Ezra Levant exposes Justin Trudeau’s secretive ties to George Soros, citing a 2016 UNHCR-Open Society joint refugee initiative with no released records despite $595M media bailout claims. Trudeau’s push for 1M+ immigrants—half non-economic—contradicts 80% of Canadians favoring limits, while APA guidelines demonize traditional masculinity as harmful ideology. Levant and Kay critique Soros-backed cultural shifts: McLean’s Magazine urging women to regret motherhood amid open-borders advocacy, and APA’s double standard blaming societal factors for women’s struggles but framing men’s traits as flaws. Trudeau’s leadership, they argue, reflects Soros’ influence over immigration policy, media control, and anti-traditionalist agendas, risking Canada’s demographic and cultural stability. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, why is Justin Trudeau illegally hiding his dealings with billionaire George Soros?
It's January 10th and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I published it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
So what is the relationship between George Soros, the ultra-rich globalist speculator, and Justin Trudeau?
We know they're allies, maybe even friends.
But what official business does Trudeau do with Soros?
We filed an access to information request with a very specific question about that, and we just got back the reply.
I'll show it to you in a moment.
But let me give you some background first.
I'm not interested in their personal friendship.
I want to know their political relationship.
I want to know what role Soros plays in deciding Canadian government policy, including immigration.
Polls show that Canadian citizens don't determine that policy.
According to Angus Reed, 80% of Canadians either want immigration to be kept where it is or reduced, but Trudeau and his immigration minister, Ahmed Hassan, have announced that they plan to jack numbers up radically to more than a million new immigrants over the next three years, almost half of whom, by the way, will not be economically useful in Canada.
They won't be productive.
They'll be refugees or other drains on our social services.
That's according to the government itself.
I think Trudeau and Husson are trying to recreate the mess that Angela Merkel has made in Europe.
They're trying to recreate the mess at the U.S.-Mexico border.
You can see that.
They're doing the same at our own border between Quebec and New York, taking all of America's immigration rejects, including criminals and bogus refugees who have already been denied refugee status by U.S. lawmakers.
Angus Reid says only 6% of Canadians want increased immigration, but that's what Trudeau and Hassan are going to give us anyways.
So it's obviously not the Canadian public that's making the decisions.
So who is?
Has Trudeau given Soros control over that?
It's not a conspiracy theory or speculation.
It's what happens.
Here's John McCallum.
He was Trudeau's immigration minister back in 2016.
He was later sent to be Trudeau's ambassador to China.
Here he is as immigration minister telling the CBC State Broadcaster that Trudeau was teaming up with George Soros.
We are having a joint initiative and tomorrow we will announce it between Canada, George Soros, and the UNHCR.
And I know that George Soros is really interested in the whole refugee crisis and so it is normal for him to partner with us on this initiative.
And in fact, that did happen.
Here's a Canadian government press release.
It's this one.
Canada, UNHCR, and the Open Society Foundation seek to increase refugee resettlement through private sponsorship.
Let me read the first line from the press release to you.
The Government of Canada, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the Open Society Foundations, that's Soros' group, have agreed to launch a joint initiative aimed at increasing private sponsorship of refugees around the world.
Now, if that's all this was, promoting private refugee sponsorship instead of government refugee sponsorship, I'd be sympathetic to that.
I mean, that means local churches could sponsor Christian refugees who are fleeing ISIS ethnic cleansing, for example.
And that local church would be committed to paying the costs of the refugee.
And probably most important, there will be real live Canadians in the community who would take a personal stake in making sure those refugees are integrated, that they learn English, that they get a job, that they don't go on welfare, that they don't get into crime, that they don't go hive off into a ghetto.
But that's not what Trudeau did.
In fact, that announcement was in September.
But here's a news story.
Just three months later, Trudeau had capped the number of private, that is mainly Christian refugees at just 1,000.
Which is bizarre.
They were being paid for by private people.
They have a much higher chance of success.
How is that not better than government refugees in every way?
Well, they were Christians, and Trudeau has always hated Christian refugees.
But let me show you one detail in that Trudeau-Soros press release that hasn't been canceled.
It's the third point in the press release.
See, besides promoting private refugee sponsorship that Trudeau almost immediately restricted, they had a propaganda mission too.
And it's point three in their press release.
It's not a secret.
They said, provide a vehicle that mobilizes citizens in direct support of refugees and encourages a broader political debate that is supportive of refugee protection.
Hang on, that's not charity work anymore.
That's not feeding or clothing people fleeing a war zone anymore.
That's politics.
That's debating.
That's journalism.
That's ideology.
That's campaigning.
And that's George Soros' specialty.
Here's one of Soros' own documents.
Again, this is not a conspiracy theory.
This is right off his own website.
I just downloaded it today.
This is one of his European projects.
This is from 2015, when he was really pushing actually millions of Turks and Syrians and Afghans and Africans too into Europe.
But look at the countless grants to migrant lobby groups and NGOs, to journalists to write pro-immigration commentaries, to lawyers to sue on behalf of migrants, to lobby groups, to lobby politicians, to youth groups, to pollsters, to advocates, even to human traffickers.
Countless grants, millions of dollars.
Those grants aren't to actually help migrants.
They're to change politics.
And a big theme of those grants is to rebrand any opposition to mass immigration as Islamophobia.
Is Soros doing that same thing to Canada?
And did Trudeau pay Soros for his help?
Or is it the other way around?
Is Soros paying Trudeau or maybe paying the Trudeau Foundation or paying the Canadian government in some way?
What's going on here?
What's the deal?
Because Trudeau seems to be following the Soros playbook.
Trudeau and Ahmed Hassan just signed on to the United Nations Global Compact for Migration, and that creates a counterfeit human right for foreigners to immigrate.
The word right or rights is in the document more than 100 times.
And look at paragraph 33 of this UN agreement.
Promote independent, objective, and quality reporting of media outlets, including internet-based information, including by sensitizing and educating media professionals on migration-related issues and terminology, investing in ethical reporting standards and advertising, and stopping allocation of public funding or material support to media outlets that systematically promote intolerance, xenophobia, racism,
and other forms of discrimination towards migrants in full respect for freedom of the media.
So reward journalists who promote mass migration.
Punish journalists that don't.
Starve them of resources, denounce them, defame them, marginalize them, call them racist or whatever.
And that's happening, isn't it?
Trudeau just set up a $595 million bailout fund for journalists, but only for journalists he says he can trust.
And they're now officially attacking journalists who are off-message, too.
Trudeau and Hassan are actually reading from the exact same script on that.
It is disappointing to see the conservatives and the member opposites engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
It is disappointing to see the conservatives engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
It is disappointing to see the Conservatives engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
It is disappointing to see the Conservatives engage in peddling rebel media conspiracy theories.
They're puppets.
I wonder who wrote that script.
Was that the third point in the deal between Trudeau and Soros' Open Societies Foundation?
What exactly is the deal?
It was an agreement.
I showed you the press release.
You heard John McCallum.
Right after his election, Justin Trudeau flew down to New York to sit at Soros' knee.
Look at that.
Look at the body language there.
The master, the father on the left, and the good boy on the right.
You could see who's in charge in that photo, eh?
We know about some of their meetings, because in this case, Trudeau tweeted the picture of it.
We probably don't know about all of their meetings, though.
I mean, remember when Justin Trudeau tried to keep his secret visits to a private island in the Bahamas owned by another billionaire, the Aga Khan, tried to keep them secret.
Trudeau took enormously expensive gifts from that billionaire.
Private flights, private island vacation.
He tried to keep it a secret from the public, even breaking the law to do so.
He was convicted, Trudeau was, four times of breaking the Conflict of Interest Act, the first sitting prime minister to be convicted of that offense ever.
Trudeau keeps many of his controversial meetings secret, like when he met with that Taliban sympathizer, Joshua Boyle.
We only learned about that because Boyle bragged about it with this Twitter tweet.
And in that same tweet, look at that.
Boyle says it wasn't their first meeting.
I'm not surprised.
Same thing with George Soros.
Here's George Soros' son and his political heir, Alexander Soros, meeting with Ahmed Hassan.
I don't know if we would have seen that photo unless Soros bragged about it.
George Soros isn't like most political activists or mega donors.
He's pretty much as big as every other political donor combined.
And he knows it.
And he himself says he has a God complex.
And so he collects people, like playthings, especially politicians.
In fact, you could even say he collects countries.
Here's Soros' own website.
This is the Open Society Foundation's website.
He boasts of spending $32 billion so far in political activism.
I'm sure some of it has gone to genuine charity.
How could it not?
But most of it is, in Soros' own words, about changing the system.
I think it's fair to say that George Soros hates the West.
He hates Europe and European thinking.
He hates Western civilization.
Although he was born Jewish, he detests Israel.
And he has said that he doesn't like Judaism, the religion.
His father, too, they actually changed their family name from Schwartz to a made-up named Soros.
Soros himself has profited mightily off of capitalism and freedom, but he promotes globalism and socialism.
I don't even really think you could call Soros a capitalist, even though he's a multi-multi-billionaire.
A capitalist is someone who builds things, you know, like an oilman or a real estate tycoon, someone who makes factories.
Soros is just a speculator.
He made a lot of his money betting against the British pound back in 1992.
He crashed the market, devalued the currency that threw millions of British people into poverty and unemployment.
But hey, he made a billion dollars in a day.
Soros has a bizarre view of the world.
He was a teenager in Hungary when the Nazis invaded, and he actually ran errands for the invading Nazis, not for the resistance.
According to his authorized biography, he hand-delivered death summonses to the Jews in town for the Nazis to tell those Jews to report to the trains where the Nazis would send them to their deaths.
Now, he was a teenager back then, and his father told him to do it.
His father actually handed Soros off to a Nazi enforcer who went around Hungary with George Soros.
Soros was pretending to be a non-Jewish teenager.
And that Nazi expropriated property from the Jews in Hungary.
Now, you might not blame a teenager who was in a wartime, who was told by his father just to do that, do whatever it takes to survive.
But what I find so telling about Soros' character, his morality, is not what he did as a teenager under duress, but his reflections on it decades later as a grown man, when he was asked about it on the show 60 Minutes.
And he had no compunction about it.
He actually once said that it was the most exciting time of his life.
Soros's Nazi Encounter00:06:42
You take a look at this.
Was it difficult?
Not at all.
Not at all.
Maybe as a child, you don't see the connection, but it created no problem at all.
No feeling of guilt.
No.
For example, that I'm Jewish and here I am watching these people go, I could just as easily be there.
I should be there.
None of that.
Well, of course, I could be on the other side.
I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away.
But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there.
Yes, so that's George Soros, a Nazi collaborator in his teens.
Okay, maybe you could forgive that.
But as a grown man, he was just fine with that.
He didn't lose a minute's sleep.
He's a speculator who games the financial system to enrich himself by impoverishing others.
He's not into building wealth.
It's not a positive sum game with him.
It's speculation.
And now he's in the business of renting or buying politicians.
So has he collected Justin Trudeau into his politician collection?
Well, we asked.
We sent a simple letter to the Immigration Department of Canada under the Access to Information Law.
We sent them that Government of Canada press release, the one I read to you, that described the joint initiative.
And we said, quote, regarding the agreement between the Government of Canada, the UNHCR, and the Open Society Foundation to launch a joint initiative aimed at increasing private sponsorship of refugees around the world, as announced at the below link, please provide copies of all background and supporting policy documents, include copies of any agreements involved, provide only final or latest versions of documents.
And then we sent the link to the press release that I showed you earlier.
And they wrote back and they said, following a thorough search of our information holdings, I regret to inform you that no records were found that respond to your request.
And it was signed by Michelle Dunn, Assistant Director, Complex and Sensitive Issues Unit, Corporate Affairs, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada.
Really?
Complex and sensitive issues, eh?
Wow.
Now, if you want to read that letter, we've posted the whole thing on our website.
You can find the link below.
Do you believe them?
Do you believe there was not a single record, not a single piece of paper, not a single email, not a single memo, not a single scheduler in the calendar, that there was nothing, no records whatsoever of that meeting other than the website and I guess the immigration minister going on TV about it.
Nothing, really.
The government can't do anything without a dozen bureaucrats being involved, without forms being filled out in quintuplicate.
There was a meeting.
There was a conference.
There were memos, there were plans, of course there were, but they say there's not a single record?
Not one.
Do you believe them?
I don't believe them.
We filed another similar request for any correspondence, any communications between the Canadian government and Soros' open society foundations.
They said the same thing.
They said they have nothing.
Sorry, no.
Really?
No emails, not even a letter.
Nothing.
They're lying.
I mean, we know that Soros has no soul.
If he is untroubled about his role in sending his fellow Hungarian Jews to their deaths on behalf of the Nazis, as we saw in that 60 Minutes clip, he surely doesn't mind lying to reporters.
And he has no duty to tell us anything.
He's not the government.
But what is the Canadian government's excuse?
We're appealing this refusal, by the way.
You can't even call it a refusal since they're saying they don't even have any info.
They're not saying we have it, but we refuse to give it to you.
They're claiming there's no records at all.
But we know they're liars.
They lied about Justin Trudeau's vacation to Billionaire Island.
They tried to keep it secret.
He was convicted of that for counts of breaching the law.
They're lying here too.
Justin Trudeau is a liar.
I think this is a huge issue.
What exactly is George Soros' role in the government?
I don't want a conspiracy theory.
I just want the facts.
Who's paying whom?
Did Canadian taxpayers pay Soros?
Is Soros paying the taxpayers?
What is still happening?
We know that Trudeau clamped down on private refugees, so what are they doing about that third point?
The propaganda plan?
Is the Trudeau-Hussin campaign to smear any critics as Islamophobes?
Was that authored by Soros' policy people?
I don't want a conspiracy theory.
I have the facts and I've shown them to you.
Now I want more facts.
And the law is clear.
If there are relevant records, we as citizens have the right to be told that.
It's called the Access to Information Act.
And unless there is a special exemption, for example, for national security, well, we have a right to see them.
They have not invoked such an exemption.
They're just claiming there's no documents.
They are lying.
They claim there's nothing.
We know they're lying.
If Stephen Harper had signed an agreement and told the world he was working, let's say on, I don't know, oil and gas policy, pipeline policy, oil sands, with some American billionaire, he'd never hear the end of it.
And if Stephen Harper would have said, sorry, guys, there's no records to show you, sorry about that, people would call him a liar.
And of course, they'd be right if that had happened.
But it's Trudeau and it's George Soros and it's in support of mass immigration and the media is now on Trudeau's payroll and it seems a few of them might even be on Soros' payroll too if his European grants are any guide.
So yeah, I'm guessing that this video you're watching of me right now is the only place you will ever hear about.
Stay with us for more.
Manipulating Masculinity00:13:00
Welcome back.
Well, the American Psychological Association is a very political organization, but I'm sure you knew that.
Well, they've just gone so far this time.
They have come up with new clinical guidelines for how to handle a pathology called being a man.
I'm only slightly exaggerating.
Joining me now via Skype from Montreal is our friend Barbara Kay, who's a columnist for the National Post and the post-millennial.
Great to see you again, Barbara.
Happy New Year.
Oh, same to you, Ezra.
Thanks for having me on.
The American Psychological Association, I suppose it's like the Canadian Bar Association.
It claims to be a professional group, but it's really a lobby group, a political group.
It's been colonized by radicals.
Tell me a little bit about their new practice guidelines for how to deal with toxic masculinity.
Tell me about it.
Okay, well, first I should say that it's not, it's more than a lobby group.
It has 117,500 members in the United States, and most of them are practicing psychologists.
So they're going to use these guidelines.
It means that literally hundreds of thousands, millions potentially of men and women going in for treatment, you know, to help with personal problems are going to be treated as though they are representatives of their gender.
And the psychologists are going to take a very collectivist approach to how they treat them.
So the guidelines are basically, and by the way, I did write an article about this, but I also looked at their 2007 guidelines on treating women and girls, very different kettle of fish.
But to go back to what they, for the first time, they've just published guidelines for treating boys and men.
And they describe what they call traditional masculinity.
And they describe traditional masculinity not as a set of characteristics that are, you know, inherently male.
They describe them, characteristics like stoicism, high achievement or trying for high achievement, competitiveness and aggression.
They describe all these characteristics not as, well, this is how boys are, but as an ideology, an ideology that is known as traditional masculinity.
You know, to me, when I saw that, I said to myself, well, to psychologists, traditional masculinity is basically what the deplorables are to politics.
You know, this is, they don't like the way boys and men are.
And they assume that, you know, these qualities are part of an ideology rather than, okay, boys are more physical than girls.
They're more aggressive.
They're more stoic.
Yes, that's true.
They're more achievement-oriented or aggression-oriented, competitive.
Yes, certainly very competitive.
All these qualities, we find them to be wonderful when we need firefighters to run up, you know, 30 or 40 or 50 floors of a burning building.
And we think they're wonderful when the Titanic's going down and, you know, it's women and children first or when they're in combat in defense of our country.
We like these qualities of competitiveness and stoicism and aggression and all that.
But, you know, The APA, the American Psychological Association, isn't thinking of all the good things that men do.
When they look at men, all they can see is a problem, a problem for women, a problem for homosexuals, a problem for transgender people.
You know, they see them as kind of a problem that needs to be fixed in terms of their general characteristics.
Yeah, you know, it reminds me of a few things, if I may.
I mean, first of all, thank you for giving us that summary.
It reminds me of the fad, which I suppose still continues, of saying that young kids, especially young boys, have attention deficit disorders, put them on Riddle in, medicate them instead of letting them go outside, run around, and be active and have physical education.
To try and say, well, that's an ideological problem or a medic, being male is an ideological problem.
Being boys is an ideological or medical problem.
And to call it ideological is to imply that it's not natural and it's a choice and a negative choice.
This seems similar.
Tell me what you think of this.
There's this new attempt to normalize being super fat.
Now, I shouldn't talk because I am fat, but this fat acceptance, this put a super fat model on the cover of a magazine, to normalize through changing beauty standards, what is unhealthy and faking and saying, no, that's just as healthy.
That is the ideology.
And saying that masculinity is a problem that needs to be fixed feels as fake as saying being fat's totally cool and totally healthy, guys.
It seems like the whole practice of health care is completely corrupt and ideological now.
Yeah, look, you know, men do, I mean, if you take a lot of these characteristics that can be very, very good and you take them and they are turned toward bad, then, yeah, aggression is not good.
A competitive can be overwhelming and it can be harmful to a man himself or to be too ambitious, to be too stoic, and never to seek help when it's needed.
I agree that all these things in extremes, they're not good for society.
They're not good for men.
But the APA is not saying that these are bad when they're extreme.
They're saying basically that they're bad in themselves, but they can be changed because we're all socially constructed, right?
So all we have to do is recognize that we've been socially constructed in a bad way and change it.
Basically, I think what they would like is for men to become more like women, you know, and after all, they stress in their guidelines that gender today is so fluid.
You know, after all, we're all so non-binary is so in.
And we should accept that gender is on a spectrum.
So basically, they're saying traditional masculinity is at one end of a spectrum that is passe.
It's over.
And we have to, psychologists have to use their authority and their profession to manipulate, it seems to me, they don't use that word, manipulate their patients into accepting a new paradigm for how they should be.
So in addition, if somebody, if some male patient would come to a psychologist and say, I'm depressed or I'm anxious, the psychologist should be encouraged by these guidelines to say to themselves, well, let's talk about some of your traditional masculinity.
You know, maybe that's the issue here.
You know, I've always been skeptical of psychology.
I'll be candid with you.
I've always found it as politics or social engineering with a little bit of medical jargon thrown in.
That's my own biases.
But just as this American Psychological Association is attacking millennia of masculinity, there's a similar movement to destroy traditional concepts of femininity.
And let me point to a recent article in McLean's magazine that's trying to stimulate moms to say, well, look at the headline right here.
I regret having children in pushing the boundaries of accepted maternal response.
Women are challenging an explosive taboo and reframing motherhood in the process.
They're literally trying to demonize the maternal aspects of being.
They're trying to whip up women to say, yeah, I regret being a mom too.
So men are not supposed to be masculine.
Women are not supposed to be feminine.
And it's, I don't even know what the end game here, but the whole thing is, I don't want to use a religious phrase like demonic or upside down or satanic.
If you were religious, I think he would say those things because it's so contrary to human nature.
Yeah, I think that McLean's, you know, which is, it seems to me that McLean's should take a little more responsibility for the kinds of topics that they take on.
This regret motherhood feature article, it was a lot of bloviating about nothing.
There are women that do regret having children.
We all know that.
And some of them have good reason, you know, circumstances of their life or they have extremely difficult children or they have, you know, they're abandoned by fathers.
They don't have any money.
Like I can think of 100 reasons why a mother might regret having had children.
But this idea that they regret having children because there was no reason in the first place why they should have wanted children.
In other words, that this idea that there's this maternal urge to have children, that's all nonsense.
That's social construction.
That just isn't true.
Women do, on the whole, they look, if we weren't biologically kind of hardwired to want children, how would the human race survive?
I mean, Darwin would be rolling his eyes at the very idea that if left to their own devices, women would have absolutely no interest in having children or only a few of them would.
The whole article was so foolish and tried to make a big hype out of a few anecdotes.
And for sure, there are women.
But what bothered me about that article was that the author was actually encouraging women to overcome the taboo, not the taboo of not wanting children, but the taboo of not talking about it.
So in fact, she was saying, you know, don't worry about how humiliating and awful it will be for your children.
If you come forward and say, I regret having had them, you should do it.
You should do it because you know what?
It'll make you feel better to say it.
And it may encourage other women to think twice before having children or, you know, to come up to the mic as well and say, I'm sorry I had my children.
I just read an article recently by a woman who said she regretted having her children, and I happened to know that her children read that article, and they were devastated by it.
You know, why?
Why?
If you regret having children, then tell your best friend, or tell a therapist, or tell your mother.
But don't tell the public.
Why does the world have to know?
Why is this a political movement?
There's something so fall of Rome about both of these issues, so decadent.
I mean, throughout the millennia, our ancestors, what they did to survive, whether, you know, I guess you could go back prehistory, surviving the wilds of nature, the ice ages.
I mean, I'm not even going back before Homo sapiens, but think about, think about the last few thousand years, what different peoples have survived, whether it was the Jews and the Holocaust or the Armenians and their massacre or the Irish potato famine or the Second World War.
You know, the number of Russian men that were killed in the Second World War was like a quarter of all the men of a certain age.
The things that we survived, slavery, Kublai Khan, or Genghis Khan, massive wars, the Crusades.
But there was an urge to live and now in the lap of luxury and ease and complacency and plenty, we say, ah, nah, nah, I don't want to have kids.
And it's totally cool not to.
And it's cool for guys not to be masculine and girls not to be feminine.
And let's just play video games.
Shakespeare's Sonnets Revisited00:03:10
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think it has a kind of, there's an air of cultural suicide in speculating about these things and in saying that it's a good thing to regret having children.
It's a good thing not to want children.
What is the alternative?
It's a life of enjoying yourself, yes, of career.
Wow, yeah, you know, traveling, all these good things, but it's not exactly what you'd call a purpose-driven life unless you're a very extraordinary individual, unless you have the talent of a Dostoevsky or a Michelangelo.
I mean, if you're an ordinary person and you have an ordinary job, where is your purpose in life if not being part of the cycle of life?
And why would you encourage people to be a bystander to history?
I don't understand it.
But then you and I feel that life is worth living because our culture is worth, you know, is worth preserving and keeping going.
You know, I'm an amateur fan of Shakespeare.
I never really studied it much in school, so I've tried to make up for it in my middle age.
And I love reading his sonnets.
He's got a book of sonnets.
And I've read them many times.
And I was surprised when I first did that to learn that the most numerous of the topics he covered was not romantic love.
We all know his love poems.
The most numerous were him trying to convince his patron and friend to have kids.
And again and again and again, the sonnets are explaining to his 40-year-old bachelor friend why he absolutely must have kids to be immortal so that to see a version of yourself live when you yourself are about to die.
To always have springtime, like the arguments he makes so beautifully and poetically in the form of the sonnet written 400 and some years ago are so perfect for today.
I just wanted to tell you that anecdote that the number one thing Shakespeare wrote about in his sonnets was not romantic love, it was having kids.
I just thought I'd tell you that.
That's so interesting.
You know, I did not know that because although I can't say I've read all of Shakespeare's sonnets because I haven't, even though literature was my thing, but poetry was never my favorite part of literature.
But that, I think that's very interesting.
I must go back and look at some of those sonnets.
Yeah, it's quite something.
And he's really, like, as you know, he had a patron, as any artist like that did.
And his patron sounds like he was just a man about London and just living the high life.
But Shakespeare was saying, you know, it's wintertime now, and you better get cracked.
Quite Different Scenarios00:03:19
I want to say one more thing about this, you know, men don't be masculine, women don't be feminine, don't have kids.
What's the point?
That is simultaneously, you mentioned McLean's magazine.
Simultaneously, they're disparaging motherhood while they're saying, oh my God, we need to open up the borders to mass, mass, mass immigration because we're not having enough babies.
Well, pick a lane, people.
Pick a lane.
Pick a lane.
I like that.
Now, you wrote a rebuttal to this McLean's article in the post-millennial, which is a, I like that little website.
Let's show it on the screen here.
McLean's Magazine encourages women to regret having children.
Now, that's one thing for some magazine to publish that.
Do you see this as getting any roots in psychology or ideology?
Do you see one day?
You mentioned you read the guidelines from a dozen years ago, how to treat women and girls from the American Psychological Association.
Are they as disparaging of femininity and motherhood as they are of masculinity?
No, no, no, no.
Oh, no, no.
No, it's very different.
And the reason I wanted to write about both the guidelines for the boys and men and the girls and women is because they take quite a different tack.
When they look at the women, they do mention the fact that women have, and girls have far more psychological problems, or at least apparent ones, than boys.
They have much higher rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, you know, suicidal ideation.
And so they are much more troubled on the surface and they are much more in need of psychological counseling.
But they don't say that it's due to any kind of an ideology.
They imply, they more than imply, they pretty well say that it's due to society, social construction, men.
I mean, they actually, I thought it was pretty funny.
They actually, they said things like, the amount of abuse, violence, and rape in society may, you know, that little weasel word may contribute, may contribute to eating disorders.
And I'm like, are you kidding me?
I mean, abuse, rape, violence in society is why, I was why a 12-year-old girl would be starving herself to death.
I think not.
So, and then, you know, in my piece, I say, hey, how about if you examined the ideology of feminism?
Could it be that that's making girls more anxious and, you know, more depressed because feminism is asking from them stuff they don't really think is right for themselves, but that they think they should do anyways because, you know, their educators are telling them that they can have it all and that they should just keep experimenting sexually for years and years and years and don't settle down with marriage because that's, man, that's that's so patriarchal.
Shakespeare's Tool00:06:20
And, you know, all these things.
So it's quite a different scenario.
So basically, the guidelines for boys and men say boys need fixing because there's something basically wrong with them.
And the guidelines for girls and women say girls need sympathy and they need blame shifting.
It's not their fault that they're anxious, depressed, just, you know, all this stuff.
None of it.
Not their fault.
It's not the result of poor choices.
It's not the result of anything.
It's all society's fault or men's fault.
You've been very generous with your time.
I understand you've got a piece in the National Post coming in either tonight or tomorrow on the post-millennial.
Post-millennial.
That's great.
I look forward to that.
Can I close with a sonnet?
Yes.
I have an app on my phone, a Shakespeare app.
There's a ton of them.
And the first, I don't know, dozen sonnets are all about him telling his buddy, have kids already.
I got to read one, okay?
Can I end the show on that note?
Sure.
Okay.
And you can interrupt me if you want.
Feel free.
But let me read.
This is sonnet number six.
Let not winter's ragged hand deface in thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.
Make sweet some vile treasure thou some place with beauty's treasure ere it be self-killed.
So he's saying to his patron, you better replicate yourself.
That use is not forbidden usury, which happies those that pay the willing loan.
That's for thyself to breed another thee.
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one.
He's saying, don't just have one kid, have ten kids and be ten times as happy.
Ten times thyself were happier than thou art.
If ten of thine Thames refigured thee, then what could death do if thou shouldst depart, leaving the living in posterity?
And here's the final couplet.
I know this is dense Middle English, but here's the final couplet that'll tell you his whole point.
Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair to be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.
So that's one of his many arguments for having kids is there's going to be nothing left of you but worms, worm food.
And why don't you, man, he's got gorgeous ones in there about seeing yourself young again in the face of your children.
I really recommend to anyone who needs convincing.
Now you got to go slow because the language is archaic, but anywhere you can find translation of those quirky Middle English words there.
But the argument, Shakespeare, I mean, he invented words, he captured things, but truly he understood what it meant to be human more than anyone else I have ever heard of, perhaps since Jesus.
And the arguments he made why you should have kids, not biological arguments, but emotional, moral, cultural reasons, I've never seen it better argued than he did 400 years ago.
Last word to you, Barbara.
I'm struck dumb.
I think the last word should be yours.
I love what you did there.
I love that you read the sonnet.
Ezra, I think a lot of people would be very surprised to know that there is this side to you.
And I'm so pleased to be part of this broadcast.
Well, you know what?
My point is a lot of people would be surprised to know that's a side of Shakespeare.
Because we just know that, you know, Shakespeare in love and Romeo and Juliet, or we know the brutal violence of Macbeth, or the, I mean, Hamlet, what an amazing tale.
But to know how hard he pressed his friend to have kids and the arguments he made.
If you want to convince someone to have kids or get married even, Shakespeare's your tool.
Let's leave it there.
Barbara, great to see you again, my friend.
Same here.
Thanks, Bob.
There you have it, Barbara.
Kay, don't mind me reading a little Shakespeare.
Don't mind me.
All right, everybody.
Stay tuned.
be back in a minute with your mail.
Hey, welcome back.
You know what?
I was trying to choose from amongst Shakespeare's 150-plus sonnets in real time while I was talking to Barbara, and I didn't choose a great one.
I chose one where the English was a little bit hard to understand, and it wasn't a great one.
Can I read to you sonnet number nine?
Seriously, you pick up that book of sonnets, you're probably thinking, oh, Shakespeare, it's going to be all lovey-dovey.
Well, he adds to that.
But the first dozen or so sonnets are him convincing his 40-year-old buddy, time to get hitched, time to have kids.
And he rolls out the most compelling arguments that Shakespeare can imagine, which I would put to you are the most compelling arguments that have ever been made.
Why to have kids?
And I'm going to read to you sonnet number nine.
I think I didn't read the best one to Barbara.
So here you go.
I don't care if you want to hear it or not.
I'm going to read it anyways.
Sonnet number nine.
Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye that thou consumest thyself in single life?
I'll explain.
You don't want to get married because you're worried that when you die, your wife will be a widow?
Ah, if thou issueless shall have to die, the world will wail thee like a makeless wife.
That means if you die without a kid, the entire world will weep for you like a matchless wife.
The world will be thy widow and still weep that thou no form of thee hast left behind.
The entire world will be your widow because you haven't left anyone behind.
When every private widow may well keep by children's eyes her husband's shape in mind.
That's a great point.
So when a woman becomes a widow, at least she can imagine her husband by looking at the kids they had.
Soros Monologue00:04:04
Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend, shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it.
But beauty's waste hath in the world an end.
And kept unused, the user so destroys it.
No love toward others in that bosom sits.
Then on himself such murderous shame commits.
Isn't that great?
That's that rhyming couplet that ends a sonnet.
That is a powerful, you gotta read them all.
You gotta read them all.
If there are any viewers left, I'll continue with my mail now.
I might have driven you all away.
On my monologue yesterday, Barb writes, The new set looks nice.
Looks great.
Nice to have a fresh look for 2019.
Glad to have you back.
That was a scathing monologue about Trudeau last night.
Keep it up.
Well, thanks very much, Barb.
I appreciate that.
Kudos to our team, Martin and the rest of the crew here, for putting together the fancy new graphics behind me.
As I said yesterday, it's not really like this steel and glass ultra studio overlooking the Sea and Tower.
It's just digital.
Billy writes, after the Huawei issue is dealt with, you will see a quick reversal to friendly relations with China.
This is an election year, and she wants Trudeau re-elected.
Hmm, isn't that interesting?
I wonder, you know, Canada has a strange trade relationship with China.
We basically buy their stuff.
It used to be junk.
Now it's computers and not so junky stuff.
And they really don't buy a lot from us.
They buy agricultural goods.
But even though the Northern Gateway Pipeline and the Transmountain pipeline would have really changed the trade balance, because we would have sold China or Japan, Korea, Taiwan, whatever, billions of dollars worth of oil every year.
But Trudeau, ironically, has denied what the Chinese really want from Canada, oil.
I don't quite understand the relationship.
I think Trudeau is just sort of an empty shell.
I think he's an empty vessel.
He's sort of a dumb mascot.
I think the people behind the scenes are his China lobby, the Demare family, Jean-Cre-Chen, Peter Harter in the Senate.
I think that there's other things we don't even see.
I pointed out yesterday that Jean-Cre-Chen went to work with the Chinese five weeks after stepping in as prime minister.
Sorry, that's corrupt.
On my interview with Joel Pollack, Gene writes, I would rather Alberta give money to Trump for the wall in exchange for a pipeline.
Win-win.
You know, I saw your note, Gene, and I thought that is a bloody great idea.
Donald Trump is having this big wrestle with the Democrats in Congress over $5 billion for a while.
Now that's U.S. money, so that's what, about $7.5 Canadian, if I'm doing it in my head.
Okay, that's a lot of dough.
But I would put it to you that Alberta loses that multiple times a year in lost investment.
And look, Trudeau foolishly buying the existing Transmountain pipeline for $4.5 billion.
Really, for an extra couple bill, we could say, hey, Donald, here's your southern wall, a gift from your friends in Alberta.
Get us that Keystone Excel, and we're even.
I put it to you that Donald Trump will be the only person who built a pipeline to Alberta until Rachel Notley is gone, and Premier Horgan of BC is gone, and Justin Trudeau is gone.
And even then, I wouldn't bet on it.
So yeah, Donald Trump is Alberta's only friend when it comes to pipelines.
I mean, Ontario under Doug Ford is nice, but he can't get it done.
Well, folks, what do you think of my Soros monologue?
A little too long?
I think it was stunning that the government of Canada says, oh, we don't have any records.
Really?
You have this whole joint initiative with the most paperworky government around, and they don't have a single stitch, a stitch of paper.
I don't believe it.
I'll keep you posted on what happens.
We've appealed that ruling.
I'm not optimistic that we'll hear anything back before the election, are you?
That's it for tonight.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rubber World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.