Ezra Levant exposes media bias in the New Mexico desert compound case, where 11 malnourished children—biological relatives of Siraj ibn Wahaj, a Muslim cleric tied to the 1993 WTC bombing plot—were found alongside alleged school shooter training materials, yet CBC and AP downplayed extremism. Parallels drawn to YouTube’s climate skeptic censorship and Canada’s "Aboriginal reconciliation" movement reveal how symbolic gestures overlook systemic issues like Indigenous unemployment and poverty, while activists prioritize divisive identity politics over unity. History’s selective rewriting risks eroding progress by replacing accountability with performative outrage. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a training camp for school shooters is discovered in New Mexico, and the media party covers it up.
It's August 10th, and you're watching the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Look at this headline here.
It's from the CBC, of course, but it's the same in a hundred other media.
Man says body found at New Mexico compound is his missing grandson.
That sounds really sad.
A missing grandson is found dead.
That's a very sad story, and it's even sadder when you read some more.
Here, let me continue.
Search for boy led police to desert site where remains, 11 hungry children discovered.
Wow, 11 more hungry kids are found.
And that grandpa is sad, I bet.
I wonder if the other 11 kids were his grandchildren, too.
Was the desert site where they were found, was the boy's father there, you know, the grandpa's son?
If so, that's a weird way to write a headline, don't you think?
To talk about the grandfather-grandson connection, but to leave out everything in the middle.
Here, let's read some more from this story.
A severely disabled Georgia boy, who authorities say was kidnapped by his father and marked for an exorcism, was found buried at the ramshackle compound in the New Mexico desert that has been the focus of investigators for the past week.
The toddler's grandfather said Thursday.
Wow, that is a sad story and weird.
But it looks like the father is the center of the story.
Actually, doesn't it?
I mean, weird that the grandpa is styled as the center of things so far.
Okay, let's read some more of the story.
New Mexico authorities, however, said they had yet to identify the remains discovered Monday, and prosecutors said they were awaiting word on the cause of death before deciding on any charges.
Hmm.
Okay.
So it might not have been a suspicious death then.
That's the question the journalists raised.
So I guess we know why the grandpa is sad anyways.
His grandson was found dead.
But we don't know if anything else was odd, although it sounds a little weird, those 11 hungry kids.
I mean, it's often the CBC would run a story about a grandpa in America whose grandson may or may not have been killed.
It's weird to run a story like that in Canada's national broadcaster.
I wonder if we're getting the whole story here.
Okay, let's read some more and find out.
The boy, Abdul Ghani Wahaj, would have turned four on Monday.
Prosecutors said he was snatched from his mother in December in Jonesboro, Georgia, near Atlanta.
Okay, now there's some drama.
The boy was snatched from his mother back in December.
I don't know if snatched means kidnapped.
I mean, it's vague, isn't it?
Are the mom and dad divorced?
If a mom takes a boy away, is that snatching?
I mean, was this a kidnapping?
Snatching isn't a word in the criminal code.
This is a weird story, isn't it?
But if you're like me, when weird stories about crime are afoot and things seem to be written to conceal the truth rather than reveal the truth, you notice things like a name, Abdul Ghani Wahaj.
It's a Muslim name.
Now, why have they named the boy?
But they haven't yet named the dad or the grandpa.
Especially since the story was built around the grandfather, right?
Okay, let's keep reading together.
The search for him led authorities to New Mexico, where 11 hungry children and a youngster's remains were found in recent days at a filthy compound shielded by old tires, wooden pallets, and an earthen wall studded with broken glass.
Okay, now this is really getting spooky, isn't it?
I mean, a compound with 11 hungry children, and it was surrounded by a wall studded with broken glass.
That sounds really weird.
Don't you think that's a little more salient, a little more central to the story than a grandpa being sad?
11 kids were found hungry in a desert compound surrounded by homemade glass studded walls?
Who wrote this weird story?
Why have they buried the lead here?
Let me keep going.
The missing boy's grandfather, Siraj Wahaj, a Muslim cleric who leads a well-known New York City mosque, told reporters he had learned from other family members that the remains were his grandsons.
Oh my, Siraj Wahaj, who runs a famous New York City mosque.
So it's not just a grandpa, is it?
He's a famous Muslim leader.
I'm going to come back to that in a moment.
Let's read the rest of the story.
I'm reading line by line.
This was, again, written by Associated Press, published in the CBC.
So this story was picked up in a lot of places and run word for word.
Let me just speed read through some more here.
I should tell you, I am not skipping a single word in this story.
I haven't missed anything.
I'm not hiding anything.
I'm just telling you exactly how this story is written line by line.
Here, let's keep going.
The Imam, that's the grandpa, the Imam said he did not know the cause of death.
Whoever is responsible, then that person should be held accountable, Wahaj said.
Yes, we must find the criminal.
I mean, again, isn't it his own son who allegedly snatched the boy?
But maybe someone else did something to him.
But that's not known yet by police, is it?
Does anything in this story make sense so far?
Why don't we have the name of the dad?
That's weird.
Okay, here, I'm going to keep going.
In an interview with WSB-TV in Atlanta, the boy's mother also called for justice as she described how her life had been taken from her after her son was abducted by his father, which she said was out of character for him.
She and Siraj ibn Wahaj, the Imam's son, had been married almost 14 years.
I wasn't able to save my son, Hakima Ramsey told the television station.
Are they still married?
It's not clear yet.
They say taken now, not snatched, not kidnapped.
Did she call the police about this?
No one knows yet.
The CBC doesn't tell us yet.
But finally, we know the dad's name, Siraj ibn Wuhaj, the same name as his dad.
Why are we reading about this story in Canada at all?
Let's keep going because this is a lesson in the media.
That's what we're doing here.
In the CBC and the Associated Press.
Let me keep going in this story here, okay?
A little bit extreme is the headline, the next sub-headline.
A little bit extreme.
So the very top headline in the story is about a sad grandpa.
And then it's about a snatched kid.
Then only later do we hear about a Muslim mosque.
And now, deep down in the story, under some more confusing details, the word extreme makes its first appearance.
Extreme what, I wonder?
Well, they don't say yet, and they don't say for a while.
Here, let's keep reading some more.
In Facebook messages, Naima Rashid, Ramsey's sister-in-law, told the Associated Press that she too was surprised by Wahaj's actions, saying he had always valued the closeness of their family.
Rashid also recalled from Atlanta the deep bond between the boy and his mother, who couldn't leave the room without him crying.
While the boy could not walk, Rashid remembers that he smiled and laughed as he watched his cousins play.
Of course, this is a hard time for her, Rashid said of the mother.
Ramsey, who is from Morocco, filed for divorce in December.
The same month, neighbors say Siraj ibn Wahaj and others arrived in Amalia, New Mexico.
Okay, so they did file for divorce.
So maybe it was a kidnapping, but kidnapping.
But so far, I don't know what that extreme word was referring to.
I know that there was a deep bond between a boy and his mother, and they valued the closeness of their family.
That's apparently important news.
I guess it's news that a four-year-old boy has a deep bond with his mom.
But that was, keep going here.
That was important for the CBC to put in that story.
Not sure what that extreme part was about.
Hey, does anybody know what this story is actually reporting yet?
I mean, we're halfway through it.
Do you know what this story is about?
How many people do you think would still be reading this weird ramble?
Okay, let's keep going.
A Georgia arrest warrant accused him of kidnapping his child.
Authorities said the father at some point told his wife he wanted to perform an exorcism on the boy who suffers seizures and requires constant attention because of a lack of oxygen and blood flow at birth.
Okay, so he was accused of kidnapping.
That's weird that it only comes out now after they said snatched and taken.
He told his wife he wanted to perform an exorcism.
That's really weird, don't you think?
And weird that you'd bury a fact like that deep down in the story.
But look at this.
We're almost at the end of the story here.
It's almost an afterthought.
Look at this.
The child's father was among five adults arrested on suspicion of child abuse in the raid at the compound.
In court papers, prosecutors also said Wahaj had been training children there to carry out school shootings.
He was training children to carry out school shootings.
This was a training camp for mass murderers.
Now look at the headline, right from the very top of the story one more time.
Man says body found at New Mexico compound is his missing grandson.
Is that the news here?
Or the sub-headline there?
Search for boy led police to desert site where remains 11 hungry children were discovered.
Is the fact that they were hungry the most interesting detail about this story, or the fact that they were being trained to be school shooters?
Let me keep reading the story.
Speaking at his Brooklyn mosque, the elder Wahaj said he had no knowledge of any such training.
Oh, it sounds to me it sounds crazy, but I don't know, he said.
I make no judgments yet because we don't know.
What a wise old grandfather.
He surely racked with pain because of the loss of his grandson.
They sound so close, but he's very wise to counsel us not to rush to judgment.
I mean, yeah, sounds crazy, but we just don't know.
Let me read some more.
The Imam's mosque has attracted a number of radicals over the years, including a man who later helped bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.
In a video posted Thursday on Facebook, mosque spokesperson Ali Abdul Karim Judan called the case a domestic situation and vehemently denied it had anything to do with extremism because you know he's really plugged into that family.
But even that first part in 1993, I mean, that's literally 25 years ago, so that's probably nothing, right?
It's very unfair to assume there's anything wrong by it.
This is just all a domestic situation.
Stop even reading this story.
Let me read a little more, though, even though they're trying their best to make us stop reading.
None of the charges had anything to do with anybody teaching anybody shooting to commit acts of terrorism or to go in and shoot up any school, he said.
Because it's a Muslim and the circumstances that are surrounding their situation, they want to change the narrative.
The elder Wahaj said all 11 of the children, ages 1 to 15, were either his biological grandchildren or members of his family through marriage.
Holy cow.
So we are deep, in this story.
And only now are we getting to what the story is about.
Siraj ibn Wahaj has a compound.
with 11 of his own children.
And police say he was training them to be school shooters.
But the grandpa also called Siraj Wahaj, he says it's nothing, don't rush to judgment.
And he has a spokesman saying it's got nothing to do with extremism.
Let me keep reading here.
I'm very concerned with the condition of my grandchildren, he said.
He said he didn't understand why his son had taken the family and disappeared into the desert, but suggested that psychiatric disorder was to blame.
Of course it always is, isn't it?
My son can be maybe a little bit extreme, he said, though he added that he never thought he was extreme enough to kill anyone.
High-strung, he said.
Extreme, eh?
Finally, that word is explained.
High-strung.
You know high-strung people.
Oh, that guy, he drinks too much coffee.
He's too much go, go, go.
He's high-strung.
Now, I'm going to stop now, okay?
I mean, there are weird evasions and euphemisms in this story.
It just gets weirder.
But besides more weird excusology, they did finally report that there were five other adults at the compound too.
That's pretty weird.
You know what they didn't put in this story published by the CBC, written by the Associated Press?
That grandpa, that lonely soul, so worried about his grandson, who thinks his son might be a bit extreme, but it's probably mental illness.
You know, he really wouldn't hurt a fly.
Do you know who Siraj Wahaj is?
Let's check in with a real newspaper, the New York Post.
Here's a story.
1993 WTC plotter in Mike Meet.
Okay, what does that even mean?
That's a funny headline.
That's that trademark New York tabloid style.
WTC is World Trade Center.
As you may know, in 1993, Muslim terrorists tried to blow up the towers with a truck bomb at the bottom.
It was a trial run for the 9-11 attacks eight years later.
They tried a truck bomb, it didn't work, so then they flew jets into it.
Okay, so that's the WTC, and the mic in the headline refers to Mike Bloomberg, then the mayor of New York.
So this was a 2009 story.
So to the New York Post, this was a scandal.
Michael Bloomberg, the mayor, was meeting with a plotter from the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
Here, let me read from a real news source, not the fake news of the CBC.
Here's from the New York Post.
A controversial Imam who was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was among a group of Muslim leaders invited yesterday to a meeting with Mayor Bloomberg at City Hall.
Siraj Wahaj has defended the convicted World Trade Center bomb plotters, called the FBI and CIA the real terrorists, and said he hopes all Americans eventually become Muslim.
Now, so Siraja Wahaj himself was not convicted of terrorism, but he was a suspect.
Black Swan Grief00:04:22
He was an unindicted co-conspirator.
He wasn't convicted of anything.
He didn't really disabuse the notion, though, did he?
He called the U.S. the real terrorists and says everyone should be Muslim.
Do you think that's a relevant point that maybe should have been added to the CBC story, that he was an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center terrorist attack?
Do you remember how the CBC described him?
Here, let me read that part again from the CBC story.
The Imam's Mosque has attracted a number of radicals over the years, including a man who later helped bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.
Yeah, no, no, no.
The Imam himself, Siraj Wahaj, that friendly grandpa, he was an unindicted co-conspirator in the terrorist attack.
He was also actually a character witness for a terrorist, but the CBC says, oh no, some other guy might have done it.
This is just a friendly grandpa who's so concerned.
The CBC withheld that key fact from you.
The whole story is weird.
Would you not agree?
The whole story was unreporting, anti-reporting, disreporting.
Look at this TV clip in the local news.
Look at this.
Here's a tweet.
Heartbreak for a mother of little boy kidnapped from Metro Atlanta.
His father was arrested at compound in New Mexico.
Remains of a small child believed to be the missing boy were also found.
Hear more of our exclusive interview at 5.44.
Oh, is that what the story is about?
Here, watch the video for a second.
I was able to save my son's life.
I'm sure it is very sad.
I'm sure she means those tears.
After all, thanks to the CBC's reporting, we know that she loved her son.
So yes, that is part of the story, to be sure.
But is that really the most newsworthy fact here?
that a plotter of the 1993 World Trade Center, a terrorist attack, his son has a compound in the New Mexico desert training 11 grandchildren of the terrorist plotter to be school shooters.
Is the mother's grief and the grandfather's grief, is that the real news here?
You bet it is when Islam is involved.
You know, there is nothing that the media party obsesses about more than a school shooting.
And with good reason, a school shooting is terrifying.
It's every parent's nightmare.
It's so emotional, it's a way to criticize firearms ownership, isn't it?
Even we Canadians know the names of famous schools that were shot, Parkland, Sandy Hook, Columbine.
You could even say the media lusts for school shootings.
They certainly cover them with lust, but not in this case.
Isn't that funny?
An entire diabolical school training camp that, according to police, was literally a training camp for school shootings.
But you really couldn't even get that information until you waded through paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of weird unreporting about the grandpa and a young disabled child, all completely irrelevant to the story.
And the real facts, the real identity of this terrorist-loving family, were hidden.
It reminds me of the coverage of Faisal Hussain, the Muslim mass shooter in Toronto, the other day where police withheld his identity from the media for a day.
Even after ISIS claimed responsibility, the media said, no, definitely not a Muslim terrorist.
Imagine that.
There's something the media lusts for even more than a school shooting or the bizarre, novel, terrifying black swan, an event so impossible to imagine, like 9-11 itself was a black swan, something unthinkable until it happened.
The black swan of a school for children being taught to murder other children.
A school in the desert in New Mexico.
An amazing, shocking, unfathomable story.
A story that would be lusted after by journalists if it was a white guy.
But if it was a Muslim guy, the son of a terrorist plotter no less, well then, let's just not report it, other than that sad, sad story of the disabled boy and his sad, sad mom who really loved him.
Debate Over Global Warming Censored00:10:31
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
You just can't trust a word the mainstream media says.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, this week we've been talking a lot about political censorship on the internet, especially about Alex Jones of InfoWars.
But it's not just controversialists like that.
It's major mainstream debates such as the theory of man-made global warming and what to do about it, if anything.
And here's what scares me.
It's not just radical, troublemaking entertainer journalists who are being censored.
And I respect Alex Jones' right to have his free speech, of course.
Now, YouTube is positively meddling in any videos that bring a skeptical point of view to the theory of man-made global warming.
Let me show you this image here.
This is a video by the prestigious Prager University.
It's Richard Lindzen, who is one of the most thoughtful thinkers and speakers about global warming.
And you can see appended underneath the video is a rebuttal, a rebuttal to his thesis put there by YouTube.
And joining us now via Skype is our friend Mark Morano to explain this craziness.
Mark, this isn't actual censorship.
They're not knocking this video off the internet.
They're just putting a corporate rebuttal to it underneath it.
I've never seen that before.
Yeah, this is all part of a recent, or a longgoing campaign, but recently starting to show impact by the climate activists to censor and shut down the climate debate on social media on alternative forms of communication and what they're doing on YouTube, as you just pointed out.
It's YouTube sourcing, are you ready for this, Ezra?
Wikipedia as the authority to refute MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, who's done hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and has been at the forefront of the entire climate change debate for 35 plus years.
So this is how YouTube, you can just imagine it now, Ezra.
It's probably some, you know, some teenager in a t-shirt working part-time for YouTube and they're posting up a video, but this is very high up in the corporate offices.
My debate with Bill Nye, which is between one and two million views from CNN a few years ago, has now been slimed, so to speak.
It now has this same disclaimer.
Why?
They couldn't let Bill Nye speak for himself, but because it features me, a skeptic.
Anything that features anyone who challenges any part of the climate change narrative put forth by Al Gore and the United Nations will now get this YouTube disclaimer explanation fact check, if you will.
That's so weird.
I mean, the fact that you were debating Bill Nye shows that there were two sides of the story and Bill Nye can make his case as best as he can or if he didn't do well.
The fact that YouTube still came in to literally tilt the scales, to put their finger on the scale in a debate is crazy.
I got to, I mean, I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask you anyways.
If they put their rebuttal under Professor Richard Lindzen, like a world-class expert on global warming, who's a skeptic, do they put a similar disclaimer under the pro-global warming videos?
I mean, I will acknowledge that there is a debate about the theory of man-made global warming.
There is a debate on what to do about it, if anything, and how to do it.
It's a controversy, which means there's another side of the story.
I think I'm right, but I acknowledge that there's another point of view.
Does Google at least acknowledge that there are two points of view?
Do they at least do they are they even-handed in their rebuttals, or is this just them weighing in and saying, nope, if you're wrong, we're going to tell people he's wrong.
Yeah, no, this is there's no even-handed.
In other words, Al Gore, John Kerry, President Obama are not going to get these same disclaimers at this time.
You know why?
Because they agree with the alleged consensus.
They're not in the wrong.
So, YouTube does not feel the need to put their fact check up.
And by the way, the odd thing about this is YouTube, whoever's behind this policy at YouTube, you can just imagine the staff meeting, they don't even understand the climate debate.
The actual disclaimer that they're putting up, sourcing Wikipedia, which by the way, Wikipedia's climate change pages change about 100 times a day between the activists fighting and just constantly changing stuff and putting in nonsense.
It's completely the most unreliable source on climate you can get, number one.
And number two, the statement that they're actually issuing to refute me, Richard Lindsay, and any other skeptic who dare question it, is that the earth has warmed over the last hundred plus years or so.
And to their mind, a warming earth equals man-caused, catastrophic, and we must do something about it.
And that to me is shocking.
So, their idea of refuting a skeptic is to say the temperature's gone up over 100 years.
And there's not a single skeptic who will dispute that because we've, of course, our temperatures have warmed since about 1850 when the end of the little ice age.
So, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire climate debate.
And then there's an outrageous source of Wikipedia, and then there's the outrageous selection process of who they're picking to give this disclaimer/slash fact check to.
Yeah, and Wikipedia, I mean, a lot of people know what Wikipedia is, but just to restate the obvious, what's so wonderful and terrible about Wikipedia is that anyone in the world can make an edit on it.
Anyone can just go and change things.
Now, it could be changed back and there's sort of battles, but it literally is not authoritative at all because an infant, a cat that is typing on a keyboard can change Wikipedia because that's just the nature of it.
That's what makes it so amazing: you're tapping into the aggregate wisdom or folly of the world.
It's not even that they're relying on some expert, some Nobel Prize expert.
They're relying on gossip, rumor.
It's as if someone was going to the YouTube comments section, some anonymous troll said something.
That's what's so laughable is to rely on a universally editable source as some sort of corrective authority.
That's just dumb.
It is, and it's not just YouTube.
Facebook, I did a video that's now approaching 7 million views.
And the Grist magazine, the environment, they're calling it the video has gone viral.
Media Matters for America has now said Facebook has a climate denier problem.
And they're using my video of 6.5 million views as a poster child to go after Mark Zuckerberg.
How are they going after Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook?
Mark Zuckerberg is a liberal.
Mark Zuckerberg supports Al Gore, the United Nations Climate View.
He's done and said all the right things about global warming.
His sin is he's allowed climate deniers to have posts and videos up on Facebook.
And they've actually named Mark Zuckerberg, the Media Matters for America, funded by George Soros, climate misinformer of the year for last year for allowing climate skeptics to appear on the Facebook platform.
That is how insane this is.
You can be a climate activist in good standing, but if your business model allows for open debate of any kind, you are the misinformer of the year, which, by the way, I've won in previous years.
And it's a big deal.
Al Gore, when I won the award, Al Gore touted the award that I won this award.
It's supposed to be a big dishonor.
Of course, I welcomed it, but they're going after, liberals are going after liberals in order to stop Facebook.
So you have YouTube and Facebook now shutting down climate change.
You know what?
And this is the slippery slope we talk about.
This is why we have to fight for freedom of speech in the first ditch, not the last ditch.
You got to fight for the Alex Joneses of the world because once they take out Alex Jones, next is the bright parts of the world, the rebels of the world.
And next is just even literally PhDs in climate science like Richard Lindsay.
And it wouldn't shock me if climatepot.com one day were just simply kicked off of Facebook because of left-wing pressure groups.
Freedom of speech, I think, is a central issue of our day.
And I believe that deplatforming and censorship has actually become the central value of the progressive left.
Mark, I hope you fight back.
And I hope that others do too, because they're coming for you today.
They're coming for the rest of us tomorrow.
Thank you.
Yeah, and the thing is that they want to go back to that era of three network TVs and PBS.
And that ended about 1995, officially, really, with the internet and all the cable news and the social media being born a decade later.
They can't go back, I don't think, but they're going to do everything they can.
I think there's too many outlets, too many sources.
And if YouTube does censor, if Facebook does censor, I think there will be entrepreneurs that come up and start giving alternatives.
I don't think the people will stand for it.
We're no longer in the three-party media, if you will, of the three networks.
We don't have to tolerate this anymore.
Well, I hope you're right.
As we've talked about with other guests in recent days, it's one thing to talk about competition, but as in the case of standard oil, sometimes it's just impossible to start a new Facebook, start a new oil refinery.
I don't know if there's a role for a trust buster like Teddy Roosevelt.
We'll have to save that conversation for another day.
But thanks for bringing this warning with you today.
Great to see you again, Mark.
Use of Language Matters00:05:04
Thank you, Ezra.
I appreciate it.
All right, there you have it.
Mark Morano.
He's the boss of climatepot.com.
Very troubling that YouTube would put in their corporate rebuttals, just slap it on anything they don't like, as if some voice on high was saying, don't believe this.
I find that very troubling.
And I'm absolutely certain our Rebel videos will be tagged with that next.
Stay with us.
It's more Ahead on the Rebel.
Welcome back.
Well, as you know, the statue of John A. MacDonald on the steps of the City Hall in Victoria will be taken down.
No one less than the mayor herself says it's an important thing to do in the name of Aboriginal reconciliation.
I only wonder when the name of the city, Victoria, will be changed, of course, named after the queen.
And when you think about it, British Columbia is the name of the entire province, and we'd better get rid of that racist obsolescence as well.
I'm only half joking.
I think we are denuding our country of its history.
Joining me now to talk about this is our friend John Gormley, who's the host on Rawl Cole Radio in Saskatchewan on 650 CKOM and 980 CJME.
John, great to see you again.
Thanks for being on the show.
Thank you, Ezra.
Good to see you.
You know, one of the things that gets me about this historical destruction, it feels Stalinist to wipe out someone from history like those erasing, when Stalin would erase someone from an old photograph and they had fallen out of favor.
Whatever flaws in our past, surely we shouldn't wipe it clean and not even learn from it.
Surely everyone, especially the founder of our great country, should be studied, not unpersoned.
That's my thoughts.
What are yours?
Well, my thoughts are exactly yours on this.
The doctrine of what they call presentism is really rearing its head here.
And this is where we take a snapshot today of values, social mores, even the law.
And so through this present lens, we look back and then we go look for things that don't comport with her values today.
Then, of course, if you weigh in a whole bunch of political correctness and postmodernism, then we can also get very offended.
You know, the mayor in Victoria, and you know what she was up to because on her campaign page, she's got a snippet of Hansard, which is the record of the House of Commons from the 1880s, where John A. MacDonald goes on at great length about, you know, the savages, referring to Indigenous people as savages, which again was not a term unused by many people in the 19th century.
So again, using this presentism, it's pretty easy to pick John A. MacDonald as low-hanging fruit because, of course, he was the architect of the failed residential schools program.
Yeah, you know what?
The use of language is particularly interesting.
I mean, is it African American?
Is it Afro-American?
Is it person of color?
Is it colored person?
All these fine nuances.
Each one of those names I've just said there was fashionable in its time.
There's a great charity called the NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
There's something called the United Negro College Fund.
Obviously, these are pro-black organizations.
No one would look back and say, you said Negro, you said colored, you're racist.
They weren't racist at all.
Those were, in fact, considered modern and positive phrases.
It's hard for us to believe that the word savage was anything positive, although I suppose it means wild or untamed in some meanings.
But aboriginal, indigenous, first nation, the law itself is called the Indian Act.
If that's what we're, this is what really gets me, John.
I'd love your thoughts on this.
If we're just being so punctilious, well, you said Aboriginal instead of Indigenous, aren't we really ignoring the problem, which is you can use whatever fancy phrase you like, but unless you're dealing with Aboriginal unemployment, social dysfunction, alcoholism, crime, the real things that actually hurt real Aboriginal people, you can use whatever fancy phrase you want, and it's all showboating.
It is.
And in an odd way, you know, if it's showboating and virtue signaling, the beauty of presentism, of course, is everybody you're going after is dead.
So it's particularly easy because, of course, one of the value sets of this kind of thinking isn't generally typified by a great deal of courage in any event.
Usually it's anonymous cowardice.
But my goodness, to go after dead people, which you're doing with John A. MacDonald.
Moving Beyond Presentism00:08:47
Interesting story very much along the same line out of Liverpool.
And Liverpool, which, of course, great port city in Britain, shipped things in and out for centuries.
And most of the famous streets in Liverpool are named after these shipping barons and magnates.
And slaves were routinely, you know, 200 years ago, shipped in and out of Liverpool.
And one of the shipping magnates, of course, was a virulent anti-abolitionist, pro-slave trader named James Penny, after whom Penny Lane is named.
So as they've been redoing these, Penny Lane was actually on the list.
And then they realized, you know, there were those four kids from Liverpool.
Maybe you heard of them, the Beatles.
So they've left Penny Lane alone.
But this is the lengths to which this exercise is carried out.
And you're absolutely right.
It's not just going back and applying the values, it's avoiding today's real issues by spending this much time on those.
You know, one of my favorite interviews I've ever done in my life was a big hour-long sit-down with Chief Clarence Louie of the Asoyuz Indian Band.
Very entrepreneurial, completely employment and economic development oriented.
And he has tough talk.
He's politically incorrect.
But he's got very low unemployment, very low substance abuse on his reserve.
In fact, white folks come onto the reserve to work.
There's so much industry there.
One of my favorite things about Chief Louie, and I don't know if you've had the pleasure of meeting him, John, is he wears all his gear is Indian brand.
He's got an Indian brand motorcycle jacket.
You know, he's like, he loves the word Indian.
And my point is, and then why do I mention that?
Because I've never heard a real Indian who cares about jobs or work or helping his people.
Never in my life have I heard a real Aboriginal person say, you know what makes me mad?
You know what holds us back?
That John A. McDonnell and the statue.
Like I've never in my life heard a real Aboriginal person put that on a list of problems, grievances, let alone, you know, I made my point about Clarence Louie is he's not fussed about Indian, Aboriginal, Indigenous.
I don't think real people care.
I think this is mainly white liberal showboats.
There is a lot of that, but there's also within the Indigenous community an exceedingly activist core now.
And they work very closely with the aforementioned, you know, white law professors and white activists of various sorts.
But it's very much now become the issue.
I mean, you know, here in the heartland of Canada on the prairies, the number of times the word colonizer, settler, colonialist, this is the kind of language is thrown around a great deal.
And you're right, not by anybody in the Aboriginal community who's getting on with doing positive stuff.
But it's part of, and I find it fascinating that in the truth and reconciliation movement, when we set up the TRC, as it was called, years ago, it was modeled on South Africa.
And one of the fundamental parts of being able to reconcile was, first of all, telling the truth, but then moving through an acceptance, a forgiveness, and a moving ahead.
And I think, for example, your model in Victoria, this mayor is doing this for reconciliation.
So help me understand how we reconcile to build ahead and bigger by going back to debates in the 1860s and removing someone's statue.
So I think we've got to get a little bit of work done on where the role of the past is as we help it define our future.
Yeah.
You know, I really appreciate you reminding me that there is a core of radical activists within the Aboriginal community.
I would imagine the vast majority of them are subsidized in some way by tax money, by academia, or as, I guess, Tom Flanagan and others would say, the Indian industry, which is largely white, of course.
And it reminds me of Black Lives Matter.
I mean, I think most normal African Americans You know, they have economic challenges too.
They have lower economic success.
So jobs is the main thing.
And, you know, they have family, you know, there's prison reform issues and drug issues and the like.
To be obsessed with race, I think, is not a true economic solution and it separates.
I think the whole Black Lives Matter movement in America pulled the races further apart, not closer together.
And I sense that some of this extremism has the same purpose.
It's identity politics to make us classify ourselves as white or Aboriginal or whatever instead of just Canadian.
I think it's actually the opposite of reconciliation.
John, my theory is it is about dividing us and then making us see ourselves as racial tokens rather than just friends and neighbors.
I don't think that's off the mark at all.
And, you know, again, I distinguish, as you do, I think, from the people who are on the front lines getting things done.
You know, a province like ours and Saskatchewan is in this respect important because we have the highest percentage of Indigenous population.
It's about 17%.
There are amazing success stories, university enrollment rates, high school completion rates, everything's changing.
But still, the outcomes today, because of substance abuse, family dysfunction, and a lot of that, yes, traceable back to residential schools.
So the important exercise in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was telling the truth, getting the answers, facing the really harsh realities.
But for the average person in the Indigenous community today, most of them live in the city because, again, the reserves are very difficult places to have economic activity and jobs.
But the average Indigenous person today is looking at a whole bunch of issues, and it's not based on my place because of race.
The people I think who are doing the wedge issue and the identity politics, there's a bigger game at play here, and it's not moving the great robust community, which is Indigenous people, non-Indigenous people, not moving that community ahead.
I'm worried that it's also going to burn up goodwill in otherwise sympathetic old stock white Canadians, for want of a better phrase.
I think that there is a lot of goodwill in Canada towards Aboriginal people, some of the issues you've just raised.
And I think if these gratuitous swipes at John A. McDonald or other symbols, they don't move Aboriginal people ahead, but they make the rest of the community a little bit, it's rough.
And it's the opposite of reconciliation.
It's almost like a vengeance.
I don't think it's moving anyone forward.
Last word to you, John.
You've got to speak to people's hearts.
You've got to speak to what brings us together into a virtuous circle.
And I think there is, there's a fatigue with a lot of activism, not just racially based activism, but activism in general.
So I think you've got to see past and see through that because it's frankly not worth the time to slow dynamic people down.
And the whole issue is how do we move ahead.
Yeah, right on.
Well, John, I know you cover this well because, as you say, Saskatchewan and your neighbor province, Manitoba, these are very real practical matters as opposed to places like Toronto, where the Aboriginal population is not as significant.
Great to see you again, my friend.
Thanks for spending the time with us.
Always.
Thank you, Ezra.
All right, there you have it.
John Gormley, he's with Rawlco Radio.
He's the star of Saskatchewan and those of us outside Saskatchewan who get his wisdom from time to time via Skype, as we did today.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
On my monologue yesterday about the city of Victoria wanting to remove a statue of Sir Johnny MacDonald instead of working on real aboriginal issues...
Don writes, John A. MacDonald was a visionary who imagined and consequently engineered one of the finest countries on the planet.
He also had the practical will and the backbone to order and oversee the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which tied it all together.
Why History Matters00:02:33
The over-indoctrinated and profoundly under-informed Lilliputians who would presume to reduce this great man to a mere racist neither understand the meaning of the word, the context of the time, nor, most importantly, the content of their own souls.
There's a lot in there, Don.
But yeah, I think it also goes to the fact that we aren't taught our own history, are we?
Bruce writes, Victoria's leftists figure they can deperson historical figures in some sort of memory hole.
And like communist dictatorships, statues keep getting replaced according to who is in power.
That's exactly right.
It's terrifying.
You know, there's this authoritarian streak.
I've studied Mao Zedong a little bit.
He had such terrifying ideas.
You know, he wanted to replace people's names with numbers.
Can you believe that?
That's so diabolical.
He wanted to raise everything to the ground, to start everything at year zero.
That's that same instinct we see even here in Canada.
Susan writes, how do you judge history by current standards and continue to make our nation great?
It just doesn't work.
Enough of the apologies and rewriting of history.
Read it, learn, and move forward in a well-educated manner.
Yeah, and as I tried to say, every single continent on the earth has had violence, has had slavery.
We know this.
You can sort of think slowly and calmly about it and remember and know and realize that there were slaving Aboriginal tribes in North America when Cortez and Diaz landed with the conquistadors in Central America.
They were in a massive war, various empires at the time.
The idea that Canadian society or Western society is this evil place of slavery is the exact opposite.
In fact, it was really the first place to rebel and outlaw slavery.
And you could say that the U.S. Civil War was a couple hundred thousand Northern Americans deciding to lay down their lives to end in part slavery.
That was what the Civil War was about in part.
I don't know any other country that has sacrificed hundreds of thousands of its own citizens to end slavery, but that's the West.
Yeah, there are things in the West from our history that we can learn from, but to condemn the West, well, that's disproportionate, and I think it's ahistorical.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until Monday, on behalf of all of us here at Rubble World Headquarters, good night.