Brazil’s election of Jair Bolsonaro—a right-wing populist backed by 55% of voters—follows decades of socialist corruption under Lula and Dilma Rousseff, tied to regimes like Iran and Venezuela. His dramatic rhetoric against Cuba and leftists mirrors Matteo Salvini’s Italy, where a migrant-linked crime in Rome fueled nationalist backlash, though the EU opposes sovereignty. Bolsonaro’s U.S. alignment contrasts with Justin Trudeau’s snub and Canada’s leniency toward ISIS returnees like "Jihadi Jack," despite laws criminalizing terrorism. The episode ties Bolsonaro’s rise to global populist shifts, questioning whether Western elites’ selective outrage reflects deeper ideological conflicts than extremism. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Brazil votes overwhelmingly for a right-wing president.
What does it mean?
It's October 30, and you're watching The Ezra LeVant Show.
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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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 didn't know much about Yair Bolsonaro until I heard that Facebook was blocking his campaign sites.
And that was a sign to me that he was an important force that challenged the establishment, the status quo, because that's the same move that Facebook did to conservative parties around the world after conservatives used the social media platform to help win the Brexit vote and to help elect Donald Trump.
It was shortly after Trump's victory that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, all the big tech companies headquartered in San Francisco, the most left-wing city in America, they just got together and decided to interfere with elections going forward.
So, for example, they deleted 30,000 Facebook pages in France that supported Maureen Le Pen.
They just called them fake accounts.
And you'll have to take their word for it, because Mark Zuckerberg would never lie to you.
So when I heard they were coming for this Yair Bolsonaro character, the right-winger in Brazil, and when I saw that Facebook was even blocking another one of its subsidiaries, a communications app called WhatsApp, it's really an encrypted chat service, I knew this Bolsonaro had the left-wing establishment scared.
I was watching out of the corner of my eye because frankly, not a lot of people in Canada follow Brazil closely, not me.
But then this happened.
And turn away now for a minute if you don't want to see violence because about a month ago, as you know, Bolsonaro was stabbed while campaigning at a meet-and-greet.
A leftist extremist just walked right up to him and put a knife in him.
And he lost 40% of his blood before he was stabilized.
He nearly died.
So turn away now if you don't want to see that.
Take a look.
There he is.
Oh, it was so quick, but down he went.
Here's another point of view of it.
Frankly, that could be any politician campaigning anywhere in a crowd like that.
A Canadian, an American.
Don't think they wouldn't do that to Donald Trump if they could.
So Bolsonaro was banned by Facebook and banned by the communications company WhatsApp that's owned by Facebook.
And then he was stabbed, but he won nonetheless.
And by the way, his family is in politics with him, his sons.
And they won too.
His son Flavio just won massively more than 4 million votes to be the senator for Rio.
And his other son Carlos is an alderman in Rio.
And his other son Eduardo just set a new record for the total number of votes ever received by a Brazilian lawmaker.
So something's happening.
A man and a family that has spooked Facebook into censoring him, a man that the left tried to stab to death, he has set records and his family is setting records.
It's truly a wave.
So what is it?
What's happening?
Well, I hardly need to tell you that the mainstream media is calling Bolsonaro far-right, but that really doesn't tell us anything useful.
They call everyone they don't like far-right these days.
I really don't even know what that means anymore, do you?
Other than the media in question doesn't like him.
I mean, it surely doesn't mean racist, I don't think, at least not in the sense that the CBC or the BBC or the New York Times would use that term.
I mean, Brazil is a majority minority country.
Europeans, the ethnicity, are a minority.
So-called mixed-race citizens are about half the population, plus there are black and Asian and Aboriginal people there.
If Bolsonaro got 55% of the vote this weekend in the presidential runoff, and his sons are setting new records, I don't think you can call that racist.
And I think that's what the media usually means when they say far right.
I mean, Brazil is not a rich country.
At least most of its people aren't.
Their economy has been pretty much stuck for a decade.
They're poor, so it's working men and working women and poor people who voted for him, and obviously an enormous number of minorities.
So what do they mean by far right?
The New York Times isn't much help.
Look at this tweet the other day.
Breaking news!
Brazil has joined the ranks of countries tilting to the far right, choosing Yair Bolsonaro, a divisive populist, as president.
Okay, well, hang on.
I took statistics in first year university.
Statistically speaking, if someone gets 55% of the vote, I don't think you can say they're far right.
They may have won the votes of the far-right voters, and they'd also have the votes of the right and the center-right, but they're all the way to the center now, and they've got more than half the vote, so they're actually getting some of the center-left votes.
I mean, isn't that what 55% out of 100 means?
You really can't be extremist or far anything because you're more than half the people, more than half the spectrum.
And is he divisive?
Well, I suppose any election is divisive in that you call for a division, as they say.
You ask people to choose sides.
That's sort of what we do in elections.
But 55% is more unified than Canada's elections have been for decades.
The last Canadian prime minister to win more than 50% of the vote was Brian Mulroney back in 1984.
He just squeaked past 50%.
So for 34 years, we've been ruled by a party that won in the 30s percent or the 40 percent.
Justin Trudeau just got 39 percent.
So how could 55 percent be divisive?
That's more than Donald Trump got, that's more than Barack Obama got.
I don't think a Canadian prime minister has won 55% of the vote since the election of 1917, if I've done my research right.
So it would be a once-in-a-century type unity in Canada.
Now, I'm not going to deny that Bolsonaro is quite dramatic.
And I think he is right-wing, maybe very right-wing in his style, at least.
He's militant.
His signature gesture is that he's shooting a gun.
But those are just fingers.
He's talked about a brutal cleansing that his country needs to rid it of leftists.
Not sure if that's just imagery and a metaphor.
I think he uses dramatic language, the sorts I've never seen used to describe the risks of the left, though.
Here's just one example where he's worried about the pervasive influence of communists from Cuba.
You can see it's translated there.
He's worried about communists in the school system in Brazil.
He says, teaching in Brazil, take barracks, take schools and universities, attack armor, attack ideas.
And he's quoting Gramsci.
So he's quoting a communist there.
And the thing is, in Latin America, when you're worried about communists, you really worry about communists.
It's not like a red scare in the United States.
It's very real in Latin America.
I mean, Brazil shares a border with Venezuela.
It's not far from Cuba.
Dictatorships and revolutions are not rare in South America.
I think Bolsonaro thinks the threat is real, and I think he's right.
And his response to everything is so bold and so tough.
Maybe it looks like a caricature to us, maybe it looks extreme to us, but I think in Brazil, which is in a crisis, I think it rings true.
And I call it a crisis.
What would you call it?
Let me give you a little bit of background here.
One of Bolsonaro's predecessors is this man named Lula, who is a full-out socialist strongman, a friend of Iran.
He's in prison now for corruption and fraud.
And he was succeeded by his chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, who is also impeached for corruption.
I mean, these folks are taking bribes.
They milk the system.
They're all socialist extremists.
Even soldiers are terrorists.
Here's Dilma Rousseff when she was younger.
She was on trial for some guerrilla activity.
I mean, they claim they're fighting for the little people.
And maybe they were when they were young, but when in office, just like all Latin American strongmen, just like Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and just like the Castros in Cuba, they became millionaires and billionaires.
So I think they've broken the hearts of maybe the left in Brazil who see them as corrupt, Lula and Rousseff, and they see this Bolsonaro and they say he's legit.
You see why Bolsonaro's tough medicine was appealing?
Because the establishment was so crooked.
And you see why his worries about communism are not really that far removed from reality, Hugo Chavez Dilma Rousseff.
Now, I know a lot about Donald Trump, and I think you probably do too.
Like you, I've watched him in the public square for decades as a person, as a TV personality, as perhaps the most accessible politician in memory.
He has surely done more long-form, unscripted stream of consciousness speeches than any politician in the TV age.
He tweets up a storm.
I know about Trump, and I know his excesses are usually just rhetorical.
He's actually very closely bound by the Constitution and how he acts.
And whenever some leftist journalist says he's acting like a rogue, well, the Supreme Court upholds Trump's orders again and again, like the travel ban, for example.
So Trump is actually not a rogue.
I'm not worried about Trump going rogue.
All the worries about him are ginned up.
This whole Russia thing, where's that, eh?
Where's that gone?
Bolsonaro?
Now, I know little about him.
I know he has made some extreme statements about social issues, about his political rivals.
I don't know if that's just rhetorical like Trump.
I don't know if that's just the Brazilian style.
I don't know.
I don't know if it's something more dangerous.
I don't know.
But for now, I know that he has specifically said he wants to reorient Brazil towards freedom and prosperity.
And that's the opposite of what most Latin American strongmen say.
Bolsonaro says he'll be an ally of the United States.
It's got to be a good sign, I think.
Here's a tweet he wrote in Portuguese, and you can see the translation underneath.
Translation reads, We just received a call from the President of the United States, Donald Trump, congratulating us on this historic election.
We express the desire to bring these two great nations closer together and to advance on the path of freedom and prosperity.
I'd say better a friendly phone call with America than a friendly phone call with Cuba or Russia or these days China or Iran.
And that happens with other Latin American countries, doesn't it?
I mean, Venezuela and Iran are shockingly close.
Other great democracies besides America reached out to Bolsonaro too.
Here's France.
I'm sure Emmanuel Macron has his differences with Bolsonaro, but Bolsonaro is the legitimately elected leader of the country and France fancies itself a land of diplomacy.
And really, how impertinent would it be for a foreign government to disagree with a country's self-determination on the eve on the night of its election?
Here's Russia.
Same thing, Vladimir Putin.
He has big plans, and Putin has been successful diplomatically for a decade under Obama and the weakness of Engel and Merkel, but now Trump is sort of pushing Putin back and rolling China back in ways that didn't happen under Obama.
I bet Putin is worried that Latin America could tilt more towards the United States and away from the communists.
Don't you think he's worried?
Here's Mateo Salvini, who I'm following in Italy.
He's a bit rambunctious, isn't he?
I'll just read the translation there.
Even in Brazil, the citizens have sent home the left.
Good work for the president Bolsonaro.
The friendship between our peoples and our governments will be even stronger.
I think there's such a wave of new leaders like this in Hungary, in Austria, in Poland, leaders who no longer bend the knee to the European Union or the United Nations or the leftist globalists for that matter.
I think it's a new club, don't you think?
They're all chatting with each other now.
Let me show you the most interesting tweet from Bolsonaro in my point of view.
Look at this.
This is the English version.
Oh, actually, I think he wrote it in English.
I've just received incredible words from the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as from Ambassador Yossi Shelley.
Our friendship ties will undoubtedly result in mutual agreements that will surely benefit both our nations and citizens.
And look at that, the little flags.
When was the last time you seen a Latin American boss roll out the Israeli flag in a tweet?
How shockingly new and refreshing is that from what one could call a third world country, a place that has done business with Iran and other haters before.
I'm actually amazed, and I think that is a good proxy for what Bolsonaro thinks about a lot of items, including the UN, which hates Israel and the global left and the OPEC oil powers.
I think he's at least against them or doesn't care about them.
Maybe that's one reason why the New York Times thinks Bolsonaro is divisive, because they would never say such pro-Israel things ever.
And then there's Justin Trudeau and his disaster of a foreign minister, Christia Freeland.
They put out a perfunctory release not even mentioning Bolsonaro by name, let alone congratulating him.
Now, Bolsonaro hasn't even been sworn in yet.
He hasn't even done anything yet.
And Trudeau is already snubbing him and 210 million Brazilians.
It's the fifth biggest country in the world.
Not even a moment of grace and self-control, not even a moment to say congratulations.
We disagree on things, but congratulations on being a Democrat.
Why start off on a bad foot?
Is it because Bolsonaro has no time for globalists and the UN and leftists and anti-Israel activists and global warming extremism?
Yeah, probably.
But just this past week, it's funny, Trudeau met and posed for photo with Erdogan, the president of Turkey, who's authoritarian, who currently imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world, who is persecuting Kurds and Christians, who props up ISIS.
Trudeau won't just say nice words to him.
He'll pose with a smiley selfie with him.
Trudeau has no problem hobnobbing in communist China.
The world's biggest dictatorship.
That's Trudeau putting us on the bad foot with Brazil, but hobnobbing with the bad guys.
Like he's put us on the wrong foot with every country from India to the United States, especially in the NAFTA negotiations, to Israel and Australia, and even with Saudi Arabia.
Now he's snubbing Brazil because they voted in a way he didn't like.
That's none of his business.
Trudeau prefers Fidel Castro.
Trudeau's Castro Complex00:02:03
Recall his loving eulogy.
It is with deep sorrow today that I learned of the death of Cuba's longest-serving president.
Longest serving?
He was a dictator.
He never faced an election.
He was a prison warden to his island.
Let me just read a little bit more here.
While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro's supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for El Comandante, yeah, all those prisoners in the gulags.
They had a deep and loving affection for him.
This is what Trudeau says about a brutal dictator, and he will not even say Bolsonaro's name.
He won't even congratulate him for winning democratically, but will say Castro was the longest serving president as if, wow, you won again, Fidel, For him, for Castro's, Trudeau's generous, but for Bolsonaro, he couldn't be chillier.
That is not professional diplomacy.
That is a temper trantum.
That is a tantrum.
That is a pout.
But to be really honest with you, I don't think Yair Bolsonaro cares.
It looks to me, just on Twitter at least, like his dance card is full of A-list countries like Brazil sort of is.
I don't yet know what Bolsonaro will be like in power.
No one does, maybe not even himself yet.
But I do know one thing.
If you take your steer from the New York Times and the CBC, you probably won't learn much other than he's divisive and far-right, and Justin Trudeau doesn't like him.
But then again, they would probably say the same things about you, wouldn't they?
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Horrific Crimes and Political Reaction00:10:11
Well, crime is a fact of life, always has been, always will be, going back to Cain and Abel.
But sometimes a murder or a rape can crystallize a political moment and become much larger than just another statistics in Canada.
I refer, of course, to Carla Homonco and Paul Bernardo.
But I think there might have been such a crime committed in Italy that is far larger than just the horror and the tragedy of one family, but it's speaking to a whole nation.
It reminds me of the terrorist attack in Nice, France, where a Muslim extremist got behind the wheel of a truck and barreled along a paradeway for miles, killing or injuring 500 Frenchmen on their National Day.
Of course, that's a terrorist attack, but what happened near Rome was not styled as a terrorist attack, but the four men charged with raping and murdering a young woman, a young woman, well, they are all migrants who recently crossed into Italy from Africa.
And joining us now to talk about this crystallizing moment, this horrific crime and its political ramifications is our new friend Alessandra Bocci, who is a investigative journalist based in Milan, Italy, who has covered the migrant phenomenon.
Alessandra, great to see you again.
Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
It's a horrific crime, and I don't even want to recount the details because I don't want to say them, but surely we must say them because we have to understand them and we have to know what is going on in Italy.
Can you tell us, and it's such a horrific thing, but I want our viewers to know, can you tell us the crime the police say was committed near Rome and can you tell us who was accused of it?
Yes, so this 16-year-old girl called Desire Mariottini, she was a drug addict.
She was known to be a drug addict even by her parents.
And basically she would ask for drugs in exchange for sex sometimes.
She was in a bad situation herself.
And one night she was in the suburbs of Rome and she ended up in this squatting building of illegal immigrants, mostly sub-Saharan African immigrants, but also Arab immigrants.
And she ended up being drugged.
She was purposely given the wrong drug mixture.
The investigators found so that they could rape her more easily.
And she was raped and eventually killed through suffocation.
And four people were arrested, two Senegalese men, then one Nigerian man and one man from Ghana as well recently.
Now, it's a horrific crime, but the ethnic identity, the national identity of these men who had crossed over from the Mediterranean, who were squatting in this building, this has really sparked a moment in Italy.
We see Matteo Salvini, the charismatic cabinet minister, part of the new conservative coalition in Italy.
He was on the scene and just a crush of reporters.
I mean, a horrific crime like this, of course, would make the headlines in any event.
But this really seems to be much larger than just a crime.
This seems, I think, observing it from afar, that it has crystallized the whole question of who are these people?
What are they doing here?
And why are they allowed to be here?
Is that an accurate assessment?
Yes, this happened before.
There was a big case of this other teenage girl called Famila Masto Pietro, who was also killed by illegal immigrants.
She was also drug killed and she was mutilated, and her body was found in two separate bags.
And actually, this triggered, this was before the election, and this triggered a reaction from this, like, he was an open fascist, a Nazi.
He had like a Nazi tattoo on his face.
So this crazy guy went on a shooting rampage just at random at Africans in general.
Like, he didn't even know if they were illegal immigrants, but that triggered that reaction.
The facts have changed now because we have this new government, we have this new interior minister who's cracking down on crime and on illegal immigration in the country.
So hopefully people, no one will feel the need to react that way anymore.
But it still shows that there's a problem, despite the fact that immigration has almost entirely been stopped in the country, there's still a problem with integration and with the people who are here, who the interior minister, Matteo Salvini, had actually promised to deport.
But he's facing a lot of issues in doing so because there's so much backlash, especially from the European Union.
You know, I recall that earlier horrific case that was very similar.
A young girl repeatedly gang raped and then to cover up, to dispose of the evidence, killed, and in that horrific case cut up into pieces.
I didn't recall that that sparked that vigilante action.
I mean, obviously the crime was horrific, but it sparked that secondary crime of, as you say, a fascist randomly stabbing black people.
I think that's a shooting rampage, actually.
Oh, a shooting rampage.
Thank you for the correction.
I had not really realized that.
I think there's a phenomenon there that if a problem is so bad and the establishment and the authorities and the trustworthy people who Daniel Pipes calls the 5P professionals, the politicians, the press, the prosecutors, the police, the professors, they all just happen to start with P. If the 5P professionals ignore a problem, the people restlessly, radically, out of desperation, will find their own solution.
And in that first case, it was a vigilante reaction.
It sounds like that perhaps helped propel Salvini and the League and the five-star coalition into power.
Is Salvini and the new government going to do something about the hundreds of thousands of migrants who are still in Italy squatting there, like the ones in this slum tenement?
Yes, so Matteo Salvini actually visited the place, the building where this happened and he promised to make sure it was cleared out from these illegal settlers in a way.
And the locals there actually cheered him when he arrived, but there were counter-protesters who I assume are not from the area because these areas have been completely abandoned and they're very degraded.
And there are these abandoned buildings where illegal immigrants find a safe place to stay and they just become like a hotbed of crime and drug dealing.
We're showing on the screen now the counter protest implying that Salvini is turning this teenager Desiree's body into a political tool.
I suppose there is something to be said for that, but it's also a problem that needs to be resolved.
And is he doing, I mean, I understand.
I mean, I think you're right.
I think the European Union does not like Salvini.
They want to stop him in any way they can.
I don't know if these are organic protesters or paid protesters.
I don't know.
But I suppose the criticism of him could be valid if it was just a PR stop.
Is he taking steps?
Can he, does he have the power to deport people?
When you say the European Union is trying to stop him, can they?
Or can he just order the police to give these folks a summary trial, put them on a plane and get them out?
Well, it's not that easy.
Well, he should be able to do so because he's the interior minister, which means that he's responsible for security in the country.
But the problem is that there's basically national countries are no longer controlled by their national governments, but by supranational organizations like the European Union.
So the problem when you have an interior minister or a government that wants to take action that is contrary to what these supranational governments or organizations want, then they face a lot of backlash, whether it's in the media or just it trickles down into the government and they get threats and things of that sort to stop them from doing so.
So that is really the issue at this point.
And I'm not sure how he's going to be able to deport 100,000 of illegal immigrants, but it was a campaign promise.
So we'll see what happens.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
I just returned from the United Kingdom where I was there for Tommy Robinson's trial.
And you strip away all the sound and fury.
And the thing that motivates Tommy is the phenomenon that's been going on in the UK for actually decades of rape gangs.
So these are predominantly Pakistani Muslim men who collectively work to exploit young girls.
You mentioned this was a teenage runaway or a prostitute.
In the case of the United Kingdom, they're usually just working class British girls as young as 11 who were sort of tricked and trapped and exploited.
But then the rape gangs do continue over the course of years in some cases.
There are the odd murder, but often it's just these girls are trapped and exploited.
In the UK, the British response is typical Britons, stip upper lip, keep calm and carry on.
It's almost like they're trying to restrain themselves and Tommy's the only one shouting about it and they want to shut him up.
Italian Vocalism Contrast00:09:01
It seems to me that Italians, I don't want to make a stereotype, but Italians are more vocal, are more, you know, don't have that stiff British upper lip, just shut up about it.
I guess I'm trying to make a comparison.
You've got a migrant crime wave of rape in the UK, and the establishment basically says, hush up, don't talk about it.
I'm going to guess that Italians are different.
Am I stereotyping?
No, you're not.
I mean, we're not really the kind of people that will go in the street and protest.
We're not really a revolutionary kind of people.
There were never really revolutions in this country.
However, I would say that culturally speaking, political correctness is not as extreme as it is in places like the United Kingdom or even the United States.
So Salvini can talk openly about immigration statistics and crime statistics without getting this insane backlash and being, well, he is being called a racist anyways, but it's not, the debate is not as polarized and the dialogue isn't as toxic as it is in the UK, I would say.
I have one last question for you.
I was observing the election in Brazil and Yair Bolsonaro won.
And he has some characteristics of Salvini and some of Trump.
I think he's more radical than either man.
And I think Brazil is in a more desperate state than either America or Italy.
Has there been any Italian reaction to Bolsonaro?
Is he regarded as a fellow traveler to Salvini?
He's a character larger than life.
I see Bolsonaro has tweeted that Donald Trump gave him a friendly phone call.
Is there any connection?
I'm trying to look at connections between nationalist populist groups around the world, and I wonder if there's one between Italy and Brazil.
Yes, Mattel Salvini actually showed his support on Twitter for Bolsonaro, and I would say he shares the stereotypical traits and even causes of other populists like Mattil Salvini or Donald Trump.
Really what it boils down to is guaranteeing people that they can feel secure in their homes and on their streets and they can have secure jobs.
And that's all it boils down to.
But somehow the left really globally seems to have committed suicide in a way because they have focused more on the issue of political correctness rather than what they used to be about, which was protecting families and protecting work for particularly vulnerable people, so the working classes and the middle classes.
I see news that Angela Merkel has announced that she will not run again and her term will expire in a couple of years.
Is this regarded as some sort of a victory or some sort of statement of defeat in Italy?
I know that Germany and France have been very critical of Italy, its economic approach, but also its approach to open borders.
Give me the Italian take on Angela Merkel.
Well, she's not very much liked in this country on either side of the aisle, really.
And even in Greece, I think she's even more hated in Greece.
She's not popular in Southern Europe in general because of her austerity policies that have really damaged southern European economies.
So I think people are like, no one has made a public statement yet, but people are happy.
I would say that finally the era where Merkel rules over Europe is almost over.
And we'll see who comes next.
But it's not promised that actually the next Chancellor of Germany, even if he or she is a populist, it doesn't mean that they will get along with other European populists.
It's not automatic anymore because now that really The populists have gained momentum.
Now they are taking care of their national interests, and sometimes they can clash.
So, what happened recently is that the AFD from Germany said that Italy's budget plan was unacceptable and was actually crazy, to use the words of the leader of the AFD.
So, in this case, the AFD is actually more extreme than American when it comes to Germany's policies towards Southern Europe because the AFD thinks that Germany has been taken advantage of and has essentially bailed out the country, these countries, at its own expense.
I have just one last question for you.
I'm just so curious, and you're one of my doorways into Italy.
It's a country I didn't honestly pay a lot of attention to, but I think that it's moving so quickly on important files.
And I find it hard to get real information about Italy the same way I find it hard to get real information about Hungary because I think the mainstream media is hostile to the new governments in places like that.
I want to ask you about Italian feelings towards America.
I think Brazil has been somewhat hostile to America, but Bolsonaro seems very pro-American.
Is your ordinary Italian skeptical of America, loving of America?
Do they have fond feelings towards America?
And how about Trump?
I mean, here in Canada, it's a cottage industry to hate Trump.
What does the average Mario or Luigi on the street of Rome think about Donald Trump in America?
I think that they are, they like Donald Trump as, you know, the ordinary people, the same people who voted for the five-star movement and for the League, like, are sympathetic towards Donald Trump.
At the same time, they view America as, you know, it's a complicated relationship because over the past few decades, America has really been the leader of liberal internationalism in Europe.
And so, and also interventions in the Middle East, which have dragged Europe into wars that many European countries didn't want to get into.
So, I'm not sure exactly.
It's a complicated relationship, but they're definitely supportive of Donald Trump.
And they don't have anything against Americans, but just like the neoconservative agenda that has really dominated America on the global scale for the past few decades.
Well, I find it very interesting, and I appreciate your help in navigating these issues.
I admired your courage in covering the mass migration from Africa into Europe, especially after the West deposed Mo Mar Gaddafi.
And it's interesting to see if that will be undone.
Thank you for giving us the time, and we hope to keep in touch with you, Alessa.
Thanks for having me.
All right, our pleasure.
That's Alessandra Bocci, an independent freelance journalist based in Milan, Italy.
Stay with us.
More Ahead on the Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
Paul writes: They couldn't jump on this tragedy quickly enough.
People aren't buying it.
They went too far a couple years ago after the 2016 election, and they just keep going further.
The media party has become a joke.
Yeah, you know what?
What was so interesting to me was to see the rabbi of the synagogue himself, who I presume was there when the attack.
And he said, Trump's my president.
I'm a citizen.
He's welcome here every time.
It would be super weird to say anything other than that, just if you're a person of any leadership and any civic duty at all, let alone to go with CNN's weird partisanship after 11 of your flock were just killed by a madman, not by Donald Trump.
CNN's so gross, but no grosser than any other mainstream media.
Robert writes, Soros is now a protected name that can't even be mentioned.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
I mean, if you criticize George Soros, you're called anti-Semitic.
The funny thing is, George Soros, while ethnically and I suppose hereditarily Jewish, he has renounced Judaism like his father has, and he's quite active against the Jewish state.
I suppose if Judaism is defined genetically, like you were born to a Jew, yeah, he's Jewish, but in his heart and his mind and his actions and his words, he's about the most hostile thing to Israel around.
Fighters and Legal Prosecution00:03:31
You know, saying that criticizing globalism is code for criticizing Jews is insane when you realize that the most globalist institutions, the United Nations, and I'd throw the EU in there too, are very hostile to Jews and to Israel.
On my interview with T. Lee Humphrey, Francis writes, if you are a terrorist, a Canadian is a Canadian extends to, if you're not a Canadian, you're a Canadian.
Well, that's the thing about Jihadi Jack.
I've read that he has not ever set foot in Canada, and I would believe that.
I haven't quite exhausted my curiosity and confirmed that, but there really is no tie there other than his dad has a joint citizenship or something.
So for him to try and weasel his way out of the UK into Canada and for Trudeau's bureaucrats and diplomats to assist is super gross.
And what bothers me is that we haven't charged any of these terrorist returnees.
As Lee and I discussed, you don't need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law that someone threw a grenade or, God forbid, raped a raped slave in Syria.
You don't need that kind of proof.
Those legal standards that we use in the court of law don't apply to the theater of war.
And so our criminal code and other anti-terrorism laws take that into account.
Simply going there, simply showing support, giving support to ISIS is a crime in itself because we can prove those in a court of law.
If you went over there, we don't have to know what you did in secret in Syria to convict you.
And that's what's so irritating is that law's been on the books for, I think, since 2001.
I'd have to check the dates on it, but those are not new laws.
Maybe they were freshened up recently, but we haven't, I don't think we've ever used them, or at least not against ISIS returnees.
And I think we should.
What was so gross is how Christian Freeland called these murderers and terrorists fighters, foreign fighters.
No, they're not fighters.
Fighters, it's a neutral word.
At worst, it's even a positive word.
They're not fighters.
They're terrorists.
They're rapists.
A fighter, you don't bestow the word fighter on a terrorist, a murderer.
You wouldn't call a Nazi SS guard a fighter.
We've got this fighter.
He's really feisty.
It's so frustrating.
I would like to inquire further, and I need to figure out the law.
Can Doug Ford have his attorney general prosecute these returning ISIS, ISIS terrorists, ISIS fighters?
There's a word fighter.
Under these anti-terrorism laws, I think the answer is yes.
The only practical question would be would the police and the RCMP and CISIS cooperate?
And frankly, if they didn't, that's a scandal we need to know.
I think Doug Ford should force the issue and prosecute them and use his OPP Ontario Provincial Police to do it.
I need to speak with an expert on how police and prosecutors and the law and the courts work together because I just don't know that off the top of my head.
But I've got to think that it doesn't all rely on Justin Trudeau.
I got to think that a provincial premier can prosecute in his own territory.
All right, I've gone on a little bit too long there, but it's reminded me to dig into that a bit.