.
I think you're right.
Amy writes, ha ha, really, Ezra?
Americans pay for our security?
From who?
Well, sister, going back to 1945, it would be from the Soviet Union.
From 1945 to 1989, we were in a Cold War.
And although I salute the efforts of our Canadian military, only a fool would realize that we were not under the protective shield of NATO and NORAD and to the point, American nukes.
It was mutually assured destruction of the American nuclear arsenal that kept the peace during the Cold War.
Now that was for, what, 44 years?
Well, who was defending us against a great many threats since then?
The renewed Russian bear under Vladimir Putin, terrorism around the world.
Yeah, listen, I wish that we were, as they said in World War I, a fireproof country far away from inflammable material.
But that ain't true in the era of ICBM's globalism and terrorism.
So yeah, even if you don't like to acknowledge it, it is a fact.
America pays for our national security, and we're so lucky to have them do so.
What we have now is a president who's just saying, hey, can you pay 2%?
Can you pay just 2%?
I don't really think it's unreasonable.
And if you do, don't pretend that you're part of NATO.
I mean, don't pretend you want an equal compact of equal countries.
Just say, yeah, we want America.
You keep doing it for free.
I think Trump's calling it out.
Folks, that's our show for today.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.