David Menzies critiques Radio-Canada’s 2018 Bye-Bye Show sketch mocking Justin Trudeau’s India trip, condemned as racist for Bollywood-style dancing and Hindu tradition caricatures despite Trudeau’s own past "too Indian" criticism. Guest Lauren Gunter links backlash to $595M in government funding, white liberal guilt, and media self-censorship, noting Indo-Canadian comedians like Russell Peters face no similar outrage. Meanwhile, Toronto activists staged a vegan die-in protest against Bolsonaro, sparking comparisons to Venezuela’s activism and absurdity over dietary demands, revealing how performative outrage often eclipses genuine cultural nuance or political substance. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Justin Trudeau is mocked in an annual French satirical show, and the mainstream media is quick to call it, you guessed it, racist.
It's January 7th.
I'm David Menzies and this is the Ezra Levent 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.
Sadly, I am unilingual, but the good news is that one needn't speak a single word of French to bust a gut over Radio Canada's New Year's Eve sketch that was part of the network's annual Bye-Bye Show that satirized the Trudeau Clan's disastrous trip to India in 2018.
Of course, the usual suspect think there's absolutely nothing funny about the Trudopian sketch, which combines Bollywood with wacky tobacco.
In any event, because all comedy is subjective, you be the judge, folks.
Here's the sketch in its entirety with English subtitles.
And it's a great judgment And it's always the best or the only one Brilliant
You know, that's the sort of edgy humor one rarely sees on Radio Canada's English counterpart, the CBC.
But we live in a day and age of I exist, therefore, I am offended.
And while 2019 is all of one week old, the grief industry is still in overdrive.
Because evidently, this sketch was racist to Indians.
And wow, did the press in English Canada, ranging from the Toronto Star, of course, to the National Post, sadly, really ginned up this story, lambasting Radio Canada for being so disrespectful.
I Exist, Therefore I Am Offended00:12:44
I mean, gee, didn't Radio Canada get the memo?
You know, that the media party shall be on the government payroll to the tune of 595 million this year?
What the hell were those francophones thinking, running a parody of the media party's number one benefactor?
2019 is a year the media party plays nice with the Trudeau liberals.
The most over-the-top pearl-clutching surely came via Global News Toronto.
The bye-bye on Razio Canada is well known for poking fun at politicians, and the 2018 version was no different.
In this segment, an actor depicts Justin Trudeau smoking cannabis, and then he breaks out into a Bollywood-style dance, an obvious jab at the Prime Minister's controversial trip to India last February.
But within Montreal's Indian community, this has raised anger.
It's not the first time, you know, I'm experiencing some sort of prejudice or racism.
I see it as racism.
For one, there's the dancing, which Ina Bowick and Ashtwin Nair both do professionally.
Even the way that Prime Minister Trudeau's actor in the skit was dancing.
It's very mocking.
But the upset doesn't stop there.
Cows are very sacred to many Hindus.
And to have cows kicked, it's very insulting.
And this depiction of a snake charmer.
To depict them is actually a mockery of their ancient tradition.
Oh, geez.
Now along with the Prophet Muhammad, we can't depict snake charmers?
Enough is enough!
I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plate!
Oh, by the way, did you notice that scene in which cardboard cows are knocked down?
The assault is carried out by a gorilla that is meant to resemble Donald Trump.
Gee, I wonder why there's no outcry about this egregious act of speciesism.
And why is it when a comedy troupe parodies Indian culture, that's cultural appropriation somehow, but when Prime Minister Zoolander himself does the Bollywood thing, that's okay?
I mean, check out the real Justin Trudeau doing some Indian dancing at the India-Canada Association of Montreal a few years ago.
You know, folks, I really try to avoid ad hominem attacks, but what an idiot.
And yet, the hate on by the PC Snowflakes continues.
I love this over-the-top posting in the Radio Canada comment section by Maha Khan, who stated, I've experienced a lot of ignorance and racism growing up.
However, I've never in my life been as offended as I was after watching this video.
The most disgusting video of all time.
End quote.
I think i'll defer to mr Shatner to respond to that, but at the time of writing, Radio Canada does not thankfully, appear to be caving into its critics and issuing any sort of mea culpa.
Nor should it If anyone needs to apologize, it is surely the Prime Minister.
That Indian trip was an off-the-chart fiasco, a costly endeavor that did nothing but give Canada a black eye on the international stage.
And that's the thing, isn't it?
With its bye-bye show, Radio Canada is striving to be intentionally funny.
But our Prime Minister, well, he just can't help himself when it comes to being unintentionally funny, all the while doing such great damage to this country in the process.
And there's nothing even remotely humorous about that.
Well, as I made note of in the monologue, a genuinely funny sketch lampooning Prime Minister Trudeau on Radio Canada is almost being treated as a hate crime in certain circles.
But not when it comes to Lauren Gunter, who...
who recently wrote a column in the Edmonton Sun entitled, Relax.
It's okay to make light of Trudeau's India trip.
And joining me now from Edmonton is Lauren Gunter.
Happy New Year to you, my friend.
Happy New Year to you.
Thank you.
Now, it is a new year, Lauren, all right, but it looks like the same old, same old bizarro world PC nonsense is steaming ahead at Warp Factor 5.
Lauren, forgive my lack of cultural sensitivity, but I didn't even know that knocking over cardboard cows and making fun of snake charmers was the sort of material that might get you hauled in front of a human rights tribunal.
Neither did I.
And I think when you said steaming ahead, that's exactly what this is.
It's just steaming.
Radio Canada has a show called Bye-Bye every New Year's Eve.
And apparently it's one of the highest rated shows on the entire network.
People tune in every year to see who they lambaste and lampoon and just generally make fun of.
And this year, one of the main sketches was one of an actor playing Justin Trudeau, who in a marijuana-induced haze thinks of a way to bring up his sagging popularity by going to India.
And we all know what happened with the Prime Minister in India and his Mr. Dress Up Tour of the subcontinent and all the costume changes and even Indian media were saying he's out-indying the Indians.
So he's too Indian for India.
It's what one of the main newspapers in India said of the Prime Minister's tour.
So he's ripe for plucking at the end of the year and ripe for lampooning.
But unfortunately, because a ape dressed or sort of a Donald Trump looking ape kicks over a couple of cardboard cows and because Trudeau himself plays a little recorder like a snake charmer and two gasoline hoses come Waving out of baskets next to him.
Some people in the Indo-Canadian community have complained that this is racist, it's insensitive to their culture, etc.
Of course, it's insensitive to their culture.
That's what lampooning is all about.
That's what satire is for.
And if you cannot have lampooning of culture, if you can't have lampooning of politicians, then democracy suffers.
I mean, it sounds like a big giant leap there.
But first of all, if you can't lampoon your leaders, then who's really in charge?
In a democracy, the people are supposed to be in charge.
Too many times we aren't already.
But if we can't make fun of our leaders for fear of reprisal, then certainly we're not in charge.
That's number one.
And number two is, of course, everybody has to be the subject of lampooning or the potential subject of ridicule.
That's just the way democracy and free speech works.
And too often now, what with gender identity and racial identity and social media and political correctness, there just isn't any humor anymore because everybody's so quick to be outraged when they perceive their identity to have been offended.
And if I can touch upon that point, you mentioned members of the Indian community in Canada.
I would like to think, and I think I'm right about this, the Indians I know can give a joke as well as take one.
They love the APU character in The Simpsons.
Yet somehow the mainstream media digs up through their Rolodex the grief industry dispensers.
I mean, you quoted one woman in your column, Con, and this is what she said about the sketch.
I've experienced a lot of ignorance and racism growing up.
However, I've never in my life been as offended as I am after watching this video, the most disgusting video of all time.
You know what, Lauren?
I would say to this, if you're an Indian living in Canada and that was the most disgusting and the most offensive video you've ever come across, you've had a really easy go of fitting into Canadian society.
Exactly.
That's not even the most disgusting video that was posted to the internet in the hour that that one was posted to.
I guarantee you there are far more offensive, not just politically and culturally, but actually visually offensive videos that were posted to the internet within 10 minutes of that one being posted.
If you watch Saturday Night Live, if you watch This Hour Has 22 Minutes, if you watched the old Rick Mercer report, you saw sketches like this every week, two and three and four sketches every week.
This is nothing out of the ordinary.
It is nothing that requires the grief industry, as you correctly called it, to get up on its high horse and say that bad things are being done in the name of humor.
You have to be able to take a joke.
And that was something that we all understood until very recently.
And I think something you're touching on just a minute or two ago there is very important.
It's not always the people in the culture or members of the race or members of the community who are the ones who are taking offense.
It's an awful lot of times it's white liberals who are guilty about this, who take offense on behalf of communities that they're not part of.
They're so worried about political correctness that they stand up for people who themselves are not offended.
I mean, Canada's number one comedian right now is Russell Peters, who's an Indo-Canadian, well known around the world, takes issue and makes fun of all sorts of racial stereotypes and cultural stereotypes and norms.
He's hilarious.
picks on people in the audience all the time based on on their identity and gets away with it because he's really really funny so I think that can I interject what I think Because I think you've touched upon something very important here.
When I look back at the TV shows I loved when I was younger in the 70s and 80s, Benny Hill, Monty Python, they were merciless in terms of parroting ethnic groups.
I mean, for goodness sake, Benny Hill used to wear blackface when he depicted Ugandan dictator Edi Amin.
And there was nothing, no outcry.
Can you give me an idea what your theory is that in the 40 or so years since then, why have things changed so much that we're all so hypersensitive about any kind of jokes regarding a race or a religion?
Well, first of all, I think there is, as I mentioned just a minute ago, this white liberal guilt that, you know, we have to show how sensitive and tolerant we are by standing up for all the other little communities around us whenever we believe they're being offended and we have to stamp down any kind of expression that might be offensive.
I think there's also this has been accelerated by social media because now all of a sudden people who didn't realize they were part of a community have all sorts of thousands of followers or thousands of people they can follow who have the same identity.
And rather than just sucking things up, now they can sit around to let it stew with other people who have the same characteristics.
Vegan Activism and Outrage00:05:41
And then the third thing is it's just this instant outrage that you now have a largely anonymous way of expressing your outrage.
You don't have to accept the consequences of your outrage and your fury.
And you get to vent all of this on social media.
And very seldom does it ever come back on you.
So it's easy to be outraged.
It's possible to find other people who have like-minded outrage.
And then, of course, there's the forces of political correctness who think they need to get into every decision, every statement, every action by every person and make sure that there's nothing in any of them that offends anyone else.
Lauren, one last question, and we've got about a minute if you can answer it in that timeframe.
I got the vibe from the mainstream media coverage of this that it was almost like overwhelmingly negative about Radio Canada having the temerity to air this in the first place.
And what I sort of took from that is almost, you know, we're, you know, it was kind of like, guys, didn't you get the memo?
We're getting a $595 million bailout this year.
We're not supposed to be upsetting Daddy Big Bucks Trudeau.
What are you thinking?
What's your take on that, Lauren?
You know what?
I don't think there's as much of that that's overt.
But what I worry about in that $600 million gift to media is that people will subconsciously start pulling punches.
They'll subconsciously start saying things nicer about the government or asking softer questions, not probing quite as hard.
That's my big concern about that.
And I can see in some of the response to this Radio Canada skit that that's sort of happening already.
Fantastic.
Well, Lauren, we'll have to wrap it here.
The good news, let's leave it on a positive note.
To my knowledge, as of right now, Radio Canada has not apologized.
They have not.
That is an anomaly in this day and age.
So good on them.
They refuse to apologize.
So that's good for them.
Absolutely.
Lauren, thank you so much.
And again, happy new year to you, my friend.
You too.
Great.
And keep it here, folks.
More of the Ezra Levin Show to follow right after this.
For starters, on New Year's Day, the so-called animal rights activists blocked traffic at a major Toronto intersection as they staged a die-in to, get this, protest the inauguration of Brazil's new president, Mr. Bolsonaro.
According to a CTV report, organizers of the protests say nearly 50 people participated.
Here's a photo that ran with the CTV piece.
I'm counting 19 people, including the ones who appear to be wearing oversized Muppet costumes.
Now, some activists held signs urging President Bolsonaro to, quote, go vegan or we die, end quote.
Huh, let's see now.
Go vegan or die, eh?
You know, I think I'm opting for the electric chair, please.
I kind of like the idea of leaving behind one final little carbon footprint as I depart to the sweet hereafter.
Even so, Anita Kranjik is an organizer with Toronto Climate Save and the Extinction Rebellion.
Gee, that sounds like a whole lot of activism.
Anyway, she told CTV that vegans want Bolsonaro to live on a plant-based diet for a month.
That's right, they want him to be as miserable as your average vegan.
Well, lots of feedback regarding those militant Toronto vegans staging a die-in protest against South America's most egregious regime.
No, not Venezuela.
We're talking Brazil here.
Gee, do you think there was something more to this protest than the pursuit of veggies?
In any event, here's what some of you had to say.
James Harris writes, someone should set up a hot dog stand next to their protests.
Oh, I don't know, James.
In this day and age, that might just be construed as a hate crime.
And Silver Bain writes, doesn't eating tons of veggies like Brussels sprouts and cabbage make them fart as much as the cows they claim are the highest methane producers?
Surely we could pop bubble covers over cow pasture and make use of all that gas.
Then at least the cows have an excuse to go on living.
Indeed, Silverbane, and we'd have an excuse to go on eating them.
Maria Fonseca writes, I'm vegan, but I agree this is getting out of hand with this stupid vegan people.
Well, thanks for weighing in, Maria.
But here's my question.
Are most vegans reasonable people like you?
Or are you the proverbial statistical anomaly?
And Andrea writes, bring vegetables to Venezuela.
They need food now.
Oh, that's just for starters, Andrea.
Don't forget about Venezuela's toilet paper shortage, too.
Funny though, that because Venezuela is a wannabe socialist panacea, that country gets a pass, but a nation now being ruled by someone known as Brazil's Donald Trump gets vilified.