Apple’s Tim Cook, contrasting Steve Jobs’ rebellious "think different" ethos, now enforces moral censorship on its platforms—banning "hate" and "division" while evading legal risks tied to Section 230. Critics argue his selective approach (e.g., targeting white supremacy but not black supremacist or anti-Semitic content) mirrors authoritarianism like Orwell’s telescreen, undermining free speech. Meanwhile, France’s Gilets Jaunes protests, fueled by 76% disapproval of Macron, expose violent far-left and migrant opportunism, potentially boosting Marine Le Pen ahead of May elections. Canada’s oil patch faces bureaucratic strangleholds (like canceled pipelines) while the U.S. under Trump expands production, yet Trudeau diverts $50M to Trevor Noah over veterans. Rebel France praises journalist Alessandra Bocchi for on-the-ground reporting, defending alternative foreign coverage against mainstream media’s blind spots. Tech giants’ moral policing risks reshaping discourse—and democracy—without accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Apple's CEO says he's going to ban controversial ideas from his company.
I think this is the time to sell your Apple stock.
It's December 4th, and you're watching The Ezra LeVant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government for why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Everybody knows the late Steve Jobs.
He was one of the founders of Apple, a genius, of course, in computing, in business, but also in aesthetics.
He rebelled against the IBM mold of thinking.
IBM's motto was think.
Which is a pretty good motto for a computer company, don't you think?
IBM, of course, goes back before computers.
That motto is actually over 100 years old.
So along comes this hippie, Steve Jobs, drug user, spiritual questor, outsider, dissident.
And his motto was, think different.
Here's a one-minute ad narrated by the actor Richard Dreyfus that summed up the style, the personality, the culture of Apple.
Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them.
But the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
Would you agree with me that the entire message there, the entire feeling, was that being controversial was okay?
That being a little bit crazy even is okay?
I think that's what it said.
I think that's what it meant.
And I think it was even true.
But Steve Jobs is gone and in his place is someone who is as bland, as vanilla, and as establishment and compliant as possible.
He's the opposite of Steve Jobs in so many ways.
His name is Tim Cook.
I really think he's more of an IBM man.
I mean, he dresses more informally than IBM like Steve Jobs.
No tie like Steve Jobs.
But I think the similarity ends there.
Tell me a breakthrough innovation that has happened with Apple under Tim Cook.
I'm not blaming the man.
You just can't will yourself into becoming a creative, transformative, disruptive one in a billion genius like Steve Jobs.
You can't just order that up.
Apple's ads these days are a little bit different.
I literally chose this next ad at random.
It was the first one I came across when I just searched the Apple commercial page on YouTube.
Take a look at what it says today.
So that's an ad for the Apple Watch.
That's a new product rolled out by Apple three years ago.
It was the first real new product line introduced under Tim Cook.
And to be honest, it hasn't exactly set the world on fire.
It's health-oriented, which is great.
Maybe I should get one after all.
But it's not really about thinking differently anymore, is it?
In fact, it's a bit more about being conformist and being optimized.
Are you optimized?
It's an IBM thing, not an Apple thing.
Did you see that moment when it told him to stand up?
Now, that's probably good advice.
Get off the couch, get some exercise.
And look what it turned into a triathlon there.
That was the focus here.
Get off your couch, get some exercise.
Of course, we should all do that.
And the AI, the artificial intelligence in the watch phone knows when you really should get some exercise.
And so that guy became better and became better and became better.
That's the name of the ad, Better You.
The ad copy accompanying the video on YouTube says, introducing Apple Watch Series 4, fundamentally redesigned and re-engineered to help you stay more active, healthy, and connected.
It's all new for a better you.
That part fundamentally redesigned and re-engineered, sounds like IBM, doesn't it?
But really, it's to make you better.
You're being fundamentally redesigned.
Now, I do need to be better, and maybe having something nag me, especially an inanimate object like a watch, not a person that I would quarrel with back, maybe it's a good thing.
But there's another word for what that watch and that whole way of thinking is.
It's called scolding.
See, it's not just redesigning and re-engineering the watch.
It's redesigning and re-engineering how you think.
Now, maybe we all need that.
Maybe I need that.
Maybe I will take the watch's advice.
And I guess you could always shut off your phone or your watch.
I think, you know, the new Apple apps and other phones too, I'm sure, they track your health.
They track your heart rate.
They track how much exercise you get, how many steps you take.
And of course, that's on top of your GPS location.
When you turn off your phone or your watch, does it really turn it off?
And who gets access to your health data?
Your doctor, that could be a good thing.
Your insurance company, I'm not sure if that's a good thing.
The government, pretty sure that's not a good thing.
A better you, that's what they were selling there.
Can I show you the Apple ad from, oh, it's more than 30 years ago now, that really shook up the world of computing and really fired the starter pistol for the whole think different idea.
This one is from back in 1984.
I remember watching this ad as a child and truly being inspired by it.
Take a look.
Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification of victims we have created for the first time in all history.
A garden of pure ideology where each worker may blow.
Secure from the pests of being contradictory force.
is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth.
We are one people.
One will, one result, one cause.
Our enemies shall torture themselves to death.
Let the people fire them with their own confusion.
We shall prevail.
On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.
And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.
So the Apple watch feels a bit different to that anti-1984 ad, doesn't it?
But who cares, I guess?
I mean, if you don't like the scolding watch, the nagging apps, the scolding apps, the better you apps, just turn them off if you can.
There's just one more Orwell reference.
If you remember in the book 1984, everyone had a telescreen in their house.
It pumped in propaganda full-time, but it was also a surveillance device.
It spied on you.
Reread the book.
And tell me the difference between those telescreens, Orwell prophesied, and the functions on your own phone, like Siri or other voice detection systems, or Amazon Echo or Google Home, that sit in your house and listen to you all the time, waiting for you to tell it to do something, like play a song, but it's listening to you all the time.
Sorry, friends, that is a telescreen.
But let me show you, and this is all by way of a preamble, to a speech given yesterday by Tim Cook.
It was at an anti-hate rally in New York City.
An anti-hate rally, that sounds like the kind of thing they did in Orwell's book 1984.
In fact, they did.
Remember that book?
The whole dictatorship had something called Two Minutes Hate.
Remember the book?
Where the government ordered everyone to express their hatred for the enemies of the day for exactly two minutes.
Can I read a passage from the book?
Here it is.
The horrible thing about the two minutes hate was not that one was obliged to act apart, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.
Within 30 seconds, any pretense was always unnecessary.
A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blow lamp.
Talk about a prophecy of online mobs, eh?
Twitter mobs hate someone really hard for two minutes, just long enough to destroy them in this modern era, get them fired, blacken their name forever, and then move on and join in with the mob and feel so, so committed to it, just for two minutes, though.
But really, that's the thing, because the anti-hate meeting that Tim Cook spoke at yesterday, well, they hate people themselves too, don't they?
I mean, they hate haters.
They're intolerant of intolerance.
And I'm not playing word games.
I mean, the right wing hates the left wing and the left wing hates the right wing and Democrats hate Republicans and Republicans hate Democrats and the Edmonton Oilers fans hate the Calgary Flames and vice versa.
As in don't pretend that only the other side has the feeling, the emotion of hatred in them.
We rename our own hate in positive words.
Passion.
Oh, I don't hate you.
I'm just passionate.
Oh, no, no, I'm not full of fury.
That's righteous indignation.
It's the other side who's hateful.
I'm passionate.
Is this guy hateful?
We will hunt monsters.
And when we are lost amidst the hypocrisy and the casual violence of certain individuals and institutions, we will, as per Chief Jim Hopper, punch some people in the face when they seek to destroy the refuge of the disenfranchise and the marginalized some Hollywood actor at some awards ceremony.
He said he was against the haters.
He was so against the haters so much he wanted to punch the haters in the face.
Yeah.
So let me show you the two minutes of hate from Tim Cook yesterday at the anti-hate rally.
Now he's so calm and bland, this Tim Cook.
He really is an IBM man at heart.
But listen to this, and then I'll, so I'm going to play it through for two minutes of hate, and then I'll give you my thoughts afterward.
Take a look.
Perhaps most importantly, it drives us not to be bystanders as hate tries to make its headquarters in the digital world.
At Apple, we believe that technology needs to have a clear point of view on this challenge.
There is no time to get tied up in knots.
That's why we only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division, and violence.
You have no place on our platforms.
You have no home here.
From the earliest days of iTunes to Apple Music today, we have always prohibited music with a message of white supremacy.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
And as we showed this year, we won't give a platform to violent conspiracy theorists on the App Store.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
My friends, if we can't be clear on moral questions like these, then we've got big problems.
At Apple, we are not afraid to say that our values drive our curation decisions.
And why should we be?
Doing what's right, creating experiences free from violence and hate, experiences that empower creativity and new ideas, is what our customers want us to do.
I believe the most sacred thing that each of us is given is our judgment, our morality, our own innate desire to separate right from wrong.
Choosing to set that responsibility aside at a moment of trial is a sin.
He's slick, that GM man, sorry, I called him a GM man, IBM man, same thing.
So let's look through it again.
Alex Jones' Conspiracy Theory00:15:20
Look at this first little bit, just for a second.
Perhaps most importantly, it drives us not to be bystanders, bystanders, as hate tries to make its headquarters in the digital world.
At Apple, we believe that technology needs to have a clear point of view on this challenge.
Yeah, no.
You make phones.
They're phones.
They're not our bosses.
You don't have a clear point of view on anything.
Just like a car maker doesn't tell us where to drive or a food manufacturer doesn't tell us how to eat it.
You can't tell us what we can or can't say on the phone.
Imagine the arrogance that your telephone can object to what you say on it.
Here's some more.
Take a look.
There is no time to get tied up in knots.
That's why we only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division, and violence.
You have no place on our platforms.
Okay, hate, division, and violence.
But those are three very, very different things.
Of course, we don't support violence.
Or hang on.
Sure, we do, actually.
Apple is one of the world's biggest vendors of movies, including R-rated movies just dripping with violence and murder.
They push violence every day, every second, for profit.
Is that what they mean?
Because Apple is all about sex and drugs and violence for a profit.
Or maybe Tim Cook means committing violence in real life.
If so, Tim, we've already got a police force.
Thank you very little.
I'm sure they'll be able to take care of any real violence.
It's against the law, always has been.
So you don't need to get involved.
Or maybe that's not what he means.
What exactly does Tim Cook mean?
I mean, there is no Apple police to arrest someone.
I suppose they could bring violence to the attention of the authorities, but we already have independent police and courts, and the accused have the right to a fair trial and the right to be presumed innocent, etc.
Is Tim Cook proposing to replace our public police and court system with some opaque private algorithm that he cooks up?
What does he mean by violence?
How can you even be violent in cyberspace?
If he means promoting violence, like calling for violence, inciting violence, well, that's a crime too.
It might even be a civil lawsuit.
Fine, give it to the courts.
Sorry, I don't trust Apple to run private corporate courts.
And what about hatred?
Well, hatred is a natural human emotion.
Like love, I suppose.
If you never feel it, if you never feel hatred in your life, you do not have a normal personality.
The key is what we do with our hate.
Can we transform our hatred into some positive things, some positive actions?
Or at least can we burn it off, let off some steam harmlessly.
By the way, free speech is the best way to do that.
Let people get a grievance off their chest.
Shutting someone up rarely changes their mind.
In fact, it often adds to their sense of grievance and persecution, and it proves to them, at least, that they were right if they have to be shut up.
And that other point he mentioned, division.
He said violence, hatred, and division.
What on earth does he mean by that?
Division is simply that we are not all unified.
Of course we're not unified.
By definition, we have controversies in life that divide us.
In fact, in many parliaments, in congresses, in legislatures, another way of saying, let's have a vote is to say, let's call for a division.
In its old-fashioned meaning, it actually meant legislators would stand up and physically divide themselves according to their views on an issue.
We are divided as a community, whether it's on boring things like what the tax rate should be or frustrating things like whether we should build pipelines or believe in the theory of global warming or personal things like abortion.
Of course we're divided.
In Canada, we have institutionalized that division.
We have something called the leader of the opposition and he's paid to divide and oppose and frankly to cause trouble for the establishment.
That criminal trial is so divided we hire people to be adversarial quarrelers, even to challenge each other's credibility.
A good prosecutor or a good defense lawyer often calls people liars.
Sometimes a life depends on the fact that they do.
So what does he mean by no division?
Well it means that Tim Cook has decided that he's going to disagree with you, but you're the disagreeable one.
He hates you because you're hateful and he's going to throw in the word violence just because no one can say they're in favor of that.
So he has to throw in the word violence to remove any objection to his censorship plan.
Here's some more.
You have no home here.
From the earliest days of iTunes to Apple Music today, we have always prohibited music with a message of white supremacy.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
I'm against racism.
I'm against white supremacy.
I'm against a lot of things as a matter of taste, not necessarily as a matter of law.
Why didn't he also say, for example, black supremacy?
I know that sounds odd, but it is a thing.
The Black Panthers, Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
Why didn't Tim Cook say he's against anti-Semitism?
And if we're against racism, are we okay with the N word?
I never say it, but you can't listen to rap music without hearing that word a thousand times.
And women being called bitches and hoes.
Is that okay if the right people say that, but not okay if the wrong people say it?
And is your, I don't know, music stereo really entitled to a point of view?
Isn't a stereo or an iPhone or an iPod, isn't it just an inanimate object?
Isn't that what we're buying?
We're just buying a tool.
I can use a hammer to hammer in a nail, or God forbid, I can use a hammer to hit someone.
It's just a hammer.
The hammer has no opinions.
The hammer has no morality.
But now Tim Cook is saying that his tool, his phone, his music app, it will have opinions.
It will have a moral code.
And maybe I'll agree with some of Tim Cook's opinions.
I don't like white supremacy.
And maybe I'll agree with some of Tim Cook's opinions on this or that subject.
But maybe even if I agree with him, I want to learn what the other side of the story is anyways.
Just for an example, as a Jew, I might want to read Mein Kampf, Hitler's book, to better understand anti-Semitism.
I don't agree with the book.
I would agree that it's distasteful, but maybe I want to read it anyways.
Maybe I want to make my own decisions and not have some anonymous algorithm tell me or not tell me, just block me.
Are they also going to block my emails?
Are they also going to cut off my phone calls when I say a key word they don't like?
I know that sounds absurd, but really how is it qualitatively different than what else he says he's going to ban in the name of curation and his moral code?
Okay, just a bit more.
And as we showed this year, we won't give a platform to violent conspiracy theorists on the App Store.
Okay, I think he meant Alex Jones of Infowars.com, right?
Is Alex Jones a conspiracy theorist?
I'm sure he is on some issues.
A conspiracy theory is a speculation, usually about some hidden collusion, often about big government or big business.
I put it to you that the entire mainstream media is deep into a conspiracy theory about Russia and Donald Trump on the 2016 election.
It's been two years, not a shred of evidence to support it, but the conspiracy theory is widespread.
And we can choose to believe the theory or not.
I don't believe it.
But why does Tim Cook get to decide which conspiracy theories are good and which are bad?
Why are official conspiracy theories, like, I don't know, like the theory that your SUV is making the globe heat up and causing hurricanes, why are those conspiracy theories cool, but Alex Jones' aren't?
Can't we each decide for ourselves?
By the way, some of Alex Jones' conspiracy theories have been proven to be conspiracy facts.
I don't know if you saw this major story in the Miami Herald just the other day showing how this billionaire named Jeffrey Epstein had a private island with young teenage girls that he systematically raped for years.
And that he would fly in political honchos on his private jet to that island with him, including Bill Clinton, who went to that island 26 times.
I know that sounds insane.
That sounds crazy.
Sounds like an Alex Jones conspiracy theory.
Yeah, but the Miami Herald just proved it was accurate in some outstanding reporting.
I bet they'll get a Pulitzer.
So I guess now it's a conspiracy fact.
You'll notice that Tim Cook called Alex Jones a violent conspiracy theorist.
I've never heard of Alex Jones being violent at all, ever.
But again, that's a deliberate Orwellian name-calling by Tim Cook, isn't it?
I mean, civil liberties types could defend a conspiracy theorist as harmless.
They could even defend a hater, because that's just an emotion.
But no one can defend violence.
Okay, what violence?
Okay, listen to this.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
My friends, if we can't be clear on moral questions like these, then we've got big problems.
Listen, Apple can have whatever moral values they want for themselves, just like Ford or GM can.
But I don't have to drive my car in a manner that GM prescribes.
San Francisco is an overwhelmingly left-wing anti-Christian city, hedonistic, shallow, even a bit pagan.
That's the vibe in all these tech companies.
That's fine.
But since when do they impose their moral values on the rest of us?
And really, if they can ban Alex Jones, why can't they ban a church they don't like?
Here's some more.
At Apple, we are not afraid to say that our values drive our curation decisions.
And why should we be?
Doing what's right, creating experiences free from violence and hate, experiences that empower creativity and new ideas, is what our customers want us to do.
Again, he's conflating violence, which is a criminal action, with hate, which is a human emotion inside your mind.
What a trickster.
But look at the other trick.
He says Apple customers want him to censor people.
Well, that can't be true.
Alex Jones had millions of followers on social media, YouTube, Apple, Facebook, Twitter.
Obviously, they didn't want Alex Jones to be banned, or they simply wouldn't have followed Alex Jones in the first place.
They didn't think he was hateful, or maybe a few of them did, but they just wanted to know what the hater had to say.
Why should Tim Cook, big brother as Orwell would call him, why should Tim Cook decide for all of us?
Since when did the phone company curate who you should talk with or not?
Don't you have a right to hear someone that you want to hear, as much as you have a right to speak if you want to give a speech?
Tim Cook believes in neither the right to hear or the right to speak if it disagrees with his own authoritarian viewpoint.
I believe the most sacred thing that each of us is given is our judgment, our morality, our own innate desire to separate right from wrong.
Choosing to set that responsibility aside at a moment of trial is a sin.
Look at the weak thinking here.
He just said there's a difference between right and wrong.
Of course there is.
But isn't that division?
He just divided the world.
He divided everyone into two parts, what he likes and what he hates.
He's doing it right there.
And he's invoking the language of moral belief and religion, really.
He says it's a sin not to follow morality and divide the world into right and wrong.
But of course he means only his own private brand of morality that you must follow.
How is what he's saying any different from, I don't know, what Alex Jones himself says, other than Alex Jones usually growls a lot.
He's not an IBM man.
Tim Cook has made it official.
He is a censor.
It would be a sin for him not to beat people.
He will apply his own brand of morality to the world and to you.
But here's the thing.
Back in 1996, when the internet was just getting going full tilt to the public, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, Section 230, you can see here.
It was designed to help handle old questions in the new media, including legal liability.
Would Google, let's say, be responsible for everything that turned up when you searched for something?
Was your phone company on the line legally?
Well, here's the key line from this statute.
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Interactive computer service was just a fancy word of what they called the internet back then, the company.
So companies, people who use the internet, were exempt from prosecution for things like defamation.
If they were just acting like a payphone company, anyone can make a call on them.
You can't see the payphone company.
They didn't create the words.
They didn't speak it or write it.
They just were a neutral platform for it.
So that's what the Communications Act, Decency Act, said in 1996.
But what would happen if the payphone company that instead of just taking your coin to take a call, what would happen if they now got involved in curating the calls?
They got involved in approving or disapproving everything said on that phone.
That's what Tim Cook just announced he's going to do.
It really is the end of Steve Jobs' think different approach, isn't it?
It really is Big Brother telling you to be a better you or else.
And it should be the end of the era of government non-interference with big tech.
If Tim Cook of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter and all the rest of them want to turn every single cell phone call, every website, every email into a personal project for moral improvement to make you better in their definition, then they're not neutral anymore.
Then they're political activists to be regulated.
They're defamers to be prosecuted.
They're liable for every word said on their systems.
They're not like a payphone anymore.
I wonder if Donald Trump has the courage to take them on, the same way Teddy Roosevelt took on Standard Oil.
Here's a political cartoon of the day more than 100 years ago.
Paris Protests Unfold00:11:59
The title you can't really see it's called The Infant Hercules and the Standard Oil Serpents.
I think one of those is meant to be John D. Rockefeller.
He busted Standard Oil into a bunch of parts.
Well, Tim Cook isn't as rich as Rockefeller, but he is more powerful.
I wonder if Donald Trump has enough Roosevelt inside of him to take him on.
Stay with us for more.
A scene,
or was the scene this weekend.
As you can tell, it was from Paris.
That's probably the second most identifiable edifice in that city, the Eiffel Tower being the first.
That's the Arc de Triomphe, a massive structure commemorating all the great military victories of France.
It's a huge traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe, but obviously shut down there with protests that verged occasionally on riots.
Now, all the folks wearing the yellow vests, that's normally what authorities look like, but those were the protesters.
They call themselves the yellow vest, they les gilet jans in French.
And it's based on a reaction to a bizarre new requirement in France that you must have a yellow vest in your dash compartment, your glove compartment, in case you have to pull over to the side of the road.
You got to put that on.
That doesn't particularly irk people, although it is very nanny state and quarrelsome, but rather the carbon taxes that are being implemented alongside them.
Huge new fuel taxes.
Well, tens of thousands of Frenchmen protested, and you saw some of the police response.
Well, our own Jack Buckby and Martina Marcota were right in the thick of it.
In fact, it was they who filmed those shots we just showed you.
And joining me now, safely back in the United Kingdom is Jack Buckby.
Jack, welcome back.
Hi, Ezra.
Thanks for having me on again.
Well, what an exciting trip.
I remember you and I were talking last week and we didn't know if there was going to be protests.
You were there for really the worst of it, weren't you?
Yeah, honestly, I was concerned about going and not getting any footage, but quite the opposite.
We turned up on the morning of Saturday to the Arc de Triomphe and our plan was just to film some nice peaceful stuff in the morning before it all kicked off at the end of the day.
But as we arrived, the minute we got there, people just appeared and you could feel this sort of stinging on your eyes.
And it never occurred to me that I should take some goggles.
And I certainly needed it by the end of the day because as the crowds grew, the police came in around that circle and got everyone stuck in that traffic circle.
And they just kept throwing these gas canisters.
The French people there told me that it wasn't a tactic.
They had nothing to achieve by throwing these canisters because it was just pushing people from one side to the other.
What they said was it was punishment.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Now, I've been observing these protests for a few weeks now.
I think this was the third or fourth weekend where they were really going.
What's interesting to me and what is so obviously deliberately buried in mainstream media coverage is that this is in reaction to many things, but the seed crystal, if you will, is the carbon tax, the fuel tax, energy poverty done in the name of elitist global warming moral panic.
Oh my God, we've got to have you change your lifestyle.
No more cars.
We're doing this for the good of the planet.
All these fancy pants.
I mean, remember, the big global warming conference was in Paris two or three years ago.
So you have all the fancy people, Emmanuel Macron, in the name of good globalist citizenship, jacking up taxes on severely normal working people who've basically said, to heck with that.
Yeah, the vibe I got, and in fact, what people told me was that it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
They were out protesting the carbon tax, but there's way more to it.
And Macron's just using it as an excuse to inflict more taxes on the people.
They're looking at proposing taxes for deliveries from online supermarkets and shopping websites, taxes on mobile phone subscriptions, on internet subscriptions.
They literally tax everything.
And they're just finding excuses.
And the carbon tax is the newest one.
But people told me that there are many places in France where they can't go anywhere on the tram or the bus.
There's no trains.
They have to use their cars.
And people have been buying diesel cars because the French government kept telling them, hey, guys, don't use that horrible petrol.
Get diesel instead.
It's better.
It's more efficient.
Buy diesel.
So everyone bought diesel cars.
And now they're taxing the diesel, making it even more expensive.
And they're going to be even putting diesel cars out of production in 2040.
So they're just making it extremely difficult for people to get by.
They're not earning much in the way of salaries anyway.
People retiring are really struggling.
And that's why when you look at these protests, you see that it's just, there's no political alignment there.
It's people from all different sides.
You know, a few weeks ago, we interviewed the author of a book called The Republican Workers' Party.
And I just, that name, I kept turning it over in my mind because I thought Republican Workers' Party, it seems like an oxymoron.
But no, I mean, if you look at Trumpism, you've got a blue-collar billionaire who's standing up for workers.
I think there's a similar thing here.
I watched all of your reports, and I know you've got more videos to come.
You interviewed one fella who said he's a nationalist, and he was concerned about open borders immigration.
So he's there.
He's complaining about spending on migrants instead of spending on French.
And then there's other people who are non-ideological.
So you had a spectrum.
Now, I want to ask you a question, though.
These protests have generally been peaceful, but I think I detect that some opportunistic leftists, like antifa and migrant groups, are sort of saying, oh, if it's a madhouse, if it's a free-for-all, let's go out and smash a few things up.
So is it accurate to draw a distinction between these Gilet Jean protesters and antifa and migrant opportunistic violence protests?
Yeah, it's fair.
So here's the facts of it.
Within the Gilets Jaunes, you do have Antifa and you do have anarchists.
Within Gilet Jaune, you also have a majority, I would say, or at least 50% of these people are just decent normal people protesting the taxes.
Then you've got a portion of them who are really angry about the taxes and they're going out for a fight.
But I mean, that's the French for you.
When they revolt, they revolt.
And then the others are the opportunistic ones, and that includes Antifa.
And you'll see in my footage of my report, which I believe is going out tonight, this report shows that every building that was torched and looted was tagged with an A for anarchist.
It was tagged with Antifa slogans.
Yellow is the new black block, black block being Antifa, of course.
So it's quite clear who was doing the rioting and the smashing up here.
I'm not saying all everyone was innocent, but it seems like a large proportion of it was the far left.
But local people also told me what they believe happened is Antifa and the anarchists went out and smashed things up and burned things, but the looting was done not again, not all, but by a lot, the migrant population, because they have these things called thief markets in Paris where they sell stolen goods.
And you can bet that the things stolen and looted that night are ending up on the thief markets this morning.
Well, it's quite incredible.
I mean, of course, Paris is one of the most beautiful cities.
It's a tourist magnet.
The Eiffel Tower, the most photographed image in the world, actually.
But that fairy tale image of Paris is certainly being undone by the violence.
Now, I see in the news today that Emmanuel Macron is sort of blinking.
He suggested he might defer the imposition of the new round of taxes by, what, three or six months?
And I got to think that's a laugh.
I mean, if someone's willing to protest or even riot, I think just saying, okay, okay, we'll delay implementation of this thing you hate so much by three or six months, that just doesn't sound like it's going to float with people who have taken tear gas to the face.
No, it's not going to work at all.
I asked, every person I spoke to, everyone who spoke English, that is, every person I asked, I said, what's going to make you stop?
Are you going to end this anytime soon?
And they replied, no, we won't end this anytime soon.
The only way we'll stop is if Macron goes.
So, I mean, not only does he have to stop the taxes, he's got to go as well before these people stop.
Delaying it?
Nah.
Marine Le Pen, the presidential candidate for the Front Nationale or the National Rally now, she tweeted earlier.
She says, isn't it funny that he's delaying it just past the May European elections, which is a good point.
Yeah.
Well, I see a new survey out that shows that 76% of Frenchmen disapprove of Emmanuel Macron.
I don't think I've ever heard an approval rating that low.
I mean, Donald Trump is a very controversial president, and things are usually 50-50 for him.
To have 76% of your countrymen say you've got to go, it's quite incredible.
He always seemed to be, to me, to be a bit of an artificial candidate.
He came out of nowhere.
He was part of the bureaucratic machine.
He's so obviously focus grouped and stage managed.
He seems a little bit like Mark Zuckerberg in terms of his lack of empathy and emotions.
He seems almost robotic.
I think personally, it's quite possible that he's replaced, you know, cut off like a gangrenous limb and some equally anonymous anodyne Eurocrat is put in his place.
But let me ask you, you mentioned Maureen Le Pen of the Rally Nationale or the successor party to the Front Nationale.
Is she benefiting from any of this?
She's definitely going to.
I wouldn't hedge bets on her doing incredibly well and just beating everyone else.
It's not going to happen anytime soon.
But she'll definitely do well.
She's already polling better than Macron for the European elections.
As of last week, I think she was on 20% to Macron's 19%, and I can only expect that 19% to go down.
Maureen Le Pen will benefit from this, but so will the far left.
The far left are going to benefit as well.
And also, apparently, there might be some new parties coming along that could sweep up some of the vote too.
So the elections in May will definitely be interesting.
Macron's going to take an absolute hammering.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
Rachel Notley's Oil Nationalization00:04:27
Let me put a little marker down.
I predict that just as he was created in a lab and appeared out of nowhere, really, I mean, he was just created a year before the election.
I mean, he was so rigged in my mind.
And I don't say that as a conspiracy theorist.
I mean, I note, for example, that Facebook deleted 30 or 40,000 pages of Maureen Le Pen support.
I just boom.
I mean, the whole thing was such a, it was so antiseptic.
I don't believe it.
I predict that he will be replaced because he's so toxic.
We'll see if that comes true.
Well, Jack, thanks to you and to Martina for going there and congratulations on the great footage.
I just want to tell our viewers that for all of your reports, and we probably have three or four more videos to come, they're at RebelFrance.com, RebelFrance.com.
And if folks want to chip in to help cover your travel and accommodation there, I'd be grateful.
So thanks very much, Jack.
Thanks so much.
Cheers.
Cheers.
There you have it.
Jack Buckby, who, along with Martina Markota, went to France for two days.
And I think their footage was actually the most interesting and the most on the scene of any reports out of France.
What do you think?
Go to RebelFrance.com for all the videos.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back to my monologue yesterday about Rachel Notley nationalizing the oil patch.
Peter writes, Notley will not get back into office again forever, so she is going to do as much damage as possible on her way out.
Yeah, I mean, this is busy work.
This is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
She also was talking about buying 100,000 barrels a day worth of rail cars.
Well, you can't just go to office depot.com and order up some rail cars.
They take maybe a year's lead time to buy.
And again, the problem with the oil patch being demarketed is not a lack of cash.
The world's energy industry has trillions of dollars in it.
Record production, record investment.
I've never heard an oil company or a pipeline company say, can I have some cash to put together an oil deal?
The oil deals sell themselves.
Northern Gateway was canceled.
Energy use was canceled.
Trans Mountain was cancelled, not because those companies lacked cash, but because there was no political will.
We don't need Rachel Notley to buy rail cars.
We don't need Rachel Notley to command and control who can produce what.
The problem is that governments, courts, and activists have blocked the actual entrepreneurs and capitalists.
We don't need some Soviet-style command economy.
It's terrible.
Robert writes, one should always be wary of a government that imposes temporary measures.
They have a nasty habit of becoming permanent, just like the temporary imposition of income tax during the First World War.
Robert, that's a great point.
But there are some things that you do them once, and they send a shock to the system because people say, oh, wow, he did it once.
Maybe he'll do it again.
So let's say in six months, this command and control supply management ordering oil companies to stop working.
Let's say it goes away.
But we've sent the message that in Alberta, oil companies should beware that they might get a knock on the door one day and it'll be some government process server saying, hey guys, I know you had big plans to produce 100,000 barrels of oil today, but lucky you, you're only going to produce 80,000 barrels of oil and so good luck.
Well, and the problem is if Jason Kenney accepts this, that lingering risk continues on into the new government.
I tell you, with Donald Trump being not just pro-oil rhetorically, but getting production up, making it legal to drill in the Alaska Arctic Wildlife Natural Refuge, getting the Dakota access pipeline built in a matter of months.
Would you really, if you had a billion dollars to invest in oil and gas, would you really put it in Canada or would you put it in North Dakota or Texas?
I mean, it's not even a patriotic question.
It's where is the less risky place.
Alessandra Bocchi: Million Exams00:03:13
On Trudeau giving away $50 million to impress Trevor Noah, Stephen writes, Trudeau can easily find $50 million to give to a virtue signaler in kind, but can't find any funds for our veterans because, well, we have no money.
Yeah, what was the line he said there?
He said, they're asking for more than we can give.
No, no, I think the accurate, they're asking for more than we want to give.
Because, of course, Trudeau has shown that there is no limit on his spending, whether it's something positively evil, like giving $10.5 million to Omar Cotter, something whimsical, like giving $50 million to a B-list celebrity in Hollywood, or just general waste and corruption like his regular budgets.
On my interview with Alessandra Bocchi, Lee writes, as a day one subscriber, I must say that I appreciate the contributions that Alessandra Bocchi has been making on the Rebel.
Thanks.
I feel like I spotted her.
She's just a youngster.
But I tell you, any young gal who actually works in North Africa, documenting the migration with her own eyes, that's someone I trust more than even an old hand who just writes from a desk in London or Washington.
And I think she speaks excellent English.
I'd say it's almost perfect, wouldn't you?
And as you, I think, I can't remember if this was a private conversation I had with her after, or it was online.
She's just finishing up her student exams or journalistic exams or something.
But once that's done, I hope that she'll do on-the-spot video for us around Europe.
Now, I know some people say, oh, you guys do too much foreign affairs.
We've got problems here in Canada.
We've got to deal with things in Canada.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, I agree.
Jack and Martina went to Paris.
That was a very interesting foreign affairs story.
There was a bit of a lesson there about globalism, immigration, and most importantly, carbon tax too, wasn't there?
And look, I bet you watch foreign news about Donald Trump.
I'm sure you do, and about Europe.
And if you're going to get it through the CBC or CTV and Global, which aren't much better, why shouldn't you get it from the Rebel?
And that's the thing.
It's so easy for us to have foreign content in the age of Skype.
Now, occasionally we do send people places on an airplane, but it's not devastatingly expensive.
We sent David Menzies down to cover the migrant caravan for a few days.
I thought that was very interesting.
And we certainly, we were being subjected to a lot of it on the CBC.
Why not send our own guy down?
So that's a long way of saying, I'm glad you like Alessandra Bocchi.
I love saying that name.
I was pronouncing it wrong the first two times I had her on the show.
Hopefully we'll have more stuff from her.
We got our little team in the UK.
We're always looking for more talent.
And frankly, we still need to hire one more person in Ontario because there's so much going on in Ottawa and in Fort Nation.
So we're on the lookout for talent there.
Anyways, that's a bit of a ramble, but I'm glad you like Alessandra Bocchi.
All right, folks, that's the end of the show for today until tomorrow.
On behalf of all of us here at our world headquarters and our Milan office, I just want to say Alessandra Bocchi one more time.