Stephen Harper critiques Canada’s media for alleged Unifor-funded bias against conservatives, contrasting Trudeau’s scripted interviews with his own sharp, unfiltered discussions like the Ben Shapiro appearance. He warns populism can’t be ignored if it reaches 5%–20% support, citing trade deals and immigration as key issues, while defending nationalism as distinct from far-right extremism. Harper’s shift toward Trump-like policies marks a break from past skepticism, unlike Scheer’s or Kenney’s avoidance of immigration debates. The episode also defends Bohemian Rhapsody against politicized critiques, celebrating Freddie Mercury’s artistry and Live Aid performance—where his Parsi family’s Zanzibar exile, framed as "Muslim aggression," sparks debate—while rejecting attempts to weaponize cultural icons for progressive agendas. Harper’s approach signals a return to bold, principle-driven conservatism over performative neutrality. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Stephen Harper gives a significant interview to a U.S. conservative blogger, and it's great.
We'll show you the highlights.
It's November 19th, and this is the Ezra LeVance Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I like the fact that Stephen Harper has a new book out, and he's on a bit of a book tour, but he is not meeting with all the Canadian mainstream media, the media party, as I call it, or as I call them now, the Unifor media.
You know why.
They're the journalists who are spending their own money in their own journalists' union in an official campaign to defeat Andrew Scheer.
I mean, that's literally reporters who claim to be neutral and objective in their reports on political leaders than taking their own personal money in the form of union dues deducted from their paychecks and handing it to those union bosses to campaign for or against the same political leaders about whom they report.
And obviously, they're against conservatives and for Trudeau, but I don't think it would be better if they were the other way around.
I just can't believe it's allowed.
The journalists of the Globe and Mail and CTV and Global and the Toronto Star and a dozen other media outlets are literally allowed to campaign against the people they cover.
I don't know how their editors can accept that gross conflict of interest.
That'd be like a financial columnist advising people to buy certain stocks in the stock market or sell other stocks without disclosing that they had a stake in those companies.
Here's a Unifor journalist, by the way, named Don Martin at the Unifor company called CTV complaining about Stephen Harper.
He says, strange how a former Canadian prime minister is plugging his Right Here, Right Now book almost exclusively in U.S. media.
Wrong country, wrong market.
Yeah, is it really strange, Don, or is it strange that Don Martin can give his own money to campaign against Stephen Harper and his successor, Andrew Scheer, without an asterisk on everything he says that has a disclaimer right on the screen?
Anyways, Harper sat down with an American conservative pundit named Ben Shapiro.
We've interviewed him before.
He sat down for a full hour.
I watched it, and it was great.
And what a surprising and refreshing change from Justin Trudeau's banalities.
I mean, Trudeau really can't go for more than a few moments before he runs out of script that he had just memorized.
He never allows himself to be interviewed at any length by anyone who is firm or independent or could ask him tough follow-up questions.
He either does student events or he talks to his own state broadcaster and you can see just how tough they are on him.
That's Rosemarie Barton there just grilling the guy.
I love you.
Can you sign my chest?
Anyways, McLean's magazine is just as bad, really.
They get $1.5 million a year from Justin Trudeau.
Boy, are they tough on him.
Look at all these covers.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, look at that.
Once in a while, Justin Trudeau, who was a substitute drama teacher before he got into politics, once in a while he manages to memorize a few lines to sound super smart.
Remember when he rattled this off?
When we get to the media questions later, I'm really hoping people ask me how quantum computing works.
I was going to ask you to explain quantum computing, but when do you expect Canada's ISIL mission to begin again?
And are we not doing anything in the interim while we prepare?
Okay.
Very simply, normal computers work by quantum computing, but most of you, normal computers work, either there's power going through a wire or not.
It's one or a zero.
They're binary systems.
What quantum states allow for is much more complex information to be encoded into a single bit.
Regular computer bit is either a one or a zero, on or off.
A quantum state can be much more complex than that because as we know, things can be both particle and wave at the same times, and the uncertainty around quantum states allows us to encode more information into a much smaller computer.
So that's what's exciting about quantum computing.
Yeah, that was sort of embarrassing.
Did you hear how he sort of asked for the question and begged a reporter to ask him because he had been practicing all morning that little line and he just had to spit it out before he just plain forgot it?
Try asking him to regurgitate that now and I don't think it's going to sound quite as smart as he normally does.
Remember this?
Favorite Baltic nation?
That's not a thing.
Yeah, the Baltic nations, they are a thing, actually, Justin.
See, that's what happens when he gets asked a question that he's not prepared for.
Anyways, enough about the dummy in the Prime Minister's office today.
And by dummy, I mean like a ventriloquist dummy.
He says whatever General Butts tells him to say, and it's sort of embarrassing.
Trudeau doesn't have any core beliefs of his own other than the legalization of marijuana and his own sense of entitlement.
The rest, he just sort of shows up and smiles and sometimes he dances.
So yeah, I guess both meanings of the word dummy, come to think of it.
Listening to Stephen Harper is a startling contrast.
After three years of being dumbed down by Trudeau, you really should watch the whole thing if you've gone an hour.
I think I'm a pretty busy guy, and I didn't want to take a whole hour to watch it.
But once I clicked on the video, the time flew right by.
It was great.
Now I'm going to show you a few excerpts from this interview Ben Shapiro did with Stephen Harper.
The questions weren't bad.
Frankly, I was a bit disappointed in some of Ben Shapiro's points, to be honest.
He was surprisingly pro-globalist on the questions of China and open borders immigration to the States.
But his questions were fair enough, and he certainly let Harper answer them.
And Harper did answer them very well, by the way.
That's the thing.
You know that Don Martin would disagree with everything Harper says, but it wouldn't be a genuine interview.
It would be Don Martin reading a series of gotcha questions written by some other uniform media activist.
Why would Harper even waste time on that?
So without further ado, here's Stephen Harper and Ben Shapiro on populism and how if there's too many people on the fringe, well then maybe it's not a fringe anymore, is it?
Yeah, this was a fight that I had with a lot of the people who considered themselves populists, is that I looked at Europe and I said, I don't want the American Republican Party turning into a European far-right party because it seems like there is actually a distinction.
And you obviously being from Canada, maybe you can either tell me whether this is correct or not, that American conservatism is of a slightly different brand than conservatism in Europe or in other countries, in that based on the idea of God-given rights protected by a limited government, the essential assumption is that if something comes up, it is not the government's job.
And populism sort of suggests there's a problem, and now it is the government's job.
And so if there's a problem in your town and you've lost jobs in that town, now it's the government's job to step in and fix it.
Or their fault.
If the government caused it, it is, particularly.
And look, so we can debate whether certain movements in Europe are far right or they're just kind of populist conservatives or are they actually far right?
I think it's the wrong question.
The question is, are they being fueled by legitimate grievances?
And I guess I would argue, and I say I argue this, someone who ran the largest per capita immigration program in the world.
I would argue that when you are letting hundreds of thousands of people illegally or irregularly overrun your borders, that is a legitimate grievance.
And if you get any kind of a movement out of that, including a far-right one, don't point the finger at the people for voting for it.
Point the finger at the policymakers who allowed such a crazy policy to bring about that outcome and fix the policy.
You know, the one thing I would say that when people, you know, it's easy to condemn.
In fact, I had a rule in my, you know, I united the conservative movement in Canada, been divided into historically two parties and various factions.
But I always said, you know, if I got one or two percent on the right of me, that's fine.
But when you get 5% or 10% or 20% or infamously with Hillary Clinton, 45%, 46%, and you're calling them fringe, there's something wrong with you.
We live in a democratic society.
You can't start condemning large segments of the population as fringe.
If they're voting for that, you've got to address their concerns, and especially, as I say, if their concerns are legitimate, so you can complain about the policies of those, quote, far-right parties, but offer an alternative.
Don't pretend they don't have a legitimate issue.
I thought that was fascinating.
And what a contrast to how Andrew Scheer and even Jason Kenney are running their conservative parties.
They're throwing conservatives overboard.
They're avoiding tough questions about things like immigration.
And they're even occasionally mimicking the language of the leftist media in criticizing the far right, when in fact it's not far right at all to be worried about such things.
Ben Shapiro had a bad response.
He said essentially, well, what if really smart people like me know better than the unwashed masses?
It was a little bit Hillary Clintonian of him.
It's arrogance, of course.
Watch how he compares the unwashed masses to his own young child.
But watch Stephen Harper's great answer.
There are some times where my kids have a completely illegitimate grievance.
In fact, it happens on a fairly regular basis.
Their grievance is that they want candy and they can't have it, or they don't want to brush their teeth as my daughter did not last night, and she needs to brush her teeth or she's going to get cavities.
When is it possible?
Like you, I'm a man of faith.
So, you know, as a man of faith, you believe there are certain things.
I mean, God is constantly telling us that there are certain things that are morally right and certain things that are morally wrong.
But I guess what I would argue as a more pragmatic politician is that most things that are morally wrong are actually pragmatically bad for you over time.
And that's why we as conservatives don't advocate them.
We advocate instead solutions that may not always be what people want to hear, but they've got to be things that at least address their concerns.
When somebody says, let me give a practical example from the last campaign of why Donald Trump won, when somebody says, you know, we've had deindustrialization of my entire region.
My kids have no economic opportunities, no jobs, et cetera.
And your response to them is, well, I'll cut the high marginal rate on taxes.
That doesn't really address anything they're worried about.
So you've got to come up with policies that address their concerns.
And that's where I talk about the pragmatism.
Yeah, that's a good point.
It also is a bit condescending to compare an infant child to a grown-up adult voter.
Now, one of the best points Harper made was on trade, especially trade with China.
And Harper doesn't need to take lessons from anyone on free trade.
I think he signed more free trade deals in his term in office than every other Canadian prime minister combined in history.
But he knows what Trump knows, that there is such a thing as a bad trade deal.
Watch this exchange.
I'll let it run a bit.
Again, I don't want to focus on Ben Shapiro's aggravating point that, well, sure, all the factories are gone, but now our cell phones are $25 cheaper.
At least Ben let Harper answer, unlike a unifor journalist would.
Take a look.
President Trump came along.
I remember when we had this debate in the election, he came along and he started talking about good deals and bad deals.
And people went, oh, you know, some, quote, economist started saying, oh, wow, he's a protectionist, bad deals.
He could be a protectionist.
But can you have a bad trade deal?
Absolutely, you can have a bad trade deal.
I mean, when companies, let's forget about governments, when companies do a commercial deal with another company, why do they have dozens of analysts and lawyers and accountants working over these deals?
Because any deal would be a good deal?
I mean, seriously.
You have to really know what you're talking about when you negotiate something as complex as a trade deal.
The United States, when the United States allowed China to enter the WTO, we set up a situation, Canada's in the same boat, where the Chinese have wide-ranging, unfettered access to almost all of our economy, and we can only sell to the Chinese when, where, and in what quantity and for how long they say we can.
And obviously, in that kind of situation, what have we seen?
We have seen massive imbalances.
Imbalances, by the way, yeah, you know, economists will say a poor country like China is bound to have a trade surplus with the United States, but it's not bound to get bigger as China gets more wealthy, which is what is happening.
This is because you have a bad deal that provides grossly unequal access, and the consequence has been the outflow of millions of jobs from the United States, from Canada to China, with no discernible benefits to our working population.
So as a populist conservative, or frankly, I would say as a conservative, you don't sign deals like that.
You sign deals where you know that overall your economy is going to benefit and that lots of people in your economy are going to benefit.
The countervailing case that's been made by particularly libertarians on trade has been, why would you tax your own citizens by essentially tariffing Chinese products in order to punish the Chinese?
I mean, is the goal to have them lower their own tariffs or is the goal to cut them out of the market because they're quote unquote sucking our jobs out?
The fact is that we've gotten a lot of cheap products out of China and people tend to see that as a bad thing, but the fact is that consumer prices have been going down in the United States consistently on the variety level.
But that's a terrible argument.
You know, it's a terrible argument.
First of all, the question of whether the tariff policy is effective is a different question.
But the argument made by the apologists for the current Chinese trade relationship is: look, yeah, so we've lost all these jobs, so we've lost, you know, all these factories and everything have moved to China, but we get cheap products.
But you know what?
I get to sell stuff to you and you get to buy it.
Why Cheap Products Aren't a Bad Thing00:07:28
That's not a trade relationship.
That's a purchase.
And that's not the justification for trade.
You know, even people, these libertarians will jump up and quote David Ricardo and classical economists.
David Ricardo didn't say it would be a good idea for Britain to open its markets if it couldn't sell its goods anywhere else.
He made the argument for reciprocal trade.
And that is the core of the argument for reciprocal trade.
And the idea that a trade relationship, no matter how badly structured, is somehow good for you.
Losing jobs, losing well-paying jobs by the millions to get cheap products, which by the way, in most cases you could get from places other than China, is not an argument for the kind of trade imbalance we have seen and the kind of economic outflows we've seen.
That's, by the way, you know, obviously there's a separate question about China being a geopolitical and strategic rival.
But even leaving that aside, that's not a good economic relationship.
And the president, my view, the president, not only is right, the president deserves a lot of credit as the first president willing to take on this.
The current trade relationship with China is beneficial to a few well-connected American corporations who get to operate in China.
But it's not beneficial to the economy as a whole, and something has to be done about that.
Or we are going to see a situation where the Chinese is the largest, China's economy is the largest in the world with a grossly unequal trade access to the United States, and that's not in anybody's interest.
Wow.
I tell you, every word there.
I mean, Justin Trudeau couldn't even understand that, let alone possibly say that, let alone think it.
I really, really feel the lack of Harper's smarts, don't you?
I mean, it's just such a reminder of what we lost.
Now, one of the things that's toughest for Canadian conservatives to talk about is immigration.
Scratch that, actually.
Canadians talk about it all the time, especially Canadian conservatives.
According to Angus Reed, 49% of Canadians say immigration is too high.
That's the red line there.
31% say it's okay where it is.
And the line at the bottom there, 6%, say it's not high enough, only 6%.
Yet Trudeau is jacking it up even more.
What I really should say is that Canadian conservative politicians don't have the courage to say even the most basic things about this crisis, even though 80% of Canadians say that immigration is fine or too high.
And yet Trudeau is racing it in the face of their views.
So Andrew Scheer, Michelle Rampel, they're AWOL on this subject.
Only the new Premier of Quebec, François Legaud, has come close to criticizing immigration levels and Maxine Bernier too.
Harper knows what they know, that it's not fringe to be concerned about these culture-changing shocks brought about by unelected elites.
And even if Ben Shapiro gets cheap Mexican labor to do his gardening and housekeeping, it's still not a justification.
What's this?
Where do you stand on immigration?
So in the United States, obviously, this has become a massive question considering President Trump's position on the border.
And there are a variety of positions.
We've got sort of the libertarian position that says, you want to come in and work, come on in and work, but you don't necessarily get citizenship.
You've got the kind of far left and now mainstream left position, come on in no matter what.
We'll try and give you citizenship.
You don't have to assimilate.
You've got the hard right restrictionist position, which is you're undercutting our labor base.
Don't come in at all.
We don't want you here.
Where do you come down on that when you think conservatives have?
A couple of those things.
First of all, the Conservative Party of Canada is one of the few right-of-center parties in the world that gets a large percentage and sometimes an outright majority of the immigrant vote.
So we're very distinct that way in a way that's very positive.
I'm fundamentally pro-immigration.
I think one of the things that has made Canada, the United States, and our society successful is that we embrace newcomers who often, frankly, who are often conservatives.
They believe in family, they believe in faith, they're opposed to crime, etc.
So I actually think properly done, immigrants should be a really great base for a conservative party.
But first and foremost, immigration has to be legal.
Immigration is not a right.
Immigration is something granted by the citizens of the country through law.
I have no time for illegal immigration.
And as I've told other leaders in other countries, no illegal immigration system or phenomenon will ever be popular with a mass of people.
It just will not.
Obviously, in a modern day and age, the immigration system should be scoped primarily around the country's economic needs.
There can be humanitarian and family considerations, but it's fundamentally about the economy and about building our society.
So look, I'm fundamentally, it's what I say about so much in the book.
I'm fundamentally pro-immigration, just like I'm fundamentally pro-trade, pro-markets.
But that doesn't mean that immigration is good no matter what.
That having caravans of people invading the country would be a good thing, or that you can live, frankly, what I would consider the libertarian delusion that people will come into the country, but somehow they will have no access to social services.
It's just never going to happen.
So it's got to be a policy rooted in what we have seen to be successful over the decades.
A lot of sponsors there.
I wish Andrew Scheer spoke like that.
Stephen Harper also weighed in on nationalism and patriotism, things that Trudeau and Francis Emmanuel Macron both denounced together in the same day in Europe this month.
I'm sure they cooperated on that timing.
Here's Harper.
Lots of common sense here.
Take a look.
Let's start with sort of the perspective on nationalism.
So, there's been a big debate in the wake of President Trump about nationalism on the right.
So, there are some folks like Jonah Goldberg, I think I would count myself in this camp, who are very attached to the idea of patriotism, but not nationalism.
There are a lot of folks like Rich Lowry at National Review, again, one of our colleagues there, who's very attached to nationalism as distinct from patriotism.
Do you see a distinction between nationalism and patriotism?
Not really.
So, I argue in the book that a healthy nationalism is part of a healthy society.
You know, I think the kind of the Germanys of the world where nationalism for historical reasons become kind of inherently suspicious is just frankly just wrong and wrong for conservatives.
Now, in that sense, as I say, I'm using patriotism and nationalism as virtually interchangeable.
I would agree that if you get kind of far-right nationalism that's essentially ethnic or racial in character, it could become a different kind of beast.
But frankly, conservatives don't advocate that kind of nationalism.
I learned a lot from Harper.
Frankly, my esteem for him went up.
I think he's clearly warmed to Donald Trump, not necessarily Trump's personality, but his achievements.
It's tough not to, especially if you're an economic expert like Harper, like Harper.
I think Harper has overcome the Canadian snobbery about Trump.
I'm guessing Harper has also spent a lot of time recently with grown-ups and not a lot of time with the unifor media and pundits in the past two years.
I still like Ben Shapiro, but more for his campus battles against political correctness, taking on cultural Marxism and identity politics, than for his views on foreign trade, immigration, or Trump, which I regard as sort of never Trump and a little bit globalist.
That said, would you agree with me that he's a better interviewer as in he lets Harper answer and he's smarter than anyone in the Canadian media party would be?
I think I might get a copy of Harper's new book.
It sounds better than I thought it would be, less risk-averse than I thought it would be, maybe even more trumpy.
Bohemian Rhapsody Insights00:14:45
I might see if Harper would agree to be interviewed by me about his book, but who knows?
Maybe he's not quite that bold and populist.
But I'll check.
Stay with us for more.
Enjoy the show I also write songs.
Our lead singer just quit.
Then you'll need someone new.
I love the way you move on stage.
Cole Grim belongs to you.
Can you see where you can be?
No one will play us on the radio.
We need to get experimental.
Do it again.
One more.
How many more Galileos do you want?
Roger, there's only room in this band for one hysterical queen.
Let me go and let you go.
Mark these words.
No one will play queen.
Fortune favors the bold.
Freddy, determining your private life.
What more do you need to know?
I make music.
I want to give the audience a song that they can perform.
What's the lyric?
Ready Freddie?
Let's do it.
Well, that is a movie about Freddie Mercury, a larger-than-life rock singer with the band Queen.
You may not know his story well, but you cannot have missed his songs from We Are the Champions to Another One Bites the Dust to his rock opera, Bohemian Rhapsody.
It's an interesting story for those who love music, but it's got a bit of a politic to it.
And joining us now to talk about this is our friend Joe Warmington, a columnist with the Toronto Sun Joe.
Great to see you.
Great to see you too, Ezra.
And it's interesting that we're talking about this subject because you wouldn't think that a movie about an entertainer would cross over into that nasty kind of Trump-like politics, but it has.
Well, yeah, I mean, I have never gotten deep into Queen, but you got to love the brio, the energy, the charisma of Freddie Mercury.
I mean, he was over the top, but he had a style that was really like no other.
And those songs, the reason they click is they have a sustainability to them.
Well, the audience is a big part of the songs.
You know, we will rock you.
Yeah.
And he was a bigger-than-life performer.
And, you know, you say the names Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Prince, and Freddie Mercury is right there with him.
I think you're right.
Now, normally we don't go into a general movie review on the show.
I mean, I talk about cultural issues, but you raised this with me, and you said, if I can paraphrase what you told me before we turned the cameras on, that you had heard bad reviews about this, and you didn't want to prejudge it.
You didn't want to get the spoiler, but you went in there with low expectations.
Tell me a little bit about, first of all, how is the movie?
And then what was it about those reviews?
What do you think is going on here?
Well, I think something's going on for sure as I went into the movie thinking it was bad.
And then after I saw the movie, I heard how bad it was.
But I loved it.
And I was with my 18-year-old son, who's a guy who plays guitar and all that.
He loved it.
And the audience was full of people with their teenage kids that were coming out going, wow, this guy Mercury, who the heck, you know.
And it was one of the best rock and roll movies I've ever seen.
I think the only one that I liked as much, I guess, was La Bamba.
I love that.
And I also liked All Most Famous.
It's right there with those movies.
And the audience has decided.
I mean, it made $100 million over the last two weeks.
In fact, it won the first weekend, even though it was getting trashed by everybody.
Now, the politics of it, I guess, trying to figure it out, but there's a few things in there.
There's political things about where he was from.
Obviously, the whole business of his sexuality, which his whole life was an interest.
He did not want to talk about that.
And I think that perhaps he wasn't, the story wasn't enough about the gay part of his life that maybe the critics would have liked.
I don't know, but that's kind of what I'm reading into it.
That's the thing.
I mean, everyone who's a success has to be grabbed politically.
Look at Taylor Swift.
For so many years, she stayed quiet about politics.
And she was practically bullied into saying, fine, fine, go Democrats.
And can there be someone who can just be about the music?
I mean, there was a little clip in the trailer there.
I make music.
What more do you need to know?
The criticisms in the movie reviews you mentioned, were they angry that the play was not more about gay politics and gay action?
It was too much a musician.
Well, I read one piece in Vanity Fair talking about Sasha Barrack Cohen, who was originally signed on to play Freddie Mercury, and I think would have been great at it.
And it quoted him, and he was on Howard Stern's show talking about how he wanted to go more into the gay lifestyle, into the clubs in Berlin, and talk about Freddy's life there.
This was in the movie.
They alluded to it.
They did not hide it.
And we all know that that was a different time.
I mean, if Freddie Mercury were alive today, he would be okay to be married, have a family, and all those things.
At that time, there was shame to it, and it wasn't very fair.
And he was really conflicted because of his background.
But he would not have liked, and the Queen guys have said this, that the focus of his life being in the bathhouses and all that stuff.
That was recreational Freddy, but he was about the work.
He was about performing in the audience.
And, you know, there's clips in the movie, even in that trailer, where the press are really handling him.
And there's some great lines that are saying, tell us about your sexuality, look at the reporter.
Let's talk about your sexuality.
He'll throw it right back in their face.
He was very private about that.
So today's critics wanted to, they were sort of echoing those reporters of the day.
Come on, talk about sex.
Come on, talk about your lifestyle.
He said, no, I'd like to talk about my songs.
There's a line in the movie where he told the members of Queen that he had AIDS.
And he said in there that he wasn't going to be the poster boy for AIDS.
Well, I'm sure that that rankled some people.
Now, you know, I don't think that there's anything wrong with that.
Maybe at that time he thought of it differently, but he did not announce.
He probably didn't want to be defined by that.
He didn't announce he had it until the day before he died.
Now, you mentioned the members of Queen.
From their point of view, were they involved in the movie?
They were.
And so obviously this has their okay.
This is kosher by them.
Sasha Barrett Cohen said that the Queen guys wanted to kill Freddie off halfway through the movie and they thought that was ridiculous.
Now I don't know if that's true or not.
But if that is true, what Queen was trying to say was that Freddy was about Queen and Queen was about Freddy and it was an interesting story.
The three guys in Queen were all these kind of guys that two of them later became PhDs.
You know, they were really smart guys.
One guy was a dental student.
The other guy was in the astronomy and all that kind of stuff.
And the other guy was electrical engineer, the bass player.
And Freddie was this kind of interesting guy who he was born in Zanzibar.
Where's Zanzibar?
I don't know, but it's very exotic.
He was a Parsi background.
That's sort of a Persian background?
Persian background.
I mean, Freddie Mercury is obviously a stage name.
He looks a little bit different, doesn't he?
His name is Farouk Bulcera.
That's his name.
And he was raised in a very strict Parsi family, a really good mom and dad.
His dad got a job in England working for the government.
That's why they moved to London.
And he had real hang-ups about all this stuff, including his teeth, his name, and they used the P-word to describe him.
And, you know, that's a theme in the movie as well.
You know, the P-word, I won't say it, but it's a racial thing.
Somebody, say, from Pakistan.
Oh, yeah, okay.
And, you know, he would always yell back, he's not from Pakistan.
And interesting, you know, this guy, the reason that, you know, he's most famous, I think, crossed over to everywhere was July 13th, 1985.
We have to talk about that.
Live aid at Wembley.
He almost didn't do that concert for a number of reasons, including being sick.
It sort of suggests that he already knew that he had HIV before that.
But I mean, it could be some poetic license in the movie.
I don't know.
But it certainly looked like that he knew about it.
But he gave the performance of the ages.
Most people say it's the greatest live performance ever.
You know, it's on most people's list as number one.
But it almost didn't happen because they didn't tell him about it.
He was in Berlin doing a solo project in the studio working away at that, and everyone was trying to get a hold of him.
And it wasn't until the woman in his life, which is another reason I think that this movie, the love of his life, that's a song that he did, was a woman named Mary Austin, beautiful woman around, just a little younger than he was, who helped him with his style.
You saw in the clip where she's sort of putting on the clothes and this kind of stuff.
She went to him and said, why aren't you answering about live aid?
He didn't even know what it was.
And once he realized that the people had kept him out of that, he was so upset.
Don't forget he's born in Africa.
It meant a lot to him.
And the Queen guys were all very reluctant to do that too because they had not played in a few years together.
And they knew there was going to be two billion people watching.
And he had this line in the movie, which I think is pretty accurate.
He said to the other guys, we've got to put our personal stuff aside because if we don't do our part for those kids, we will never, ever be able to live with ourselves.
We'll look back and regret it.
Well, now here we are, you and me, 33 years later.
And I watched that day.
I was, you know, 21 years old.
And we're talking about that Live Aid concert and the importance that all those artists brought.
And I think that they really did help there.
That was a telethon that worked.
Yeah.
Now you mentioned Mary Austin, the love of his life.
Maybe that's what wrinkled some of the reviewers too, is that the movie treated that.
His soulmate was her.
He said in the movie that there's no man that he could meet anywhere that could ever touch his heart like Mary Austin.
And you know, to this day, Ezra, you know where she lives?
She lives in that mansion in London.
He left it to her.
She lives there.
You know what?
And again, if this were just a movie about his biography and his music, critics wouldn't care about that, but they want him to be a political weapon.
Now, you touched upon the racial epithet.
He would say, no, I'm not from Pakistan.
Did he ever deal with some racial or religious issues?
Is there a political correctness there also?
Well, you know, the movie addresses that, which I think is another reason why his family and the people that, you know, the Parsi people were forced out of Zanzibar.
And it says in the movie that it was by Muslim aggression that moved them out.
That's why they left.
I haven't read up on it.
I don't think you have.
I'm not saying that I'm an expert in that.
The movie says that.
His father was a very, very good man, but he did not understand this rock and roll stuff.
He did not understand it.
But the one thing that he did understand was when his kid went to Wembley Stadium July 13, 1985 to raise money for kids that are starving in Africa.
That party got about his kid.
Well, it sounds very interesting.
I mean, I don't have any Queen albums, but of course, like everybody, I've enjoyed watching the clips on YouTube.
Much for Mike Myers in this.
Oh, he's in there too.
Mike Myers is in this, and you won't even know it's him.
And ironically, he plays the guy in the movie who said, what's this Bohemian Rhapsody?
We're not putting that out.
Isn't that funny?
Well, listen, Joe, I really appreciate you talking about this.
I don't think I would have gone to see the movie on my own.
You have to go see it.
I think I want to now, because if it's a good musical movie, and the box office suggests it is, the clips suggest that the actor here hit it out of the park musically, which, I mean, imagine trying to walk in his shoes.
Yeah, it's pretty tough.
But the fact that all these leftist social justice reviewers are mad at the movie because it wasn't left as possible.
They're telling you not to go to it.
Well, that's a reason.
That's why I think it's important what we're doing.
I think you just go to the movie.
Bohemian Rhapsody.
Well, I'm going to do that.
And you know, I know your audience is around the world, and I just want to say that because I'll say it again.
Bohemian Rhapsody is a great movie.
You will enjoy it.
You'll have fun.
I mean, you will have tears in your eyes because there's some sad moments and there's some dark moments.
But mostly it's a celebration of one of the greatest artists in the world and one of the people that helped raise a lot of money for a lot of people.
He was a good guy.
Well, you've convinced me.
I know that he had a certain look.
I mean, he had the teeth.
Well, the teeth you were saying.
Yeah, well, he actually said it.
He had money to get the teeth out later, but he was told that if you do that, you might not be able to sing as well.
He kept the teeth.
He had that right look.
He had a trademark look and a trademark sound.
And the fact that all these lefty critics don't like the movie, but the people do, that's convinced me to go see it.
Joe, great to see you.
All right, Esme.
Thanks for having me.
All right, there you have it.
Joe Warmington, the scrawler.
He writes for the Toronto Sun on a variety of beats, political beat, crime beat, but today he was talking to us about a movie that I am going to go see.
Stay with us, more Ahead on the Rebel.
Brexit Punditing Fights Back00:04:56
Hey, welcome back on my monologue last Friday about Unifor announcing they will campaign against the conservatives in the next federal election.
Betty writes, shouldn't Jerry Diaz be looking out for the rights of his union members on their jobs?
Who asked him to meddle in political elections?
How can Canadians ever expect objective reporting now?
Yeah, well, not just now, but I remind you that in the last election, the Canadian Media Guild had a massive quarter million dollar campaign against Harper II, and I'm sure Unifor did.
I'd have to check just off the top of my head.
I can't remember it.
But yeah, it's not new.
I think the only thing that's new here is the brazenness with which they're showing their anti-conservative stripes.
And I think Jerry Diaz, like so many union bosses, wants to be a political boss but doesn't want to actually have to run and be subject to the will of the people.
Am I right?
Nicholas writes, the memes are hilarious.
This McLean's cover has been endlessly mocked all over social media.
Yeah, I mean, listen, who knows?
I mean, you can't measure the public's pulse by checking Twitter because it's too easily gamed and trolled.
There's too many robots and think-alikes on there.
But it was mocked on there, but that doesn't really say anything.
I just think it didn't look that compelling a cover for the five conservatives on it.
Who knows, maybe I'm wrong.
On my interview with Jack Buckby, Paul writes, Brexit in name only, May leads an establishment globalist party that calls itself conservative.
Well, you've got to remember that the Conservatives only reluctantly put the referendum to the British people to take the wind out of the sails of the UKIP party.
They were shocked when it went yes to Brexit.
They were shocked.
And they didn't want to carry it out.
Just the same way we saw Democrats in Florida try and slow walk the certification of the election of Republicans and have recounts and come up with every excuse.
Frankly, how the 2016 presidential election was disputed.
All those tricks and delays by reluctant work-to-rule type bureaucrats being done for Brexit too.
I've always said that the difference between Brexit being mauled by the deep state for two years and Trump is that at least in the person of Trump, you have someone fighting back for his own sake.
Brexit, I mean, Nigel Farage got the win, and he's sort of been semi-retired since then.
And so there was no institutional champion for Brexit.
Certainly not Theresa May, not the party that didn't want Brexit in the first place.
So yeah, it's tough.
It's interesting to see.
Let me just throw one last comment at you about it.
I see that Andrew Scheer is digging in.
In fact, he put this little tweet up.
We'll put it on the screen here for you to see.
He put up this tweet saying he's strongly for Brexit.
And he did this now.
This isn't even something he did two years ago.
And I'm thinking, well, of course, I'm for Brexit too, because I'm a Conservative and I believe in national sovereignty and I'm against the European Union.
But I'm a pundit.
Like, my job is to be mouthy and to mouth off about everything, and I have no limits on me other than my own taste.
But why is the leader of the opposition of Canada weighing into a domestic matter in the United Kingdom?
What business is it of his?
Would we like it if a British politician, especially an opposition leader, I guess it would be worse if the prime minister weighed in on a Canadian referendum?
How would Canadians like it if Theresa May, in the middle of a dispute over a referendum matter that goes to the essence of our democracy, if Theresa May weighed in?
We'd tell her to buzz off.
It's so weird that Andrew Scheer is picking that battle.
There are no votes for Andrew Scheer in the United Kingdom.
The votes for him are in this country.
All he's doing is meddling in a Trudopian kind of way.
Trudeau meddled in Brexit too, but, you know, Trudeau's a bonehead, we all agree.
What's Scheer doing?
And Scheer's late conversion to national sovereignty against supranational organizations.
Yeah, it's nice to see.
But how about we see some of that here in Canada?
I remind you that Andrew Scheer whipped his entire caucus to support the Paris global warming scheme coming out of the UN.
We don't yet know what Andrew Scheer is going to do about the Marrakesh migrant scheme that the UN is cooking up.
I think Andrew Scheer should cork it about British domestic politics and maybe fight a little more for Canadian sovereignty.
Leave the punditing on other countries to pundits.
It's just weird.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night.