Maxime Bernier’s critique of Canada’s "diversity is our strength" slogan ignited backlash after his near-win in the Conservative leadership race, where he led 12 ballots before losing. He tied excessive diversity to cultural fragmentation, citing ISIS-linked violence, taxpayer-funded migrant misconduct, and left-wing MPs like Selena Cesar Shivanas silencing dissent. Meanwhile, a MacDonald statue’s removal in Victoria—orchestrated without public input—sparked outrage over taxpayer-funded bike lanes and rising costs ahead of October elections. Ex-Muslim Yasmeen Mohammed described niqab enforcement as sensory deprivation, linking it to extremism, while Ezra Levant blamed Antifa’s violence on Soros-funded indoctrination and Twitter’s opaque censorship, like Gavin McInnes’ ban. The episode reveals how free speech and national identity clash with progressive orthodoxy, exposing deeper tensions in Canada’s multicultural experiment. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Maxime Bernier says there's such a thing as too much diversity and the Canadian establishment explodes.
It's August 14th, and you're watching The Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I like Maxime Bernier and so do a lot of other Conservatives.
He got 49.05% of the vote in the Conservative Party of Canada leadership contest.
In fact, he led the race for the first 12 ballots, losing by a sliver on the 13th.
He's the opposite of Andrew Scheer in so many ways.
He's got charisma.
Scheer has anti-charisma.
He cuts a dashing figure that has sometimes got him in trouble.
Andrew Scheer, he boasts about his minivan.
They're opposites in style.
But style and substance can meet when it comes to, I don't know, courage, for example, don't you think?
Take Donald Trump.
His over-the-top chutzpah is a personality trait, a style, for sure.
But it also goes to his substance.
He takes on political correctness.
He cuts through niceties in foreign diplomacy.
His style actually becomes his substance.
And so it is with Bernier and Scheer.
Maxime Bernier is a Quebec MP, but he has made abolishing Canada's rigged dairy cartel a high priority.
Andrew Scheer, even though he's an MP from Saskatchewan, has gone to absurd lengths for the Quebec Dairy Cartel and what's called supply management.
That's just a code word for banning private competition in milk and cheese and yogurt and putting on huge taxes on American imports.
Just happens to be a big problem for Donald Trump, by the way, and it's going to derail NAFTA and probably cost us our entire auto industry as Trump slaps taxes on our cars in retaliation if we don't fix it.
Just this week, Donald Trump made the same threat all over again.
Even Brian Mulroney is worried about it.
Brian Mulroney, the champion of all things Quebec, he says we have to compromise.
But hey, Quebec Dairy Farmers put Scheer over the top as conservative leader, so he's just returning the favor.
Substance and style, I think.
Courage.
It takes courage to challenge the establishment.
You'd think an opposition leader would be built to do that, to be a challenger, but not Andrew Scheer.
He's caved on so many things where he's afraid of the establishment, especially the establishment and media.
Under peer pressure, he blurted out that he absolutely loves the Paris Agreement on the Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming.
He absolutely loves the Paris Agreement.
He would absolutely meet its targets, he says.
He said that just a few months ago.
Remember this?
Will you unveil a plan that will actually meet the Paris targets?
Of course I will unveil a plan that reaches the targets that we have already voted in favor of.
We believe that Canada has to be part of the solution.
We want to have, we will, we will have a meaningful plan to reduce emissions.
You see how that style and substance, his style is.
He's totally terrified of fighting with a journalist.
So on the substance, he's totally terrified of taking on the establishment love for global warming, even though Doug Ford has just proved that's a huge winner and even Justin Trudeau himself now looks like he's starting to blink on his carbon tax.
But Andrew Scheer is pushed around by a single journalist.
Too bad Andrew Scheer isn't leading the parade against the carbon tax.
He could have if he would have had the courage to stand up to the bullies in the liberal media, but he doesn't.
Well this week we've had another illustration in that.
Bernier made a series of tweets about Justin Trudeau's endless mantra that he's trying to turn into an unofficial Canadian motto, diversity is our strength.
What does that even mean?
Well, that's the thing.
You're not really supposed to think about it too carefully.
You're just supposed to repeat it again and again.
And it leads to things like this.
A statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, our founding prime minister, the man who built the railway that kept Canada together, our version of George Washington, in his own peaceful Canadian way.
I guess he's just gone now.
Statue taken down from outside the Victoria City Hall.
He's gone from our $10 bill now.
They had enough moral cover from the media to take the statue down.
Diversity is our strength, BS, but not quite enough for the people.
They didn't have a proper referendum.
They did it super early in the morning before the public could stop him.
I think people are getting fed up with the political correctness.
I think people are getting fed up.
Sheila Gunread broke a huge story last week about how Trudeau's Syrian migrants were put up in hotels at taxpayer expense and then proceeded to trash the hotels, starting fires, ripping up Bibles, urinating in the lobby, wrecking the pool, abusing female staff.
People know this, or at least census, or they get glimpses of this.
We see that our RCMP and border police have been turned into concierges and bellhops, luggage boys, literally helping people break the law by illegally crossing into Canada, not at a proper border point of entry, literally helping these criminals carry their luggage.
I say criminals, because their very first act is to break the law.
But Trudeau, he has actually set up an intake program.
You can see there, he's got a whole system there.
He's giving them free hotels now.
He's not enforcing the law.
He's not building a fence.
We see this and we see it's a scam.
And then we have terrorism, like the mass shooting in Toronto's Danforth Avenue in Greektown.
And we see how the government hides his shooter's identity for a day until his social media accounts can be scrubbed maybe, or a PR letter can be written claiming he has mental illness.
Later it turns out it was written just by a spin doctor, not really his parents.
ISIS literally claimed responsibility for Faisal Hussein, but the media and the police say, no, that's unpossible.
We see all this.
We're not stupid.
We see weird things.
Like Seamus O'Reagan, Trudeau's right-hand man in Newfoundland, cabinet minister tweeting that immigrants are just better, just better at creating jobs than Canadians.
They're more industrious, I guess.
They're just better people.
It's factually false in a number of ways, but the sneering hatred for Canadians, the otherism, literally preferring others to yourselves, that's unmistakable.
We take more immigrants proportionately than any other Western country does.
Only 8% of Canadians think that number should be increased, by the way.
And still, Justin Trudeau increased it.
He's pushing as hard as he can.
And his Muslim Somali immigration minister, a refugee himself, says, the Canadians are racist.
We literally saved his life.
He claimed he was in jeopardy.
That's what refugee means.
But he tweets that Canadians are racist.
And we discriminate.
He's angry at us.
We saved his life.
His fellow Toronto Liberal MP, another immigrant named Selena Cesar Shivanas, tells people to shut up if they're white and male.
In fact, she said that to Maxime Bernier himself.
She was invited to Canada.
She benefited from Cash.
She wasn't invited here.
She applied to come here.
She was allowed here.
She's benefited from Canada.
She and Amadasson were allowed to reach the highest heights.
And they call us racist while being racist themselves.
But there's Trudeau in his endless, brainless pattern.
Canadians understand that diversity is our strength.
We know that Canada has succeeded culturally, politically, economically, because of our diversity, not in spite of it.
He says that all the time.
It's his filler.
It's like how, I mean, he also says um and ah, but it's it's the equivalent to um and ah.
He just fills time if he doesn't have words to say.
So finally, Maxime Bernier weighed in on Twitter about that mantra.
It was both substance.
He explained his position.
And it was style.
He wasn't cowering in fear of the media party.
He wasn't afraid to cross the media, which is Andrew Scheer's signature emotional response.
Here's a series of tweets written by Bernier.
I want to show them to you.
He was responding to this story on Global.
Diversity is what makes Canada Strong.
Trudeau, that's the name of the story.
And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, I'm reading from the story here.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau celebrated Canada's diversity as he helped mark the opening of Toronto's Taste of the Danforth Food Festival just weeks after a mass shooting that claimed two lives.
So here's a clip.
Take a look.
Always, as we look to what makes our communities strong, one of the best examples is right here.
Our diversity.
The resilience that comes from different perspectives, different backgrounds, different cultures coming together and celebrating the same things.
A beautiful summer evening, great flavors, great friends, new friends we're meeting.
That is at the essence of our country.
It's the essence of our values.
It's at the essence of what we share with the world.
Loudly and proudly, when we gather together and celebrate that our differences are a source of strength, never a source of weakness.
Yeah, except that it was a Pakistani Canadian and extremist whose family was up to their eyeballs in violence and illegal guns and illegal drugs.
It was this criminal family from which Faisal Hussein came to murder and wound.
Maybe a bit too much diversity going on, don't you think?
Here's how Bernier put it in direct response to that news article.
He said, Trudeau keeps pushing his diversity as our strength slogan.
Yes, Canada is a huge and diverse country.
This diversity is part of us and should be celebrated.
But where do we draw the line?
And then as you can see, he linked to that story.
I'll read some more tweets since it was in the series.
His next one, ethnic, religious, linguistic, sexual, and other minorities were unjustly repressed in the past.
We've done a lot to redress those injustices and give everyone equal rights.
Canada is today one of the countries where people have the most freedom to express their identity.
All right, so far pretty unremarkable, don't you think?
In fact, he's really just checking off all the boxes, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, whatever.
Really, a liberal could say everything he's said so far.
I'm going to keep going.
Look at this.
He says, but why should we promote ever more diversity?
If anything and everything is Canadian, does being Canadian mean something?
Shouldn't we emphasize our cultural traditions, what we have built and have in common, what makes us different from other cultures and societies?
Exactly.
I mean, do you know what the United States official motto is?
Not just a cliché spouted by Trudeau, but it was the official American motto adopted in 1782.
It's in Latin.
It's e pluribus unum.
Have you ever heard that?
It means out of many, one.
As in America took a diversity and they forged it into a unity.
They didn't take a unity and split it up into a diversity.
They united, they didn't divide, and say, oh, we're dividing and this is awesome.
They took a division and put it together and said, look, what we've built together, that's awesome.
E pluribus unium is the exact opposite of diversity as our strength, isn't it?
And shouldn't Trudeau and the Liberal Party of all people know that we have some things that are non-negotiable at our core, an underlying identity that is Canadian?
I mean, didn't his father, Pierre Trudeau, build his prime ministership on that?
Does our flag mean nothing?
Or to be more Trudopian, does our Constitution, our Charter of Rights mean nothing, if you must.
history.
I mean, even bilingualism, which Pierre Trudeau foisted on the whole country to appease Quebec, isn't that different from the cacophony of the Tower of Babel, with a million languages spoken but no one talking to each other?
Isn't that the point of Canada?
That it's not just a hotel room or an airport terminal, that it's a place with some meaning, and not just anyone's meaning.
We have a different meaning than Pakistan or North Korea or Cuba, and it's why people, in fact, flee those countries to come here.
I'll read more from Bernier's tweets.
He said, having people live among us who reject basic Western values such as freedom, equality, tolerance, and openness doesn't make us strong.
People who refuse to integrate into our society and want to live apart in their ghetto don't make our society strong.
Exactly.
That's the heart of it there.
If you're against the equality of men and women, if you are diverse in that way, you're not Canadian.
If you believe in the supremacy of one religion, say, in Islam, over infidels, or to make it easier for the leftists to see the point, if you believe that whites are racially superior to blacks, let's say, that's un-Canadian.
How is this at all controversial?
This is liberal, isn't it?
He's talking about including everyone, getting away from the balkanization of ghettos.
How on earth is that bad?
It's what the progressive integrationists of the 1960s fought for in the States.
Blacks and whites living together peacefully.
How is that out of vogue in 2018?
And don't you think that most immigrants reading his comments would say, right on, brother, to Maxime Bernier.
Let me read his fifth tweet.
He said, Trudeau's extreme multiculturalism and cult of diversity will divide us into little tribes that have less and less in common, apart from their dependence on government in Ottawa.
These tribes become political clientels to be bought with taxpayers' dollars and special privileges.
Again, he's so right.
And this is actually one of the multiculturalism strategies that was deployed by Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney.
Don't just pay off ethnic power brokers and bosses.
Try to find some underlying values of commonality and talk to them about that.
Bernier is simply restating the Harper way.
He's criticizing the affirmative action payoffs by the liberal establishment.
Again, I say right on, and I bet most minorities and immigrants would agree.
Last tweet.
Cultural balkanization brings distrust, social conflict, and potentially violence.
As we are seeing everywhere, it's time we reverse this trend.
Before the situation gets worse, more diversity will not be our strength.
It will destroy what has made us such a great country.
Critiquing Affirmative Action Payoffs00:03:00
So what's he talking about?
His tweets are sort of a Rorschach test.
You know, those ink blots you look at?
That you could project your own ideas onto them?
You're not actually describing the inkblot, you're describing what's in your own mind.
But even as a philosophy in the abstract, I think his tweets are irrefutable and it's patriotic and it's inclusive.
And if you want to know what he really means by this dog whistle politics, it's not hard to guess.
I mean, open the newspapers on any given day.
Open borders, fake refugees, Muslim terrorist attacks, the Burqa and Nikab becoming ubiquitous, anti-historical extremism, tearing down statues, rewriting our anthem, revising even whose pictures are on our money.
It's obvious.
Again, what's the objection here?
Well, the objection is that you can't say this because you can't say anything that deviates from the establishment line.
You can and you must have every sort of diversity imaginable, except for diversity of opinion.
Which, by the way, I hazard the statement that the vast majority of Canadians agree with, including new Canadians.
The media knew their job immediately.
Run to every other conservative and demand that they disavow this racist, this racist, who praises different ethnicities and invites everyone to combine and integrate what a racist.
Of course, personality-wise, they were indeed able to find quite a few knock-kneed, timid conservatives willing to disown Bernier.
were terrified of being asked tough questions by mean CTV or CBC or McLean's reporters, so they told the reporters what they wanted to hear.
Surprisingly, Andrew Scheer did not really throw Bernier under the bus.
Rather, he simply hid from the cameras and bravely had an assistant read out a message in favor of diversity and inclusion.
It was sort of a passive-aggressive statement, but not quite as eloquent as Bernier, but not throwing him under the bus either.
The media were unsatisfied and tried to spin.
That is Scheer giving Bernier a rebuke, but it didn't actually look that way to me.
It looked like Scheer knows that actually most Canadians side with Bernier, and surely most Canadian conservatives do.
And Andrew Scheer probably detects that his own reticence on the subject of Islam and the sheer number of migrants to Canada, it's a weakness with his own party, even if the media love him for being so shy.
It will be interesting to see what happens at the upcoming Conservative Convention next week in Halifax.
I wonder whose party it really is anymore.
Is it really the party of Andrew Scheer?
Fear of the CBC and other media party journalists, love for the Quebec dairy cartel, terrified about anything touching on culture, national identity, patriotism, immigration.
Is it that party?
Or is it the party of confident, patriotic conservatism that has enough self-respect to stand up to statue destroyers and history deleters?
For decades, Quebec has actually been the Canadian home of ethnic nationalism and populism and cultural pride in Canada.
Sneaky Plan Revealed00:05:38
Think about it.
May that same spirit of pride, that sense of identity, that we're more than just a hotel room, we're more than just an address.
Maybe it can come to the rest of us Canadians from Quebec, not in xenophobia, not in hatred, but the love for the unity of purpose and respect for our history and cultural traditions.
That's what makes a country.
It's not a list of differences, no matter what Justin Trudeau tells us.
Stay with us for more on this Sir John A. statue.
Welcome back.
Well, we've been talking about the symbolism of literally removing a statue of John A. MacDonald, the founding father of Confederation, our first prime minister, removing the statue from the City Hall in Victoria, B.C.
And by the way, how much longer until Victoria is renamed, named after the Queen of England and the Empress of the British Empire?
How long until British Columbia, the British part offensive to some, the Columbus part offensive to others?
How long before we stop speaking English, a language embedded with racism?
How long before we start saying the year, stop saying the year 2018?
That's very Christian-centric.
This is getting absurd.
And someone who was there standing and bearing witness to this desecration of our history is our friend Aaron Gunn.
He's a spokesman with BC Proud, and he was there when they took this statue down.
Aaron, great to see you.
Thanks for joining us today on The Rebel.
Thank you for having me, Ezra.
I'm so mad about what's happening here, and the way that this was done in such a sneaky fashion makes me upset.
Why don't you tell me a little bit about what you did that day?
I understand that you were having a grassroots protest in support of the statue.
Tell me how it went down.
Yeah, so the first place to start is we didn't have a lot of time to put anything together.
The council came out of nowhere with us on Wednesday.
On Thursday, they held a quick vote.
And on Saturday morning, they were taking down the statue.
Now, we didn't know.
They just said the weekend at first.
So we planned a rally in support of not just Sir John A. McDonald, but our history and our culture for Saturday at noon.
And they kind of pulled a fast one on us and started tearing down the statue.
I mean, the crews were working at about 4.45 a.m. when I showed up.
And they'd fenced it all off the night before.
And even I heard one of the counselors talking today who wanted to delay it, even though she still wanted to move it.
And the mayor of Victoria, who is really a complete disgrace to the city, said that, sorry, we can't do that.
The crane's already booked.
They booked the crane before they even informed council about this vote.
And so they took the statue down.
It was carted away.
It was terrible to watch.
It was like watching a funeral.
They had like a noose kind of around his head, like a rope.
Oh, my God.
Reminds me of how they tore down the Saddam Hussein statues after the liberation.
We see it here.
We're watching it here.
So we have here the footage you sent us.
Thank you very much.
I see one young man draped in the flag of BC, another young man draped in the Canadian flag.
I see you all behind a fence.
So this, what time of day would this have been?
So it's no longer 4.55 a.m.
Obviously, they've been working for a while.
What time was this that you took this footage?
So depending on the clip you're looking at, he was finally carried away in the bed of a truck basically at around 7.15.
And they first kind of took him, like dismembered him or whatever you want, like from the ground at around 6.30.
So you guys got there really early.
How many people, I mean, that's quite impressive on a weekend to have a substantial crowd at 6, 7 a.m.
I'm impressed.
Did you just sort of spread the word when you saw the crane there at 4.55?
Did I hear you right when you said, did you say 4.55 or something?
Yeah, so what happened is no one knew the time.
The media couldn't even figure out the time.
And then finally, we had a rally planned for noon.
And then we finally, it kind of leaked out that it was going to be at like 8 a.m.
They were telling people.
And then at midnight, the night before, I got a text message from a city worker who's kind of a long story.
He was like the dad of someone I went to high school with.
And he said, just so you know, they're trying to be sneaky about this.
They're actually starting to take it down at 5 a.m.
5 a.m.
You know, I got to tell you, Aaron, I'm not very familiar with cranes of this sort, but my common sense, and you tell me if I'm wrong here, tell me if you maybe have more experience than this, to book a crane to be in place at 5 a.m., that doesn't sound normal.
I mean, crane operators, I mean, hardworking guys, power engineers, whatever.
But generally, you see them working in daylight hours for reasons of noise.
And, you know, because that's when guys sleep at night, they work in the day.
I mean, there are some mines where you would work 24 hours a day, but it seems to me like this was done as a deliberate trick.
They probably even paid extra to have the guy wake up really early.
Like, it just seems abnormal and sneaky and deliberate to have a 5 a.m. show up.
He must have had to get up at 3 a.m., get the crane, get down there.
It sounds like a stitch-up.
It sounds like this was all a sneaky plan.
Sneaky Plan Revealed00:08:19
Oh, totally.
I mean, it's something out of 1984.
Like, it's under the cover of darkness, tearing down statues, rewriting history.
They also installed, like, where the statue was, this, this plaque, basically talking about all the bad things that McDonald did and why they moved the statue.
Really?
So they have a denunciation of him on the spot where he used to stand, really.
Right.
And that must have taken weeks, though, to get this.
Like, it's a big fancy plaque's probably not like on a podium plaque thing.
Like, it's gold engraving.
Like, I don't know.
That probably took a couple of weeks to order, I imagine.
So they had this planned out for a while, obviously, and then just try to spring it on the public and kind of force it down everyone's throats.
And what if You said that this was ratified like a couple days before it happens.
This whole thing was an inside job.
The fact that they had, you're right, that plaque, there's no way you can get a plaque like that ready on that short notice.
This was a monstrous trick.
I wonder who was in on it.
Yeah, so there's obviously the mayor, and then there's like two or three city councils on this quote-unquote working group that tasked themselves with reconciliation and stuff.
By the way, this is the worst possible thing for reconciliation.
It's supposed to bring communities together.
Obviously, this just drives them apart.
But they, so there's a couple counselors at least and the mayor that knew about this.
And obviously it was their plan to kind of spring this on everyone and probably just get it out of the way as quickly as possible.
And I think they've been surprised at how quickly that there are how much pushback they've received from it.
Well, I should hope so.
Now, I understand we have a little bit of a clip from the actual protest.
And I wouldn't mind showing that just for a moment to show that you were there, Aaron, on short notice, early in the morning, your team at BC Proud.
And we like BC Proud.
We've been following Ontario Proud.
They were very effective in the election here in Ontario.
I'm really delighted that you're working for BC Proud and BC.
Can we play the clip just for a second here?
Let's take a look.
Today is a sad day for Victoria.
It's a sad day for British Columbia.
And it's a sad day for Canada.
Right behind me, a statue of our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, is being torn down.
This follows the order given by Mayor Lisa Helps and her cronies on City Council to tear down this piece of our history without public consultation and without public debate.
So I guess you were speaking at that point to the camera.
I saw someone else standing up there.
I think it looked like a lady in blue.
Was she with the media or something?
Is that who that other lady was?
Yeah, there's quite a bit of media there.
There's, you know, getting footage for the national media.
That person, there was some, I don't know, Neo-Marxist person or something.
Oh, so there was someone there cheering this also, eh?
Well, they were purposely basically just trying to make noise for my video.
They weren't making any noise, and then they saw I was about to film it, and they started what I can only describe as yelping sounds that were just kind of annoying.
But that pretty much summed up the rally later, which was I tried to speak, and everyone listened to their speakers.
And then when we tried to speak, they all started these, you know, the crazy white supremacy chants.
You've heard them 100 times before.
Now, I mentioned Ontario before.
Of course, there's a new premier out here, Doug Ford is his name.
And I know that he has publicly offered to take the statue of John A. MacDonald.
Has there been any reply from the mayor or city council of Victoria?
I mean, what are they going to do with the physical statue?
I think if Ontario wants it, let them have it.
It'll surely be treated more respectfully than Victoria.
Any feedback from there?
Has the mayor responded at all?
I believe the mayor politely declined the offer, or at least declined the offer.
My hope is that this October there's municipal elections here in British Columbia, including Victoria.
And I hope we have a new mayor and council that reinstates the statue.
Now, when they took it down, they said they were going to move it to some other location to be decided at a later date to recontextualize Sir John A.
But I mean, why would you take this if you wanted to move the statue like in front of the legislature or something?
Why wouldn't you come up with your new location first and then take the statue movement?
So they clearly have no intention of doing that unless they feel the political heat.
Maybe they're going to change their mind or something.
But they had no intention of ever the statue seeing the light of day again.
Well, we know they were acting in bad faith the midnight or the 5 a.m. crane appointment.
That just, that's not normal.
That's a trick.
The fact that they had the plaque, which surely took weeks to make, that's a trick.
This whole thing has been, as my friend Tommy Robinson would say, a stitch-up.
Two last questions for you, Aaron.
Is there any, you mentioned municipal elections are coming up.
Is there any candidate on the horizon who looks like a common sense alternative?
So I've actually been looking into that.
I haven't, we're trying to figure out who the serious, you know, municipal elections can be kind of confusing on who's the serious challengers.
Maryland Self definitely has challengers.
I think the stronger challengers will be for new council members who, as you know, obviously a lot of the just as much power is held in the council as the mayor.
So I'm very hopeful.
This is just the latest of a string of insults to taxpayers from spending millions of dollars on bike lanes that no one uses to hiking property taxes over and over again.
So I would hope that this mayor and council's days are numbered.
Victoria is a weird city because it's not amalgamated there.
There's 13 municipalities.
So the city of Victoria itself is actually not that big.
So it kind of leads to strange results sometimes.
Well, Aaron, I'm so pleased you're doing what you're doing.
I'm so glad you got there so early.
That tells me that you're really alert to things.
And I liked your remarks that you gave to the camera there, even if you were being heckled.
I'm glad you were there.
Can you tell our viewers what's the best way to find you on Facebook?
Am I right?
Do you have a website also, or is it mainly Facebook-based?
Yeah, you can visit facebook.com/slash BC Proud.
And you can also visit my personal one where you see all my content at facebook.com slash aarongun.ca.
And we're always out there talking about different issues, federal, provincial, and in this case, kind of a local and an intersection of the three.
Yeah, well, I got to tell you, we like the cut of your jib, as they say.
And, you know, we've talked to you before with your other projects.
Do me a favor, if there's more on this story, and if there's other shenanigans in Victoria or in BC in general, don't be shy about reaching out to us because I want the rest of Canada to see this too.
Because what's happening in Victoria is not isolated to Victoria.
That same willful destruction of our history, rewriting our history, demonizing our history.
Warts and all.
I'm not saying John A. was perfect, but it's Stalinist to destroy a statue, especially of your own leaders.
So, Aaron, I hope that this is the first of many new conversations we have in your position with BC Proud.
Thank you very much, Ezra.
All right, take care and good luck out there.
Thanks.
That's our friend Aaron Gunn with BC Proud.
I've followed their Ontario group called Ontario Proud, obviously, and I thought they did very good work, especially on social media.
They really held Kathleen Wynne's toes to the fire in Ontario, and I think they deserve some credit for the success of Doug Ford.
Hopefully, Aaron and his team can be a source of the same common sense in British Columbia.
I certainly enjoyed talking with him today, and I hope you did too.
And that footage, by the way, that we showed you of the crane, that was filmed by Aaron's group, and we're grateful that he shared it with us.
All right, that's it for now.
Stay with us.
There's more ahead on The Rebel.
Welcome back.
Well, Boris Johnson is a very interesting man.
He used to be the bicycle-riding mayor of London with that shock, that mop top of yellow blonde hair.
He's always been a little bit eccentric and had a bit of a politically incorrect sense of humor, which was risky when he was the foreign secretary until most recently, under Theresa May, the British Prime Minister.
Someone say Boris Johnson will be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Wearing Masks as Sensory Deprivation00:07:45
Well, he made a comment, a joke in a recent column about something you're not supposed to joke about.
He compared women wearing the full face-obscuring niqab.
He compared them to mailboxes, or as they're called in the UK, letterboxes.
And indeed, it's tough not to notice some sort of similarity.
Well, holy cow, did it hit the fan?
There were calls for investigations.
Rowan Atkinson, also known as Mr. Bean, he defended the joke, saying it was actually pretty funny.
And even if it wasn't, freedom of speech means you can make fun of religion.
Boris Johnson wasn't bending the knee to his critics.
They were camped out at his home for hours.
Take a look when he came out to meet them and what he said.
Would you apologize for what you comment?
Will you have a cup of tea?
Will you part of us for your comments?
Do you like a cup of tea?
Yeah, sure.
Have a cup of tea.
Thank you, thank you.
Do you regret your comments?
Do you regret your comments?
Thank you very much.
Thank you, sir.
There you go.
Do you ever get your comments, sir?
You want you to have a cup of tea?
If I have a cup of tea, will you answer my question?
No, I'm here solely on a humanitarian mission because you've been here all day and you've been incredibly patient and incredibly, and I feel very sorry for you because I have nothing to say about this matter except office of tea.
Okay, thank you.
Well, he's not bowing to pressure, offering his critics instead a cup of tea.
Well, should we talk about the burqa?
Is it okay to criticize it or is that racist?
And by the way, when people say it is a facet of our free society that women are allowed to choose to cover themselves up this way, are they also allowed not to choose it?
Joining us now via Skype is our friend Yasmeen Mohammed, who at one point in her life had no choice and was indeed compelled to wear the burqa.
Yasmeen, how are you?
Nice to see you again.
Nice to see you too, Ezra.
Thank you for having me.
It was a pleasure.
I remember our extended biographical interview a couple of months ago.
That was a big hit with our viewers.
They were so fascinated by your story and shocked that someone in Canada, which we regard as such a liberal, open, progressive democracy, could have been basically imprisoned at your home in face covering hijabs and burqas.
What was your life like and what part of it did the burqa play?
Well, it played a huge part.
So once I was Islamically married to the man that I was forced to marry, I was told that I have to start wearing this niqab, which is sometimes referred to as a burqa, depending on from which part of the Muslim world you're from.
And at that time, everything had to be delivered from Saudi Arabia.
So I had gloves delivered.
I had socks delivered.
I had a face veil delivered.
I was covered head to toe in black, top to bottom.
And what that does, I describe it as a sensory deprivation chamber because you can no longer see properly or hear properly or feel properly.
You are erased as a human being.
Your individuality is gone.
I mean, we know that most of our communication is nonverbal.
So you can no longer communicate effectively with people.
People don't see you as an individual or as a human being.
You're all of a sudden just a black blob.
And to go back to your comments about Boris Johnson, in the Muslim community, people are always calling women in niqab bats, tents, penguins, ninjas.
All of these analogies are made, and that is within the Muslim community.
So, you know, for people to make jokes or to make these comparisons is not so completely outside of the realm of reality, I think that Boris Johnson's comments were actually quite benign compared to other things that I've heard said about niqhabis from Muslims.
It's important to note that niqhab is not typical Muslim attire.
It is for extremists.
As you know, my ex was a jihadi, a member of al-Qaeda.
And that's why I was told that I have to wear the niqab.
It's not your typical Muslim people that are wearing the hijab or the niqab or the burqa.
You know, it was Kurt Wilders, the Dutch political leader, who first put it to me.
He said, how are you going to make friends in Holland if you're wearing a niqab?
I mean, it would take great courage to approach something who is so completely obliterated from...
I mean, if you approach a stranger on the street, you can see if they're smiling or not.
You can see if they're looking away or not.
You can see if they're interested in making friends.
And he's right.
I think going up to someone who is wearing a one-woman sensory deprivation chamber, that's a very good way of putting it, you're just not going to interact with your Gentile neighbors.
And maybe that's part of the point of it.
It's not just so men don't see you.
It's so you don't make a bunch of girlfriends and start hanging out in mainstream society.
I'm guessing.
When you wore a niqab, did any Canadian women come up to you and say, hi, how are you?
I could just imagine how terrifying or off-putting or uncomfortable it would be.
Well, that's exactly it.
You just end up becoming ignored because people don't know how to interact with you.
They don't know if I'm smiling, if I'm angry, if it's okay to approach me or not.
There are no clues for them.
I mean, the niqab I wore even covered my eyes.
So yeah, you just, you essentially get erased.
And that's why I would describe myself as a ghost because I'm walking around amongst human beings and I can see them, but they can't see me.
I was completely invisible.
Like a ghost.
Now, some people who are doctrinaire libertarians would say, well, it's a free country.
If someone wants to wear a mask, they can.
And by the way, there are various laws against masks in public places.
We don't allow people to go into banks wearing a mask.
You wouldn't let someone wearing a mask into a jewelry store, for example.
Putting that to detail aside, how voluntary is it?
I mean, I am sure there are some women who choose to do that, whether or not it's they're acting of their own free will or if they have sort of a Stockholm syndrome.
How many women in your experience would be under some threat or duress to wear the niqab, either physical violence or just social marginalization or even, let's say, even a divorce, perhaps?
So 100% of the women are under duress.
And the reason why they're under duress is because they believe that their God has told them that they have to wear this if they want to go to heaven and if they don't want to burn in hell.
So even though it is not a human being that is threatening them with physical violence, they are doing it under threat of physical violence.
I read a survey from Paris a few years back that more than 70% of Muslims in Paris, Muslim women in Paris, felt a physical threat if they didn't wear physical, like sorry, not a physical, a threat from another person.
So it wasn't just like a religious commandment that they felt duress or a threat from people.
Reception Across Campuses00:06:39
Did you ever see or experience or hear any of that?
Was there any verbal insults or physical threats to you or other niqabi niqab wearers if you were to go out without one?
Yeah, I mean, forget niqab.
That's true for people wearing hijab.
I mean, as you know, in Canada, we had Aksa Parvez, who was 16 years old, who was killed by her family for not wearing a hijab.
My mother threatened to kill me when she found out I wasn't wearing hijab.
So, yeah, that 70% number that you quoted doesn't surprise me at all.
There's definitely a threat.
Now, I very much appreciated our interview when we went into some depth in your biography.
Of course, you have a book called Confessions of an Ex-Muslim, and you've talked about your past and your former husband.
Since that time, I've enjoyed following you on social media, and it looks like you've been able to get your story out further and wider than before.
Tell us a little bit, especially for those who recall your earlier interview, tell us some of the places you've gone and people you've spoken to with your message.
Well, I've been very lucky to be one of the speakers for the Ion Herciali Foundation.
So through her foundation, I've been able to speak at Harvard.
I've been able to speak at Stanford.
I went with Dave Rubin to Dartmouth University and spoke for the Anne Rand Institute.
So yeah, I've been very lucky to be invited by many different universities and institutions to come and speak about my story.
Well, that's impressive.
Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, those are first-rank universities, Ivy League in some cases.
Let me ask you, I mean, I found your story riveting.
I remember we spoke for some length and my own, and I've read other things you've written online.
Dave Rubin, he's a very excellent interviewer and clear thinker.
I really appreciate him.
And he comes from the left, which is interesting.
He would say he's a liberal, I think.
How have, I mean, the places you've mentioned also, especially Dartmouth and Harvard, are very feminist.
And part of me thinks a true feminist would appreciate your message of emancipation.
But other feminists would be dominated by their Orientalism or their otherism.
And they would say, oh, no, no, no, this is a cryptic critique of Islam, or not so cryptic in your case.
So you are just a tool of the right, and we have to reject you.
I see that.
I see a lot of feminist women instantly become quiet in the face of this hijab-niqab issue.
How was the reception at these feminist institutions, Dartmouth and Harvard, when you presented yourself?
Well, luckily at Dartmouth and Harvard, both experiences were very positive.
In fact, at Harvard, I was invited by a conservative women's group called New, N-E-W.
And I can't remember what the acronym stands for, but I was very excited to be invited by them because they were women, actually.
So they were a conservative feminist group.
But there have been other universities that I've gone to where unfortunately the reception wasn't quite so positive.
I was at the University of Chicago in Champaign, and the president of the student association there was most famous for posting an Instagram photo of herself and talking about how America was based on slavery and rape and et cetera, et cetera.
This was on July 4th.
And so my coming to their university was, you know, for a while we expected there to be some protests, but luckily that didn't happen.
But there was some pretty negative people in the crowd there.
So, you know, that's just one example.
Most of the reception that I've had has been positive, and that's because most of the groups that are inviting me are generally from the right wing, the left-wing one.
Nothing to do with me, which is quite ironic because my message is all about liberty and all about freedom and, you know, individuality.
And these are things that you'd think that liberal people would be interested in hearing about.
Well, I tell you, if you're hanging out with Ayan Hercia Lee, you're with such a noble and courageous woman, and I'm so delighted that you've connected with her.
I regard her as a heroine, and I know many people do.
Not enough people know about her.
I'm glad she's in America.
Of course, she is still in fear for her life.
Her former collaborator, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered in part because of a movie he made about called Submission, about the place of covered niqabis in Islam.
Terrifying.
Well, I'm so glad that you've had these successes and that you've been able to spread the word.
You're welcome on the Rebel anytime to tell us whatever message is on your mind.
If you've got a new project or a new book or a new campaign, consider us at your disposal.
I always find you very interesting, and I find you a source of hope and courage.
So thank you for being with us today.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
All right.
Well, it's our pleasure.
That's Yasmeen Mohammed.
She's the author of Confessions of an Ex-Muslim.
And in fact, she herself used to wear, as you heard, a full face-obscuring burqa.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
On my monologue yesterday on the anniversary of the Charlottesville protest and a Toronto Sun photographer getting assaulted by Antifa.
Keith writes, The so-called Antifa movement is nothing more than the results of years and years of propaganda rammed down children's throats by the Marxist-controlled educational system.
Unfortunately, as long as the great pretender rules the roost, it is going to continue.
Well, it'll continue past that.
I mean, Barack Obama is gone from the United States, but Antifa remains.
Yes, I think that decades of ideological conditioning in schools certainly have created a petri dish in which this bacterium can flourish, but I think it is money and professional organizers that makes it happen.
You can't just get hundreds, thousands of people to show up organically.
Lawsuits And Disclosure00:02:45
It doesn't happen in a spontaneous manner like that for things like this.
It's organized, it's paid, it's recruited, it's lists, and that's people who fund Occupy Wall Street, Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, Antifa.
It's, you know, the usual suspects, George Soros being amongst the most generous of the funders.
Allen writes, remember how the Toronto police frog-marched that kid away from Trudeau for merely heckling him?
These cops get no respect from me.
They're complicit with the Pantifa crowd who are seeking their own destruction.
Hey, what a great juxtaposition.
Thanks for that reminder.
That guy and David Menzies interviewed him.
Firstly, I thought it was a little bit inappropriate to be shouting at the prime minister at a memorial for the dead and wounded in Danforth Avenue.
Obviously, I have no time for Justin Trudeau, but it just didn't seem like the right time or moment.
But there was no laws being broken, clearly no laws being broken, and yet that young heckler was taken away by cops.
An actual punch delivered to the face of a Toronto Sun journalist, and the police didn't care.
They didn't care.
On my interview with Gavin McInnis about him getting banned from Twitter, Paul writes, I was one of Gavin's Twitter followers.
I hope the lawsuits bring about great results.
Well, I hope there are lawsuits.
I don't think that has been determined yet.
And I mean, lawsuits are always expensive and slow, and the lawyers win.
And at the end of the day, you know, these things can take years.
But I think that there's something important to a lawsuit.
First of all, it's a formal declaration that you're going to do something about something.
You're not just going to mutter.
You're going to go on the offense.
And even if you have a small chance, you still have a chance to win.
Second of all, and I think what might be most interesting here, is you will get documentary disclosure.
If you sue a place like Twitter for banning you, you'll have access to their relevant internal documents.
Memos, emails, whatever other records they have.
Who sent them a dossier putting together all the bad things they could about Gavin McInnes?
Who made the final decision?
What outside consultants, if any, put their finger on the scale?
I don't know.
None of us know.
It's so opaque.
That's one of the problems with corporate censorship is, unlike the government, there's no public process or procedure.
But a lawsuit could smoke that out.
I hope Gavin and his new bosses at CRTV who can afford it, I hope they sue because I hope they win and I hope they bring back some freedom to the new public square that just happens to be owned by the new J.D. Rockefellers of the internet.
But also because I want to know what's going on.
I want the bright light of publicity shone on their murky dealings.
Well, that's our show for today.
On behalf of Volvos here, Rebel World Headquarters to you at home.