Alex Jones’s Infowars purge exposes YouTube’s selective enforcement, deleting 10,000 videos while letting left-wing figures like Farrakhan and Jiang evade bans. Justin Trudeau’s $4.5B Kinder Morgan pipeline purchase—overpaying by $1B—fails transparency, with delays costing $9.3B amid election concerns. His Saudi spat tweet, virtue-signaling over Raif Badawi, contrasts with silence on abuses in Mexico or Iran, where his brother aids propaganda. The government’s opaque deals and free speech crackdowns reveal a pattern of prioritizing control over accountability, warning dissenters like Jones’s former allies that censorship may soon target them too. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, after silencing Alex Jones and Infowars, the leftist mob is moving on to the next conservatives to censor.
It's August 8th, 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 for why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Alex Jones and Infowars, you can love them or you can hate them, or a bit of both.
They've published more than 10,000 videos, and YouTube just deleted them all.
Why?
All of them.
Not all of them were controversial, let alone possibly breaking some YouTube rule, let alone possibly breaking some law.
That's what's so odd here to me.
It's that old Roman concept of damnatio memoriae, where Roman emperors would declare someone to be unpersoned.
Do you see that painting there?
Any public memory of someone was obliterated, scraped off a painting, a sculpture destroyed.
We know about some of those cases because there were some records that weren't destroyed, but we'll never know if it was successful in a particular case, would we?
Because if all traces of someone were evaporated, an entire emperor perhaps, if it was just obliterated, well, by definition, we wouldn't even know about it.
Joseph Stalin did the same thing.
That's my point.
I'm not here to defend any particular Roman emperor or someone who got on the wrong side of Stalin.
I'm not even here to defend Alex Jones.
Let us just reflect on how odd it is to want to cancel out every trace of another human being altogether.
I mean, when we prosecute someone in court, for example, we're suing them for an action they did, not for an activity.
It's not the very human being himself we want to obliterate.
It's what they did.
I mean, sometimes it's what they thought.
A criminal court prosecutes an illegal act that was motivated by a guilty mind.
But we don't prosecute someone just for being someone, just for existing.
And even when we meted out the death penalty, it was not because we wanted to obliterate their ever having been that person.
It's just that's the biggest penalty we could imagine.
It's the only sure way to avoid a repeat of whatever horrendous crime was done.
But usually a death penalty was the opposite of secret, right?
It was publicized.
There were witnesses.
It was a lesson to be told about what someone did wrong and not to do it.
We don't just make someone disappear and all of their works disappear and all traces of them disappear.
And that's what they've done to Alex Jones.
By vaporizing more than 10,000 videos by him, most of which would be innocuous.
And then there's Facebook and all his other social media.
I learned yesterday that Alex Jones was kicked off of LinkedIn.
You know what LinkedIn is?
It's like the Facebook of business connections.
Here's my LinkedIn page.
It's just sort of like a resume.
It's a website where people post their resumes and look for work and talk to other people in their business.
It's like a networking for business people.
I mean, some people do post essays and you can share news stories on it, really, but it's not really a media political website, as the name suggests.
It's a business links networking site.
I don't even really know how to use it.
I don't think Alex Jones did either.
Why did they delete Alex Jones' LinkedIn account?
How could they possibly argue that he violated their terms of service for his resume?
Or what?
I don't know.
Again, this is not a correction for an improper action or even an intemperate word.
This is a depersoning and unpersoning.
This is making him a persona non grata, making him an outlaw.
It's medieval.
When we hear the word outlaw today, we think of a bad guy in a cowboy movie.
Outlaw actually used to have a specific legal meaning.
If someone was deemed to be an outlaw, that means they were outside of the law, outside of the law's protection and processes.
You could kill an outlaw with impunity.
They were compared to a wolf.
In fact, the wolf was a symbol of an outlaw, and anyone can kill a wolf.
They're a menace to society.
This kind of brutality, kill the wolf, kill the outlaw, that goes back even earlier.
The Latin phrase, it tells you how old this is, homo sacer, the cursed man.
You can kill a cursed man on sight.
That's how it was.
But even these barbaric dehumanizing sentences were sentences, as in they happened after some sort of hearing or tribunal.
They didn't just happen out of nothing, declaring someone a cursed man or an outlaw.
What was Alex Jones' trial and hearing and sentence?
Who were his accusers?
Who was the decider?
What were the particulars of his offense?
At least in the Star Chamber, you were told what you were accused of doing wrong.
At least you'd have a chance to speak back to the judge.
You actually were required to have a lawyer in the Star Chamber.
You may have heard about the infamous Star Chamber in the United Kingdom.
It was a political court.
It was called the Star Chamber because of the stars painted on the roof.
This is a drawing of it.
The Star Chamber was set up originally to deal with politically difficult cases that a regular court might be afraid of tackling, taking on a politically connected person.
It prosecuted political crimes like treason and sedition.
But over the years, over the centuries, the Star Chamber itself became colonized by political intrigues, and it soon became a tool for political extremism and vendettas itself.
There were cases where it would summon an entire jury.
Get this, where the jurors themselves would be put on trial for not giving the right verdict in a legal case.
That's what the Star Chamber turned into.
Vox's Extreme Wing00:07:51
But why was Alex Jones kicked off of LinkedIn?
Because they're making him anathematized.
That's the Christian way of saying he's a non-person, an outlaw.
Why?
Because sometimes he's wrong?
Because sometimes he's rude?
Surely that can't be it.
We're all sometimes wrong and sometimes rude.
It's obviously his politics.
He's conservative, but I wouldn't even really call him conservative.
I'd say he's a universal skeptic, doubting everything, challenging everything, provoking and poking everything, maybe too many things.
But surely that is a healthy thing in a democracy to have a gadfly who will, by definition, get some things wrong and be more enthusiastic than he is careful.
Is that enough to deperson a man?
Of course not.
It's not any particular action that he's taken or a thing that he's said.
We know that.
We know that, for example, Louis Farrakhan, the racist head of the Nation of Islam, a black supremacist anti-Semitic group, he still enjoys all his social media privileges.
But you see, he's on the left, so that's okay.
That's him with Barack Obama.
On Monday, we showed you a few dozen of Sarah Jiang's racist, sexist tweets.
Again, she's on the left, so it's all cool.
She was hired by the New York Times.
I haven't watched everything Alex Jones has said, but he surely is not as odious as Louis Farrakhan or Sarah Jiang.
But he's banned.
His whole body of work is banned.
Not just banned, erased.
But it's not over.
Look at this.
This is from the left liberal website called Vox.
You've probably heard of it.
Vox is pretty mainstream as website media go.
It's actually partly owned by NBC, which poured in $200 million into Vox, tens of millions more from venture capitalists.
So it's mainstream left-wing crud.
400 staff throughout the whole company.
It's a pretty big company.
And where does Vox stand on free speech?
Why, they're against it.
For conservative side, there's look at this.
The very next day after Alex Jones was depersoned, was made an outlaw, a castaway.
It's not just Alex Jones.
YouTube's most extreme creators are pushing the platform into a tough debate and censorship and free speech on the internet.
It's a bit of a grammatical problem with that tweet.
Okay, so they have a handy list of people that they think are extreme.
And it won't surprise you to learn that two rebel alumni are on their list, including Lauren Southern and Gavin McInnis, both of whom have moved on from us, but their rebel work is cited as proof of their extremism.
You can see our logo there.
Now, we're conservative, and we're a bit dissident.
Not much compared to Alex Jones.
I'd say we're one or two standard deviations more centrist than him.
I mean, being a conservative in Canada is really like being a moderate Democrat in the U.S., don't you think?
But we're on the official enemies list now, I guess.
Take a look.
Search YouTube for videos about immigration, and eventually you'll find this.
Mass immigration is not the rainbows and unicorns that our politicians portrayed as.
It is, in fact, a tragedy.
Search for videos about Islam, and you'll find stuff like this.
By its very nature, Islam is an intolerant, radical, extremist belief system.
Search for feminism, and yeah.
Newsflash, everybody hates feminism.
These videos are all products of what New York Times magazine calls the YouTube right.
A growing collection of right-wing vloggers, media operations, conspiracy theorists, and activists who built sizable followings on YouTube.
They warn about mass immigration, decry political correctness, and mock out-of-control social justice warriors.
Why am I on camera for this?
So there's some honesty there.
There really isn't any extremism they're mad at.
They're just mad at anyone right-wing, including a black Republican woman who disagrees with feminism.
That's our friend Candace Owens.
Imagine calling her extremist, because she dares to be a Republican.
Do you think Vox would call someone extreme if they criticized Christianity the same way Paul Joseph Watson criticized Islam?
No, of course not.
I mean, if you type the word Christianity into the Vox.com search engine, as I did, you will find literally 300 anti-Christian articles, none of them as entertaining as Paul Joseph Watson, but all as hostile to Christianity as he is to Islam.
And opposing open borders immigration, I'm sorry, that is not an extreme position.
I've shown you before a poll commissioned by Justin Trudeau's Liberal government in Canada that shows only 8% of Canadians believe we need more immigration, but he gave us more immigration.
I'm sorry, it's the 8% that's the extreme fringe by definition, not the 92% who think we have enough or too many immigrants already.
This is just setting the narrative, though.
No one with right-wing opinions can be allowed in the public square, which these days is online.
Surprisingly, a voice of sanity in all this came from Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of the very left-wing activist censorious social media company called Twitter, that just happens to have a major shareholder in Prince Al-Walid of Saudi Arabia.
They love censorship.
They love censoring anti-Islam commentary.
But here's what Jack Dorsey said to the baying mob.
Take a look at this.
He said, we didn't suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday.
We know that's hard for many, but the reason is simple.
He hasn't violated our rules.
We'll enforce if he does, and we'll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren't artificially amplified.
Yeah, exactly.
What rules did Alex Jones violate?
I mean, sure, he's being unperson, but that's just the mob.
Did he say or do anything wrong other than being right-wing?
Here's more from Jack.
He said, if we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce and evolve impartially, regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that's constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction.
That's not us.
Well, look, I'm glad to hear him talk about principles.
I don't think he's being fully candid.
They routinely censor conservatives to Twitter.
They ban Tommy Robinson, for example.
They routinely shadowban conservatives, as in they make it impossible for people to find their accounts.
So he's preening a bit falsely, but let him.
He alone is standing up to the mob in this case.
But here's the key.
Here's his third tweet.
He said, accounts like Jones's can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors, so it's critical journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions.
This is what serves the public conversation best.
Exactly.
I mean, one man's rumor is another man's theory, is another man's explanation for things.
And unsubstantiated rumor today might become substantiated tomorrow.
A conspiracy theory might yet to be proved a real conspiracy fact.
I mean, doubting, challenging, being a dissident, being a disturber, isn't that healthy in a democracy?
Think of any example of government lies that was eventually revealed, but that first was bought by the mainstream media stenographer.
It was only dissenters that challenged it.
The most obvious example to me, right off the top of my head, is the Hillary Clinton lie about Benghazi.
Remember that?
She said that the consulate in Benghazi was attacked by a mob of people who were mad about a YouTube video from some filmmaker in California.
That's what she said.
When in fact it was an al-Qaeda attack on the consulate there on the anniversary of 9-11, she lied.
Now the New York Times and all the fancy people bought the lie, but Alex Jones didn't, and neither did other conspiracy theorists.
I'm not saying he's always right, but whether or not he's right or wrong is not for a handful of social media executives to decide.
Prime Minister's Diplomatic Flap00:15:25
It's for us, the people, to decide, all of us for ourselves.
But not according to the fancy people, to the well-funded, well-heeled mobs, like at Vox.
They're making up their lists, their hit list.
I can guarantee you that we're on it here at the Rebel if our alumni and our friends are on it already.
We will keep fighting.
You know we will.
And if one day you simply stop seeing us, well, just know that it won't be because we've decided not to say anything anymore.
It's because, like Alex Jones, we will have been depersoned.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, what a surprising diplomatic spat.
Justin Trudeau versus the new king of Saudi Arabia.
You know, there's a lot of foreign affairs files that are burning dumpster fires under Justin Trudeau.
Obviously, the most important one being our bilateral relationship with the United States, including NAFTA, other relationships like with the world's largest democracy, India.
But now there's a serious diplomatic row with the Saudis.
And who better to talk to than our friend Manny Montenegrino, the president of Think Sharp, who joined us now via Skype.
Manny, great to see you again.
Good to see you, Ezra.
Thank you.
You know, I just go down the list of countries that we have had spats with.
I tell you, Justin Trudeau certainly put himself forward as someone who would have Canada come back to the world stage, unlike the humiliations of the Stephen Harper era.
Stephen Harper is the one who was the cool professional.
Trudeau is mucking up everything left and right.
Well, it seems so.
I mean, this diplomatic war with Saudi Arabia, I simply can't get my head around.
And I've been looking at the news reports and you don't get the facts.
So when you're confused about something, Ezra, at least start with the facts.
Try to understand the facts.
And somewhere you might find some logical conclusion or logical understanding.
I don't know if your viewers know, but neither of the two, Raif Bawadi, or his sister, Samara Bawadi, are Canadian citizens or share a dual citizenship.
They're not even Canadian.
And they are being processed under the laws of Saudi Arabia.
And I don't know why Canada has any interests in two individuals that are going through a legal process in a foreign jurisdiction that is no way similar to Canada's foreign judicial system.
So I start there, and I wonder why are we involved in this in the first place?
I have a theory on that.
And let me put my cards on the table, Manny.
I'm critical of Saudi Arabia for a number of reasons.
Mainly, they are an extremist Islamic theocracy with no civil rights.
The Sharia is the basis of their constitution, the Quran, rather.
Right.
And I know this Raif Badawi was sort of a democracy activist blogger, and so I'm sympathetic towards him, as I would be with any Chinese democracy activist or Iranian democracy activist.
I think because Canada took in as for refuge his wife, Ansef Haidar.
So she's become a Canadian political figure.
And I'm sympathetic.
I'm sympathetic to her.
Absolutely.
I'm sympathetic to her.
But I think you're spot on being politically sympathetic and making a public demand that a Saudi national have different legal treatment.
I don't know.
I mean, I think there is a place for Canada to be a moral exemplar and to push for human rights.
But obviously this wasn't done right.
I mean, what do you explain?
I mean, Saudi Arabia has come down like a ton of bricks, dispatching the Canadian ambassador home, canceling flights, withdrawing Saudi students from our med schools, threatening to cancel imports.
It's a real thunderclap diplomatically.
What was the precise thing that you think triggered it?
Was it that tweet from the Foreign Affairs Department?
Well, absolutely.
The tweet was a public tweet humiliating the kingdom.
And normally these channels are done privately and communications are made privately.
To make a public tweet and to pick out the kingdom really alarms me.
There are, Ezra, if we look at it, there are 7 billion people on this planet.
About 6 billion don't enjoy what we enjoy in Canada.
That is the right of individual rights, the right of our own liberty, our right to assemble, our right to freedom of speech.
So there are a lot of countries, you know, upwards of over 100 countries that do not enjoy the rights that Canadians enjoy.
Why single out Saudi Arabia?
We have to ask why.
And these are not, I mean, if they were dual citizen, I'd be strongly supportive.
But there are millions of people around the world that are either being killed, prosecuted, or injailed for doing absolutely nothing in these very barbaric countries.
Ezra, I put to you the following.
Mexico, Canada has, and I don't understand, but Canada has an asylum process for Mexicans.
We have accepted many Mexicans under the asylum process, basically saying that the government is a threat to its people.
We don't hear the prime minister speaking about human rights in Mexico.
We don't hear about the millions that are trying to escape from Mexico and the human rights violations there.
We don't hear about Iran.
Iran is going through a crisis right now, and the prime minister is getting close to Iran.
There are riots and there are protests to get some rudimentary fundamental rights in Iran, and we're silent.
China, as we know, is a terrible jurisdiction when it comes to human rights, but our prime minister was pretty cozy with him.
The biggest one, I mean, and I tweeted this, and that is Cuba.
I've gone to Cuba once, and I was heartbroken to see these beautiful 11 million people basically enslaved in a country, no freedom of speech, and their dissidents are jailed.
Their dissidents are flogged and some killed.
But our prime minister is very close to Cuba.
So how does this prime minister speak on human rights when he allows, in fact, loves jurisdictions that are abusive to human rights, but picks out Saudi Arabia?
And I think that's why Saudi Arabia moved very quickly.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think Saudi moved quickly because, I mean, I find this one a tough one because I'm sympathetic to Raif Badawi.
He's a democracy blogger who was flogged by a theocratic dictatorship.
So I'm sympathetic to him.
His wife in Canada.
Go ahead.
Yeah, you and I would be Rafe in Saudi Arabia.
You and I would be subject to that.
So of course we do.
But there is a bigger point here.
In Saudi Arabia, they have laws like we have laws.
They have, and I've looked at this, they have their M130 that we have are that we've passed as a motion, but they've put teeth into their law.
That if you speak poorly about Islam, you speak poorly about the Muslim culture, you will be imprisoned and you will be flogged and you will be.
So that is, I mean, what I don't understand is why our prime minister, who has hold himself out, held himself out to be knowledgeable about Islam, to be knowledgeable about the culture, completely misses what's really happening in these jurisdictions.
He does know what Sharia law means.
He does know that Saudi Arabia has 32 million people, that all must be Muslim.
You cannot be a citizen of Saudi Arabia unless you're Muslim.
You cannot be a citizen if you say there are no churches, there are no other forms of religious practice in Saudi Arabia.
So it's clear.
So how are we confused about this?
And our prime minister is, we've seen him in pictures, we've seen him understanding Islam and understanding Sharia law.
It clearly tells me he doesn't understand it.
And he shouldn't be virtue signaling about it.
Here's a few of my thoughts, because on the one hand, I want to acknowledge the rare time Canada speaks out against an Islamic theocracy.
Like that's sort of a miracle.
But I have to ask, like you do, why Saudi Arabia not Iran?
Because we know that Justin Trudeau is affectionate towards Iran.
His brother did a propaganda video with the Iran state media called The New Great Game.
Like his brother worked with Iran propaganda.
There are MPs in Trudeau's caucus who are trying to rebuild diplomatic and business ties.
So is this some sort of move against Iran?
As you point out, China, Cuba, horrific places.
Why was Saudi Arabia chosen?
I'm curious, but also it's that obsession with Twitter and social media.
Justin Trudeau starts so many policy disasters with a careless tweet, like his announcement to the world that we can no longer enforce our borders.
I think maybe that's what bugged the Saudis virtue signaling tweet is what started this battle.
Well, I know, I think I'll go a little bit further.
I think the Saudis wanted to send a worldwide message.
Do not interfere into our own governance.
And it so happened that who do they pick on?
Who do they send the message to?
Well, once again, our prime minister has demonstrated incredible weakness in the world, and they just jumped on it like a cat jumping on a ball.
But Saudi Arabia sees a very weak and vulnerable prime minister, a very weak Canada.
And you've already stated the reasons why.
The offense to India, the war with the President of the United States over NAFTA, and the embarrassment in China.
So they know that Canada is weak.
And if you want to send a world message out, you use Canada.
What I'm alarmed about the most is how weak has Canada become.
The UK has stepped aside and will not get into this battle.
How can the country that created the Magna Carta, the country that's sat shoulder to shoulder with Canada since our inception, is not standing beside Canada?
It's not Canada that they're not standing beside.
It's the prime minister.
You know, I think you're right.
I think this was a strategic choice by Saudi Arabia to smack Canada so hard, pour encouragé les otres, as they would say in French, to teach a lesson to everyone else.
You know, I don't know if you remember, Manny, a few weeks ago, some Iranian dictator mused about some threat to America, and Donald Trump wrote an all-capital letters tweet.
I put it on the screen here, and it basically said, don't you ever threaten America or you will have more pain than you can imagine.
Like it was a stunning tweet that written in all caps, as you can see on the screen right now, it's as if Trump was shouting it.
And you know what?
I would be scared.
I would be scared.
Whereas Trudeau, he didn't even react.
I mean, he was on vacation or maybe just got a vacation he went to parade in Vancouver.
Everyone knows he's the world's weakest leader.
Well, he's demonstrated that for two years.
I mean, like, the world takes notice when Justin Trudeau goes to important events and he shows his socks.
He does a dress-up.
He's referred to as little potato in China.
The world notices that there's a weak, weak leader there.
I mean, and the embarrassment with India, trying to blame India for Canada bringing a Canadian terrorist to India and trying to blame India was an embarrassment.
And so there are ample examples.
Our own country has found this prime minister in incomprehensible failure.
I mean, there are lists of failures.
During the one-year investigation of the ethics commissioner on his $200,000 free trip to the private island, the ethics commissioner found that his excuse or his evidence that this was a friend not credible.
We have an adjudicator of fact finding our prime minister not credible.
We have another, the auditor general, finding colossal failures.
So the world knows that this is not a very strong prime minister, and he should not be wading into areas where he does not have the strength of UK, USA, or Canada behind him.
This is very alarming.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting.
Saudi Arabia, believe it or not, sells oil to Canada.
Which is so weird to me.
When I first learned that years ago, I was shocked.
I thought Canada is a major net oil exporter because of the oil sands.
Why are we importing oil from anyone, let alone from conflict oil regimes?
Well, because we don't have a pipeline going east.
And Trudeau and his liberal friends in Montreal, especially, sunk a massive pipeline project called Energy East.
It was a private sector shovel-ready infrastructure project, $15.7 billion jobs project.
Like, imagine how the $15 billion to build a pipe and it was stopped.
Not only did that kill a bunch of jobs, not only did it keep the oil price in Western Canada depressed, but it was the best thing ever done for Saudi Arabia.
Maybe, I mean, I don't think that that deal is salvageable now because I don't think any sane pipeline company would proceed in Canada under Trudeau.
But what a shame we don't have the Energy East pipeline providing us with an alternative source of oil to Saudi Arabia and Algeria and Angola and the rest of the conflict oil countries selling into our country.
Last word to you, Gordon.
Well, that's exactly right.
If there was a bona fide intent to message human rights, we would have created the Energy East as a national security interest, as he did with Trans-Canada Pipeline.
Trans-Canada Pipeline moves oil from Alberta to China or whatever consumer.
Energy East was a perfect national treasure that we could have created to get off Saudi oil.
Kinder Morgan Controversy00:14:47
Had that been done and had other acts been done and then speak strongly on human rights, it would have been more effective.
But there is none and there is no strategy.
Everything that this government does from its selfies and its socks and its trade war is simply virtual signaling to get what I'll call low-hanging votes in Canada, these patriotic votes.
And it's a reflection of how poor this government is doing.
Yeah, what a laugh.
And Christy Freeland keeps boasting that she was voted Diplomat of the Year by some foreign policy magazine.
What a joke.
Manny, it's always great to catch up with you.
I really enjoy our talks.
And by the way, there's such fan favorites.
People love, love, love it when you come on the show.
We'll obviously put this outside the paywall on the internet because people, I think people listen to what you have to say and they say, I haven't heard that point of view anywhere else in the mainstream media.
So I think you're becoming a bit of a fan favorite here at the Rebel, by the way, Manny.
Thank you a lot.
That's right.
All right, take care, my friend.
Take care.
There's one of our favorite guys, Manny Montenegrino.
He's the president of Think Sharp, and he joined us today via Skype.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Welcome back.
Well, the United States has a deal maker as a president.
And really, there's no tougher place to make deals than the property wars, the developer wars, the financier wars of Manhattan real estate.
You can see the deal making when Trump engages in bringsmanship with everyone from China to the European Union to Canada itself.
The guy knows how to negotiate.
Compare that to our leader, whose negotiation is basically his track record in business is basically giving Bombardier whatever they ask for.
And so it is that when Justin Trudeau thought he would solve the problem of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline Project by buying it, he got, well, he got what's a word to say that's not profane.
I don't think he did the best negotiation job possible.
Joining us now to talk about the new facts that have come forward about Justin Trudeau and his deal with Kinder Morgan is our friend Lauren Gunter, a columnist with the Edmonton Sun.
You know, I was thinking about a whole bunch of words there, but none of them were suitable for a family-friendly program, Lauren.
Let me put it this way.
We see news filed by Kinder Morgan that all of a sudden this pipeline project that Justin Trudeau bought just a few weeks ago, just in the last few weeks, the project is now one year delayed from what it was, and it is $1.9 billion more expensive than it was just a few weeks ago.
Don't tell me they didn't know that when they did a deal with Trudeau.
Don't tell me that wasn't known.
Yeah, it had to be.
They at least had to have a sense of that.
I think the thing, I mean, both of those bother me, the fact that it's going to be delayed by a full year and the fact that it's going to cost taxpayers an extra $2 billion because they can't unload this white elephant that they bought, which is only a white elephant because they won't stand up to BC and get it built.
Otherwise, they wouldn't have had to put a nickel into this thing.
I guess I said there's two things about me.
I guess that's the third thing that bothers me.
Probably the most basic thing that bothers me is that this did not need a nickel of public money.
What it needed was the Trudeau government to stand up and say, this is a federal matter.
It's been federally approved.
We will do what we need to do legally and in terms of construction to get this built.
But they won't do that.
They could have passed a motion in the House of Commons.
They could have passed a law in the House of Commons asserting their federal jurisdiction according to the Constitution over interprovincial movement of goods, which is clearly what a pipeline is.
They didn't do that.
Instead, in a desperation move, they went out and they paid $4.5 billion for a pipeline that does exist and works quite well and for a pipeline that doesn't exist.
The twinning of the Trans Mountain.
And so those annoy me.
And then, of course, we knew, suspected, anyway, you and I have talked about this many times before, suspected that they were never going to get a piece of pipe in the ground this construction season, despite the fact in late May when they bought this thing, that was all the hurrah.
Oh, pick up your shovels.
Rachel Notley said, there are going to be jobs right away.
And the feds said, oh, my goodness, construction will begin next week, meaning the first week of June.
And then slowly things trickle out through June and July that, well, yeah, it's probably not going to happen this year.
And finally, then Ian Anderson, who's the head of Kinder Morgan Canada, says at an Indigenous pipeline blessing ceremony about two weeks ago, yeah, there's not going to be any pipe in the ground this year.
We'll be lucky if we get some in early next year.
That was always, the feds knew that all along.
I am absolutely certain that they knew that right from the start.
The extra $2. billion dollars in construction costs, I think you're right.
I think they probably knew that too.
But for sure, they knew they were not going to get the pipeline started this year.
But they bought it anyway so that they could have these glorious announcements and the provincial government in Alberta could have these fabulous announcements.
I'm sure you remember that ceremony that Rachel Notley had.
It was a beautiful day on the plaza that overlooks the legislature.
She brought her cabinet out and they all stood around behind her and they were vibrating with excitement.
Oh my goodness, it's so thrilling.
We've got a pipeline.
It's going to be built.
Now we can win re-election.
Nothing can stop us.
And of course, it was all hogwash.
Yeah.
You know, politicians can lie and exaggerate, and so can lobbyists, and so can activists.
But when you run a publicly traded company, you must disclose the facts that are material to investors.
That's what the whole securities and exchange regulator is about.
And I am in no way saying that Kinder Morgan has misled investors.
I'm saying sort of the opposite.
Now this pipeline is, I think, out of the hands of a regulated company that has a legal and fiduciary duty to tell the truth.
I mean, public companies have to proactively disclose their worries.
Here's the risk.
They have to lead with their chin, so to speak, to warn investors.
Politicians are sort of the opposite, aren't they, Lauren?
Now that this thing is owned by Justin Trudeau, we're going to have the worst of all worlds.
We're going to have a politically partisan owner that no longer has the SEC requirement to tell the truth about it.
Yeah.
And we're lucky that in one way, that the sale hasn't officially occurred yet.
Because if it had already taken place officially, it's very likely then the feds would not have filed the same documents with the SEC that Kinder Morgan did yesterday.
And we would not know this unless we went to the trouble of filing an access to information.
Lauren, it would be blacked out.
I can assure you.
It's just blacked out.
And it would take months, months and months and months.
But let me ask you something that I feel that this issue that I'm about to put to you, Lauren, has not properly been aired out anywhere.
And you tell me if I'm misunderstanding things or you tell me if it has been clarified.
But there's something about this that has frustrated me ever since the idea that this was bought by the government.
Here's the thing.
As you alluded to, the existing Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline was built more than half a century ago and it's been happily pumping away ever since.
You know, it's great.
That is what the liberals bought.
Something that was non-controversial.
Most people don't even know it's there because it's buried.
It's just there.
And according to various bank estimates, Trudeau overpaid by more than a billion.
But that's for the one that's in the ground right now, Kinder Morgan, Transmountain.
But this new pipeline, the twinning of it, that's called the Transmountain expansion.
That's what just jacked up $1.9 billion in price.
So the $4.5 billion that taxpayers have already spent was just to buy the existing one underground and we overpaid by a billion.
So we haven't even mustered what was until recently $7.4 billion and now it's $9.3 billion.
And here's my question to you, Lauren.
Where's the $9.3 billion going to come from?
It's going to come from taxpayers.
It's clearly going to come from taxpayers.
$9.3 billion?
Well, okay.
If you're asking me, is it ever going to be spent?
that's a different matter was it actually going to be raised and and put into the like i'm not i'm not sure I think this is just a stopgap measure to get them past the federal election next fall.
In about 15 months, we're supposed to have another federal election.
There are 18 liberal seats in BC.
There are four in Alberta, and they will not win any but one of them.
There's one they might win in Edmonton.
But my guess is that the Liberals will be wiped out of their four in Alberta.
So they have to really be careful not to lose the 18 in BC because they're not as popular in the ring around Toronto as they used to be.
They're not as growing as fast in Quebec as they'd hoped they would be.
They're solid still in Atlantic Canada, but they're starting to do these calculations.
And they realized that, you know, if they lost six or eight seats or 10 seats in BC, they would be in real danger of losing the government to the conservative.
And so I think what they've done with this pipeline is I think they bought it so they could have all these handsprings and huzzahs about how wonderful it is and how they're going ahead with this, but they're not actually going to do anything about it because they really don't want to anger the environmentalists in the lower mainland of BC who vote for liberal candidates, whose candidates they really, really need to keep their majority in the House of Commons.
And so I think we're going to see maybe some pipeline in Alberta next year, but the chances of us seeing any construction in BC until after the federal election, pretty remote.
And once it's over, where's the pressure coming from to have the liberals push this through?
Yeah.
You know, let me put to you my speculative theory.
And I think I'm entitled to have a speculative theory because...
I just offered you mine.
Yeah.
Well, because we have been kept in the dark and shoveled manure, as they say about mushrooms.
My theory is the Liberal government overpaid for the existing Kinder Morgan Transmountain pipeline by a billion knowingly as a form of shut up money to Kinder Morgan.
They said, look, Kinder Morgan, you know you're in for a world of pain.
Let's take the existing asset as an excuse to actually give you a billion dollar apology check.
And then, so take your billion and count yourself lucky, great rate of return.
And then you just play along with this pantomime as we pretend we were going to actually throw another 10 billion behind this thing.
And we're just going to talk about it.
And you will be shut up because you're paid off now.
So be a good boy and go along with this ruse.
And they're not actually going to ever do it.
And soon we'll, oh, it's delayed to 2022.
It's delayed to 2023.
And no one will actually ever say the truth, which is they just paid $4.5 billion to shut this pipeline project down.
And it's all a lie.
Yep.
I mean, I've speculated on that too.
That is entirely possible.
That's entirely possible what they've done.
I mean, there are other ways of constructing this.
And maybe, you know, there are different ways of interpreting it.
But that's as good an explanation as any, that they wanted to make a problem go away, and they threw $4.5 billion of your money and mine at it.
Yeah, it's so very frustrating.
I would say that I spoke at the top of our interview about a dealmaker named Donald Trump.
That Keystone XL pipeline that he brought back exhumed from the grave that Obama and Hillary Clinton had killed.
I predict that will be the only major pipeline that Alberta gets.
And that does not get rid of the major problem that Alberta had, which is that the Americans are our only buyers, and they know that.
So they will give us a discount price.
They won't pay us the world price.
We need to get to tide water, as everybody keeps saying, either in BC or in New Brunswick, hopefully at some point in the future, to both places.
And at that point, then we open up the world market.
We open up competition for the Americans to buy our oil.
And the Americans then have to pay a more proper price.
Right now, as of, well, yesterday, I didn't check today, but yesterday, the gap between the world price for Wet's Texas Intermediate and the price for Western Canadian Select, which is what we're selling, was almost $30 a barrel.
It's appalling.
And that's not going to change with Keystone XL.
I'm happy we're going to get Keystone XL.
Don't get me wrong.
But we need something else.
And that is dependent on Ottawa and the Alberta government.
And they're not pushing for it.
You know, let me throw one last thing in here.
The Saudi Canada spat.
Saudi Arabia still exports oil to the Atlantic, which is outrageous to me.
But the Energy East pipeline would have solved that if the Saudi oil and maybe Algerian oil and other OPEC oil is cut off.
You know who's going to replace that, Lauren?
American oil shipped in from North Dakota by rail.
So we, if we had that Energy East pipeline, we would be able to fill that largest refinery in Canada.
The bigger refinery.
And not only that, we would be able to take a principled stand on foreign affairs without cutting off our noses.
Subscribers and Subscriptions00:04:32
Yeah.
It's so frustrating that that Saudi boycott of Canada, if they cut off their oil shipments, I don't know if they will.
The beneficiary of that will be Americans selling oil to Canada by train.
That may be Venezuelans too, but yeah, for sure Americans.
Yeah, that's what happens when you have a drama teacher instead of a deal maker, isn't it?
This is what happens when you have a first-year poli-sci class masquerading as a cabinet.
Yeah, you're so right.
It's so very frustrating.
Lauren, thanks for fighting the good fight.
I understand you've got a column on this subject coming out in the Edmonton Sun tomorrow.
We'll keep our eyes peeled for that.
Very good.
All right.
Thanks very much.
That's our friend Lauren Gunter.
He's with the Edmonton Sun, and I look forward to seeing what he has to say in tomorrow's Edmonton Sun newspaper.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
On my monologue yesterday about Alex Jones and InfoWars being purged from the Internet, Peter writes, the left demands those they do not like to be banned and in literally the same breath claim those on the right are fascists.
Banning people for saying things you do not like is fascism.
101.
Well look, free speech only matters if you're allowed to say things that people don't like.
That's what the free part means.
It's free from other considerations like what someone else thinks.
If you're only saying things that never challenge other values or never step on anyone's toes, it's not actually free speech.
Free speech indicates it is higher than another value, like not hurting someone's feelings.
It is legitimate to say we don't want to hurt feelings.
But freedom of speech says if those two are in conflict, the free speech wins.
Tammy writes, Orwellian censorship and deplatforming has only gotten started.
Ministry of Truth to Follow.
I listened to Fall Joseph Watson's reports and found Alex Jones to be too much and annoying.
I strongly disagree with his purge in principle.
Alex Jones is an acquired taste.
I think he's theatrical.
He reminds me a little bit of Howard Stern.
You know who I'm talking about, the shock jock who just, he'll say any joke to make anyone uncomfortable.
He's very sexual in his jokes.
He's far less political.
You know, people would listen to Howard Stern.
His fans would listen to him and his enemies would listen to him even more.
And both have the same reason.
I can hardly wait to see what he says next.
I think that's okay.
I think that's America.
And I wish there was a little bit more Canada, too.
Tyson writes, Alum hit the nail on the head.
The globalists think people are too stupid to make their own decisions.
Yeah, isn't that the truth?
I mean, Justin Trudeau thinks we're smart enough to vote for him.
Only 39% of Canadians did.
But we're not smart enough to make other decisions in the meantime.
And I mentioned Justin Trudeau because Gerald Butts, his principal secretary and his nanny, hates the Rebel with a passion and has called for the banning of fake news, which means conservative news to him, and to Twitter accounts he doesn't like.
I think that what they're doing to Alex Jones today, they will do to us next.
By the way, I was just looking at our YouTube subscribers, as you know.
We don't get any money from our YouTube subscriptions.
It's a free subscription, so it's not that valuable, but it's a measurement of how many people like to see us, because you can unsubscribe at any time.
Every day, some people sign up and some people unsign up.
And you know what?
We are coming up on 1 million subscribers.
In fact, last I checked, I think we were at like 980,000, and we're growing by about 1,000 a day.
Which makes sense.
We're about three years old, so it's about 1,000 a day on average since we were born.
That suggests to me that sometime in August, maybe September, we will hit a million YouTube subscribers.
What does that mean?
It actually means absolutely nothing other than the symbolic odometer flip, like in your car when you hit a million miles, maybe.
And that's a sign that there are a million people in Canada and around the world who want to see what we have to say.
Not all of them agree with us.
Some of them don't pay much attention to us.
Some of them hate us.
But a million people want what the Rebel has to say.
Justin Trudeau is not amongst them.
Alex Jones had two and a half million subscribers.
They shut him down.
I hope that when they come for us, my friends, that you will be there for us to help us survive.