Ezra Levant warns the CRTC’s January 2024 push to regulate short-form news—like The Rebel Media’s 11,000+ videos (300M+ YouTube views)—risks censoring dissent, citing past bans of conservative voices and $595M in government bailouts for mainstream media. He frames climate-driven meat taxes and vegan extremism as Orwellian rituals, mocking apocalyptic rhetoric from figures like Bernie Sanders while exposing contradictions in "deep green" ideology, including Maurice Strong’s calls for 95% population collapse. The episode ties media control to anti-human activism, underscoring how Trudeau’s policies weaponize bureaucracy against free speech. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Canada's TV regulator wants to regulate the internet now too, specifically companies that make short news videos.
Gee, I wonder if they mean the Rebel.
It's January 11th, 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 publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
February next month will mark the four-year anniversary that Canada's government regulator for TV and radio and phones, called the CRTC, or the Canadian Radio, Television and Communications Commission.
Well, four years ago next month, the CRTC killed the only conservative TV station in Canada called the Sun News Network.
Well, they're back.
Here's the CRTC's news today.
They have published something called their written submission to the legislative review panel.
Written public submission.
It's a wish list sent to a group of elite political insiders that Trudeau has asked to update the internet rules in Canada.
I'll tell you more about this elite group in a moment.
Anyways, you will not be surprised to learn that the CRTC, the same people who euthanized the Sun News Network, now want the power to regulate the internet, especially the news.
They specifically mention short news videos and audio podcasts like what we specialize in here at the Rebel.
We've produced about 11,000 short videos in the past four years, and you know this show is made into a podcast too.
I don't know if you know that.
And collectively, just on YouTube alone, our videos have been watched more than 300 million times, probably about 400 million by now.
About 2 billion minutes of video have been watched combined.
As you know, we're the largest YouTube news channel in Canada.
Measured by the number of followers we have, we have more than CTV or Global or even the CBC state broadcasters.
So yeah, I really can't think of anyone else in Canada who they could possibly be talking about.
Can you?
Because they already regulate CTV and Global and CBC as regular broadcasters.
So who do you think they mean when they say they want to regulate short online news videos in Canada?
And they specifically say they want to make sure that people who produce short news videos produce, quote, accurate, independent, and trustworthy news and information.
And look, we're highlighting it here.
They use that phrase again and again in their document.
I'm going to get into the details in a moment.
Now, by the way, I totally agree with that goal.
We put a lot of emphasis on accuracy here at the Rebel.
That's why we usually show you our sources.
We show you a photo.
We show you a video.
We show you excerpts from documents as I'm doing now.
When we make an argument, we have our evidence.
I just showed you the cover of the CRTC report and a short quote and I'll show you more quotes in a moment.
I showed you the panel of elite liberals and I'll show you more about them in a moment.
I'll get into that.
We value accuracy in providing evidence.
It's why we so often send journalists to the scene of stories, even overseas, like just for one example, when we sent David Menzies to cover the Mexican migrant caravan on the scene.
Or when we sent Jack Buckby and Martina Markota to cover the Paris yellow vest protests.
Accuracy.
We fact check our stuff, we lawyer it when necessary, and on the rare occasions when we get something wrong, we correct it.
So yeah, accurate.
We share that goal.
Their second goal is independent.
Well, I put it to you that we are the only, or maybe one of the only, independent news outlets left in Canada because we don't take money from the government.
The CBC does.
Now all the private sector TV companies do and the newspaper and radio companies do too.
They're taking part of Trudeau's $595 million slush fund.
So we here at the Rebel are pretty much the last independent people left.
Everyone else is on Trudeau's payroll, just like the CRTC, just like Trudeau's legislative review panel.
And their third word there, they had accurate, independent.
The third one was trustworthy.
That was the last part of their CRTC phrase.
Well, trust is a matter of opinion, don't you think?
I don't trust the CBC.
To me, they're extremely biased.
They're anti-Trump.
They're pro-Trudeau.
They're anti-American.
They're pro-UN.
They're anti-military.
They're pro-terrorist.
They're anti-Christian.
They're pro-Muslim.
I could go on, but I don't trust the CBC at all.
In my mind, they're biased activists.
But I'm sure the CBC staff don't trust me or us here at the Rebel.
And that's fine.
Part of a free society is letting individual viewers make their own choices.
I mean, that's what a political election campaign is about, isn't it?
A bunch of parties all competing, and there is not one elite expert panel who decides.
Every single one of us gets to decide, and we have the right to choose wrongly.
By the way, Canadians have the right to vote for that fool Trudeau, and he has the right to be a fool.
The mainstream media gets things wrong all the time.
That's human nature.
I can't believe anyone would ever trust the CBC again after their Gianne Gameshi scandal.
And by that I mean the scandal of the whole CBC covering up for him for years.
So yeah, I believe that individual grown-ups can make their own decisions about what's trustworthy or not.
And even if I disagree with someone, that's freedom too.
I mean, the David Suzuki Foundation literally has 21 registered lobbyists lobbying Ottawa against the oil sands, against Pipeline.
Here's a list of them.
I'm showing you.
This is from the official Ottawa Lobbyist Registry.
I bet the CBC never shows you that.
And the David Suzuki Foundation, they're paid to do this lobbying by foreign donors, but the CBC still lets David Suzuki go on TV as a trustworthy sort.
He's not trustworthy.
He's not accurate.
He's not independent either.
I hate the fact that I have to pay for him, but it's up to Canadian news consumers, that means citizens, whether or not they like to believe his propaganda.
Could you imagine, though, that the people who propose to ensure all of this, to ensure the accuracy, to ensure the independence and trustworthiness, that they're coming from the government.
And of all the different government departments to come from, they're from the biased government agency, the CRTC, that already killed the Sun News Network.
I literally would rather trust a stranger on the street than would I trust a Trudeau appointee when it comes to news.
But of course, I don't want to trust anyone other than my own judgment, because isn't that what being a grown-up in a free society is about?
To make up your own mind, even if you're wrong.
And who is this panel of elite experts anyways?
Well, here they are.
This is the list of this legislative review panel.
They're all Ottawa insiders.
Mainly at least.
They're lawyers mainly.
And this is how you know they care about accuracy and independence and trustworthiness.
Well, you know that because they're good liberals.
You see that Janet Yale, the one who chairs this whole thing?
Well, here's from public records.
She has donated, this is a list of her political donations over the years.
She has donated thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to the Liberal Party, going back years.
If you look carefully at this list, you'll see she mixes it up once in a while.
Once she gave money to the provincial liberals just for diversity, and she once even gave money to the NDP.
Now that was more than 20 years ago, so I'm sure Trudeau will forgive that one NDP act of disloyalty.
Tons of donations to the Liberals from the other expert panel too.
They're about as independent as Justin Trudeau's independent senators.
You have to be from the CBC to be gullible enough to believe that these people are independent.
Anyways, I have nothing against Janet Yale.
She's the head of this review committee.
She used to be the CEO of the Canadian Cable Television Association.
So I bet she hates internet companies like us that are eroding cable TV viewership.
But even if she wasn't a former lobbyist for our competitors, even if she wasn't the largest liberal donor I've ever come across, frankly, even if she actually was interested in accuracy, independence, and trustworthiness for the news, why on earth should anyone in this country care what she thinks?
Why should anyone in this world have to defer to her taste or her politics or her aesthetic sense or her sense of humor or anything?
Or to put it more bluntly, who the hell is she?
But look at what the CRTC is proposing.
I'm going to read to you from their legislative proposals.
Let me quote some of it.
Some of it is quite Orwellian.
Some of it's contradictory.
Some of it's just laughable, but the meaning is still crystal clear.
They intend to regulate voices on the internet that they don't like.
But it's not just my right to speak to you that's going to be eroded.
It's your right to hear me or anyone else and your right to make up your own mind about what's trustworthy or not.
Now, this is a 21-page filing, 21 pages, so I'm obviously not going to read it all, but here are some key parts.
I'll start by reading.
Their headline is, ensuring there are accurate and independent news and information sources.
And they say, the fundamental freedoms and democratic rights that underpin the interactions between Canada's citizens and its institutions are best maintained when these institutions are verifiably held to account in an open and transparent way.
Canada's broadcasting system, including news and information programming in particular, plays a significant part in this system of accountability.
Well, hang on, they're mixing things up.
See, our fundamental frights and democratic freedoms, those are our rights as citizens against the government.
That's what the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is about.
It protects us from government infringement.
It doesn't give anyone power over anyone else.
It certainly doesn't give the government power over the media.
They were using word trickery there, weren't they?
They used the language of the Charter of Rights, which was drafted to be used against people like the CRTC.
They've twisted that charter language to suggest that the CRTC government should have power over private media institutions to hold them to account.
Yeah, no, We have the right to hold the government to account, including the CRTC.
And what does it mean to have a TV station or a YouTube channel verifiably held to account in an open and transparent way?
What on earth does that mean?
I mean, here at the rebel, we make videos.
Okay, people can watch them or ignore them on YouTube.
You can like something or dislike it.
You can leave a comment.
If there's anything legally wrong, I suppose you could sue.
YouTube itself has some terms of service.
They have some of their own rules.
But where on earth does the government of Canada come in to verify what?
To verify what?
Well, their next line gives a hint.
I mean, quote, when elements of this system are left unchecked and offer false or misleading information to Canadians without strong, accurate, independent, and trustworthy sources of rebuttal, the ability of Canadians to fully exercise their democratic rights suffers.
Elements of this system, if they get out of control.
Is that code for people who say things the government doesn't like?
Is that elements of the system left unchecked?
What does that mean left unchecked?
Unchecked by whom?
By the government?
But we don't believe as Canadians that the government should be a check on the people.
We believe that the people should have a check against the government.
I mean, if we're committing some crime, come at us.
But the CRTC are not police or prosecutors.
They're TV and radio cops.
They hate things for political reasons, not criminal reasons.
What they really mean is censorship.
In the year 2000, here's an old story.
Broadcast regulators shut down someone who is an extremely popular Tough Love personal advice radio host named Dr. Laura Schlesinger because of a few political complaints.
They just banned her from the airwaves in Canada because she had the wrong views about personal relationships.
I'm not making that up.
Maybe you even remember that.
A few years later, they shut down an entire radio station in Quebec, Schwa-FM, because the host was telling risque jokes in the manner of Howard Stern, who was also banned from Canada's airways, by the way.
The listeners of that Quebec radio station fought back.
I don't know if you know that.
Did you ever catch this when it happened about 15 years ago?
Take a look.
A casual glance would tell you it's a rock concert.
But another look reveals a rally for choice, or in this case, schwa.
They love their free speech, and they want to tell the governors, we like schwa, we love schwa, we want schwa, and we will have schwa.
It's doubtful that so many people have ever traveled such a distance to voice their support for a radio station.
But for much of this crowd here on the hill today, the real issue is free speech.
And as many as 10,000 of them have gathered here to demand loudly that the federal government restore Schwa-FM's right to be on the air and by extension the rights of Canadians everywhere to hear whatever they wish.
We broadcast what they want, and the case is, is the CRTC and five people put there by the Government Liberal could determine what are the limits to freedom of speech we don't believe in.
That's amazing.
What a spirit of free speech.
10,000 people marching on Parliament Hill against liberal censors.
You heard that guy at the end there.
He was against the liberal censors.
And the government blinked.
Schwaffem is back on radio.
They've been going strong ever since.
But Trudeau has attacked Schwafman again recently, by the way, calling them Islamophobic.
Now, that's his new favorite insult.
But you see my point.
The CRTC killed Schwafman, literally put it out of business, but it was reborn.
The CRTC killed the Sun News Network.
And I suppose you could say it was reborn on YouTube and our paywall shows like this one, beyond the reach of the CRTC censors.
So now the CRCC wants to extend their reach in the name of accuracy, independence, and trustworthiness.
You see, I mean, Trudeau owns the CBC, and that's more than half of all the news journalists in Canada.
He's renting most of the rest of the private journalists in Canada with his $595 million bailout.
So he wants to regulate the last few holdouts like us here at the Rebel.
But back to that line in the CRTC report.
When elements of this system are left unchecked and offer false or misleading information to Canadians without strong, accurate, independent, and trustworthy sources of rebuttal, the ability of Canadians to fully exercise their democratic rights suffers.
CRTC's Reach into Journalism00:08:20
Really?
So how does it work then with the government ensuring trustworthy sources of rebuttal?
How can the government choose its own critics?
Or how can the government choose the critics of its critics?
How can the government regulation lead to more rebuttals as opposed to less?
When the CRTC shut down the Sun News Network, they obviously weren't interested in its strong views and strong rebuttals of the government.
The CRTC just wanted fewer voices, not more voices.
They just want all the voices to be the same.
And by the way, that was under Stephen Harper.
Imagine how it'll be under these liberals.
Okay, let me read you some more.
Here's where the rubber really hits the road.
I'm reading from the CRTC report again.
Canadians already make use of various sources for audio and video news and information content, including both traditional broadcasters and a wide range of online content services.
That's us people.
In the future, Canadians are likely to continue to rely on both traditional and online news and information sources, many of the latter of which may be unknown at this time.
Okay, that's sort of obvious.
I don't know if we need to pay government bureaucrats to write this, but get this next part.
Ready?
In such an environment, Canadians will need the means to determine which sources provide trustworthy, verifiably accurate news and information and are independent of political or other influence.
Educational efforts related to digital literacy will be key to giving Canadians the tools they need to make these determinations themselves.
Imagine the hubris.
We're all on the internet.
You, me, if you're watching this year on the internet, most of us have been on the internet for years, some for decades.
But the CRTC liberal appointees in the year 2019 think it's necessary for them to teach us to figure out how to use the internet and what to believe.
Somehow we've managed to survive to the year 2019 using the internet without their advice.
I don't know, it's a miracle that we managed to do it without them telling us how to do it, but they really, really need to give us the means to determine which sources are trustworthy.
And really, who better to tell us who to trust than a bunch of liberal hacks?
Who better to teach us how to think about, I don't know, Trudeau than Trudeau's appointees who donated to Trudeau and who will review the media during Trudeau's election campaign.
Who better to trust than them?
And they repeat it, just to be clear, because they said that Canadians need to make those determinations by themselves, but I know that sounded a little bit too free to me.
So they wanted to clarify that, and they said right after that, they wrote, however, ensuring that Canadians have access to accurate, independent, and trustworthy news and information sources should also be an explicit outcome for Canada's broadcasting system.
Oh, okay.
So what they're saying is we'll trust the citizens, but if they don't get it right, we'll have to get it right for them.
One way is for the government to tell people which journalists to trust.
Like I say, it's upside down.
This is inverted morality here.
The government holding the media to account, using the charter as a tool, even though that was designed to hold the government to account.
You couldn't write this stuff as fiction.
No one would believe it.
It's too Orwellian.
Let me quote.
This is what they plan on doing.
They plan on encouraging and helping Canadians identify those sources that adhere to appropriate journalistic standards.
Oh, okay, I got it.
So Gianne Gameshi, David Suzuki, the revolving door between the media and the Liberal Party, that's all good journalism.
And the fake news at CBC and frankly CNN and increasingly CTV and Global, that's all high-quality journalism.
I mean, really, if you're talking about great journalism, this is your standard.
The one that the entire country wants to know.
What shampoo do you use?
What a disappointing answer this is going to be.
Whatever happens to be hanging around at the time.
Yeah.
I mean, that's appropriate journalistic standards.
That's good.
That's accurate.
That's independent.
That's trustworthy.
But us asking tough questions, well, there better be a CRTC warning on top of that.
And here it is.
Here's their proposal.
Here's what they want in black and white.
They say, new legislation should continue to enable the CRTC to develop co-regulatory approaches to encourage content providers, including certain online services, to adopt journalistic codes and practices.
Oh, okay.
So they want to regulate the internet.
Just that.
Just that.
Content providers, that means us, of course.
Online services, that means us, of course.
Or maybe they mean YouTube and the web hosting companies that we rely on, or Facebook or PayPal or whatever, but just that.
They just want to regulate journalistic codes now on the internet.
No big deal, nothing to see here.
Hey, did you see his cool socks Justin Trudeau's wearing?
Look, there's a squirrel over there.
Now we know this is going to happen.
And we know why this is happening because Trudeau has promised this.
Look at this story from almost exactly a year ago when Trudeau warned Facebook that if they didn't shut down news websites that he disagrees with that he calls fake, well, he'll go ahead and regulate them.
That's what this CRTC demand is.
It's Trudeau keeping his threat to regulate the internet.
It's a 21-page manifesto for the government take over the internet.
That's all it is.
And the mainstream media doesn't really mind.
Here's an online search I did today on Google News.
Just type in CRTC, sort by news, and there's just one item on this, just one item, precisely one story, and it's on an obscure tech magazine called Mobile Syrup.
Okay, good for them.
That's it in the entire media.
There's not a peep in the CBC.
They don't mind one bit.
You go to the CBC search engine, you type in CRTC, they don't have any story about this at all.
They just don't have it at all.
They have some story about Brian Adams mocking the CRTC.
They don't talk about this.
The CBC likes this.
This will muzzle their competitors, as in us.
Now, I've read a lot to you today from this document, but let me read the summary of the document written by them themselves to show you the plan, because you're not going to find this on any other media in Canada, except there's a paid service called Black Box Reporter, which is a small website based in Ottawa.
I have to give them credit.
I've got a lot of time for them.
But they're small, and their story was behind a paywall.
But give them full marks for talking about this.
I like them.
Anyways, you won't get this from any media that the CRTC calls accurate, independent, or trustworthy, which tells you that what the Liberals mean by accurate, independent, and trustworthy isn't what you and I would mean by accurate, independent, and trustworthy.
So here's the plan.
Let me quote.
New legislation should grant the CRTC explicit statutory authority, as well as flexible tools, to regulate services, both domestic and international, including online service providers who offer audio or video services in Canada and benefit from the creative economic and social advantages of operating in this market.
Such an approach would aid in ensuring that all players contribute in an equitable and effective manner to achieving the public policy outcomes established for new legislation, including the promotion and discoverability of Canadian content.
So just that.
That's all they want, people.
I mean, come on.
They want new laws to give more power to this CRTC in laws, but also to give them lots of discretion, flexible tools, so they can do what they like without having to check back with Parliament.
They want to go after anyone giving audio or video services.
Why Greens Are Different00:12:05
That's us.
Even international companies, that's bizarre.
And everyone has to be equitable.
What?
And everyone has to follow Trudeau's preferred public policy outcomes.
That's a fancy way of saying follow his politics.
And if you don't, well, look, look.
The CRTC had no problem shutting down Schwa-FM.
They had no problem euthanizing a $50 million conservative TV network owned by a Quebec billionaire, Pierre Carl Pellado, while Stephen Harper said and did nothing.
Do you really think the CRTC would hesitate for a second to kill a conservative news channel owned by some rabble like us?
With Justin Trudeau and Gerald Butz egging them on?
Oh, they will.
They just told us they will.
They just told us how they will.
This will happen in the year 2019.
Mark my words.
Stay with us for more.
Well, they say the carbon tax is designed to change our social behavior, to have us make better choices, in the words of Justin Trudeau.
Well, if that's to reduce our carbon footprint, that's just the entryway to a whole world of social modifications our government can do.
And I see news that I find on climatepot.com of a member of parliament in the United Kingdom who proposes a meat tax.
Let the meat cake.
Green MP demands meat tax.
Oh, of course, in the name of stopping climate change.
Let me read just the first headline, first sentence.
A green MP has called on Parliament to impose a tax on meat to cut greenhouse gas emissions and reduce climate change.
Carolyn Lucas told delegates at the Oxford Farming Conference: an overhaul of Britain's agri-industrial food system is needed because it is in crisis.
Did you know that?
And it's favoring consolidation at the expense of human health, ecology, and the livelihoods of farmers.
Well, joining us now to talk about this is the man who brought this to my attention and many other people on this side of the Atlantic, our friend Mark Morano, who is the curator of climatepot.com.
Hey, Mark, good to see you.
I tell you, I gave her marks for chutzpah going and saying this to farmers.
At least she has the courage of her convictions.
Let's find the silver lining here.
Yeah, well, this is actually a meat tax going after meat consumption for global warming has been around for a long time.
And it started as a social movement, meatless Mondays.
You have the whole vegetarian movement.
Al Gore claims to be a vegan.
You have people like Paul McCartney, the ex-beetle, out there encouraging, you know, no meat consumption, all because of concerns over climate.
You have a whole movement to push insects as a replacement source of protein.
And that's a serious movement.
People pushing bugs as earth-friendly.
Oh, consumption.
Everything else.
But here's the thing.
In 2007, I believe it was the United Nations came out and said that cow emissions were more harmful to the planet than the entire transportation sector combined.
Planes, trains, automobiles.
And then a few years later, another study came out, a peer-reviewed study showing that actually grazing cows on grassland helped reduce nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas.
They're worried about the methane from the cows, the belching and the farting causing global warming.
But then they're also saying a new study came out and said that cows are good for the earth because it reduces nitrous oxide.
By the way, the cows are grazing on grasslands.
So you have, again, a contradictory study, two different things happening.
But the general consensus among the climate activists is that meat-eating is bad, agriculture is bad.
Let's tax it.
Let's tax it to death.
And that's where they're going.
This is a big step in England.
It's out in the open.
They're pushing it hard.
And there's been proposals like that in the United States to make all kinds of just increases in everything, the cost of everything.
Same thing.
They want to get rid of coal, oil, gas, make it more expensive.
You want to get rid of meat, make it as expensive as possible.
Well, I have no doubt that they'll do it, and they'll do it in the name of global warming, but they'll do it really for social control and the tax benefits too.
You know, I used to be chummy with the head of a deli here in Toronto called Kaplansky, and he had a great line about meatless Mondays.
He said, Aren't Mondays tough enough already?
And I just thought that was just a great line.
Of course, he was a real meat aficionado.
I want to say, you mentioned Al Gore.
You mentioned Paul McCartney.
And I admire McCartney's music, and you have to admire Al Gore's grift, I guess.
I wouldn't call it capitalism.
I mean, he got a huge payday from the government of Qatar when they bought his TV network off him to create Al Jazeera America.
But those are extremely wealthy people.
I have never, and I know some vegans, and I find them to be people, and I'm making a judgment call here, but I've been around for a while and I've met a lot of vegans.
And every last one of them is sort of a postmodern wealthy liberal who has no religion in their life.
So it's like they've checked all the boxes on wealth and achievement, and they're looking for some sort of meaning.
I guess the other way of saying that is I've never met a poor person who's a vegan.
I've never met anyone in the third world who's a vegan.
I don't even think that exists.
I think that being a vegan and going meat-free, except in the extremely rare case where there may be some medical reason, I think it is absolutely just a political statement, some sort of preening of some sort.
I think it's fake.
I think it's completely fake.
What do you think?
Absolutely.
There's actually a movement to make your dogs and your pets go vegan and go meatless and not allow them to eat meat.
This is all about ideology.
And as you mentioned, the ideology is matched to very wealthy people.
You mentioned a religion.
I actually, at Climate Heap a few days ago, there was an incredible essay by two professors from some kind of Bible college in Texas.
And they just laid waste to the environmental movement and how basically it is the new religion for urban atheists.
And it went through and explained how, and specifically on meat, Ezra, it talked about how this is a very, it's deeply rooted sort of in the religious tradition of deprivation, depriving yourself to serve God and to be more holy.
Except here, you're doing it in service of the climate, in service of the earth.
They talk about the Catholic tradition of not eating meat on Mondays, and they're comparing it now.
And they actually said that the green ideology is being imposed and people are accepting it as essentially to many things that medieval clerics, they're worse than medieval clerics.
In other words, they are imposing an austere lifestyle on people where you're not allowed, if you follow the religion, of course, of the greens, you're not allowed to fly, to turn your thermostat up, to even use coal or oil or gas to own a car and have an SUV.
These are all sins.
But of course, the leaders of the movement, well, they can do whatever they want because they're important.
They're too important to be hamstrung down by the actual rules of this.
But they are trying to get a legion of people to impose this kind of self, I guess I'm looking for the word deprivation on themselves.
They're just trying to deprive themselves of a very monastic tradition.
You sort of deprive yourself of all pleasures.
And that's sort of what the modern greed movement has evolved into.
Yeah.
You know what?
I respect self is the word flagellation in one case.
That's when you hit yourself and abnegation, I think might be another word.
When you're trying to purify your own lusty or corporeal or hedonistic impulses to make yourself, to fix yourself psychologically, emotionally, religiously towards God.
I can understand that.
But being a vegan, it's almost like, what are the three rules to being a vegan?
Number one, tell everybody.
Number two, tell everybody.
Number three, like it's just, it is only about sneering and lecturing and hectoring others.
It's sort of the opposite of a religious self-denial and self-mortification.
And I think it was Lord Moncton, your friend in the UK, who made the distinction to me, that this is different than a religion.
This is a superstition.
And I love to think of those three-armed, massive wind turbines as three-armed crucifixes that have replaced the cross, the crucifix in Christianity.
Well, now we have a three-armed cross.
in the superstition of global warming.
And whereas in our religious tradition, we have the Garden of Eden, the time before sin.
Well, that's the Industrial Revolution.
Before that, when we were just hunter-gatherers, that was this golden era, except for, of course, it wasn't a golden era in real life.
It was a time of poverty and deprivation and hunger and disease and discomfort and fear.
Life expectancies were 30 before the Industrial Revolution.
So the religious superstitious analogy works for environmentalism, but in every single way, the new green superstition is flawed and inferior to the Judeo-Christian West it tries to replace.
Yeah, in fact, this last week, you know, Donald Trump gave his big speech immigration.
The rebuttal was done by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who ran for president.
And he actually said that we seek a fossil-free world because the earth will be uninhabitable if we don't get rid of fossil fuels.
So that's apocalyptic.
It's going to be uninhabitable if you do get rid of fossil fuels.
And this is where that superstitious belief comes in.
They believe that the things that have powered human ingenuity and civilization are now evil and they're making the earth uninhabitable.
That's a superstition.
You can't argue with someone like that.
Yeah, but notice how he reaches for the archetypical Christian Jewish idea of an apocalypse of a final battle.
You know, we're doomed.
The world's going to, I suppose, I suppose.
Our salvation comes from getting rid of fossil fuels.
We can save ourselves if we're willing to.
Well, there's so many similarities.
When you purge religion from the public square, don't think that you've purged religion from people's hearts.
They need something.
And all the little rituals, like Catholicism in particular, but Judaism too, and a lot of religions have little rituals that are physical, that are tactile, whether it's a rosary beads or, you know, sometimes the more Orthodox Jewish traditions, there's lots of little things throughout the day that you would say, well, why do you do that?
Why do you, you know, have this kind of bread and that kind of meat?
And it's to infuse a little bit of the holy in every, so infuse a little bit of religion in your day-to-day.
So we have lots of rituals in Judaism and Christianity and other religions too.
And environmentalism does that too, Mark.
Sorting your garbage, composting.
But instead of elevating us, instead of making us holy, you're handling your garbage.
Or the semi-religious edict, don't flush if you just pee.
Like, I swear, that's a whole environmentalist movement.
So instead of being cleaner, holy, or better, the environmental religion makes us gross.
Animal Rights and Environmental Religion00:04:16
It does.
Yeah, this is, I mean, it's an anti-technology revert back to our old, the good old days, which, as you said, never existed in the first place.
And it's also the apocalyptic tone.
Everything is doom and gloom of the future.
And they try to, but here's what's different about it.
They're doing all this in the name of science.
So in a way, they've not only perverted religion and turned it to superstition and it's in their hearts now, but they've also perverted it, science, on such a level that no previous scares have come close to because now everything is scientist, science demands we do X, Y, Z, as though the scientists now are the new, you know, new religious clerics who issue edicts from up high.
That's what it's become.
Yeah, the new priesthood.
And talk about an appeal to authority.
There's just one more thing.
And I know we've been going on about the religion thing for a bit, but when you said that there's a movement for some vegetarian extremists to make their pets, to make their dogs in particular vegetarian, I mean, it's one thing if a person wants to mortify themselves and to deprive themselves, if that's some way of cleansing themselves.
You know, it's one thing to do something to yourself.
And I say again that vegetarianism is about bragging to your friends.
It's not about self-improvement in most cases.
But an animal is an animal.
And if you're approaching this from a moral point of view, an animal was made by God or by nature.
And its natural instinct and its place in the world is to eat meat, as is a lion's place.
To force a lion to be a vegetarian is the worst anthropocentrism, and that's an arrogance unbounded, and it's a form of cruelty.
You can't make a lion a vegetarian.
And that's just so gross.
And that's what happens when you replace fashionable politics, when you use fashionable politics instead of even nature, even science, let alone religion.
I think there's something deeply wrong with people who are vegan.
I'm sorry.
And there's probably some vegans who are watching this who are getting very mad at me and saying I'm a good person.
And I'm sure you are.
But I would say that vegan politics is a crypto religion that at the heart of it is anti-human and anti-life.
I'm sorry I do believe that.
And if I've hurt your feelings, viewers, I apologize, but I mean that.
Back to you, Mark.
I interviewed the Princeton bioethicist, Peter Singer, years ago.
And I was at an animal rights conference.
And the message of this conference was that animals and humans are equal.
We have no business.
We can't call them pets.
And actually, even Petco now, the major food chain here, calls them animal companions when you get a form and you buy like a hermit crab or something.
They no longer call them pets.
So the animal rights movement has made progress in our language, the political correct.
But basically, I said, how can you ban, and this was the question of the conference, how can you ban humans from eating animals when you don't ban other animals from eating animals?
Now, since that time, they are trying to, at least animal companions, not pets.
They're trying to get them to stop eating meat.
But you can't be equal with an animal, but unless you're going to stop, as you mentioned, lions from eating meat or other animals from eating meat or eating other animals, then we have no business trying to act like we're equal with animals.
If they're saying that humans are different and we're at a higher plane, then that's sort of going against the whole thing.
And that sounds like a very biblical perspective, that humans are above animals.
And that's not something they want to concede.
But what they want to do is they want to stop humans from engaging in behavior that animals do.
But at the same time, they don't seem to want to ban animals.
I don't know of any movement to ban wild animals from eating other animals slash meat.
And it's one of the hypocrisies of this whole movement.
But yet somehow we're equal to animals and we shouldn't view ourselves above them.
This is according to the hardcore animal rights activists.
Yeah, you know, you're making me, I haven't thought about this in a very long time, but in my book, Ethical Oil, I talk about some of the deep green, that's what they call it, the deep green, and then sort of a made-up word that I saw them use, ecosophy.
Hardcore Animal Rights Hypocrisy00:02:56
sort of ecological philosophy, where they regard humans as a cancer on the planet.
And if you look at the writings of Maurice Strong, the late Canadian globalist who was behind Ontario Hydro, who was the chairman of the Rio Conference, I think was that in 92, and the architect of the Kyoto Protocol, Maurice Strong, who was the deputy Secretary General of the United Nations.
He, in one of his various books, he's got five kids himself, by the way.
But in one of his various books, he mused about a societal collapse where the world's population would plunge by 95%, and there would be wars like a Mad Max post-apocalyptic scenario, and that only a few back-to-the-earth types like himself, of course, would survive.
He regarded that as sort of an ideal future of, he wanted to see civilizational collapse.
He actually said so.
This is the same guy, by the way, who mused publicly about having to have licenses before humans are allowed to have babies.
I think there is some, and I'm sure I'm going to get mail from viewers who are mad at me because they consider themselves gentle vegetarians or gentle environmentalists.
But to them, I would say if you follow the logical path far enough, you will get to the inevitable conclusion that Maurice Strong himself did.
Last word to you, Mark.
I know this was an unusual conversation.
It didn't go the path I had planned.
I was going to talk more about meat taxes and what's the likelihood and when we see them in Canada too.
And we just started talking about the immorality of it.
And I think that's fine.
Give me one last word on meat taxes and morality.
Well, what I was about to say is what you said about, it's ironic because on one hand, they warn that unless we put global warming in check, billions of us will die.
Cities won't be inhabitable.
The earth, Bernie Sanders just said this week, the earth won't be inhabitable.
But on the other hand, they want that.
On the other hand, they're out.
So it's like that's a good thing, right?
You know, interestingly enough, this whole immigration debate in Washington right now, I have a 2010, a 2013 study from a peer-reviewed journal claiming that global warming will cause agriculture in Mexico to collapse by 2080 and cause mass migration up to nearly 10% of the Mexican population to move to the U.S.
On the other hand, we have activist Bill McKibben claiming that global warming will reduce, increased illegal immigration will reduce global warming because the more Mexicans and Latin Americans that come to the United States, they'll live a wealthier life and thus will have less kids and be less resource attentive.
So on one hand, global warming causes more migration and on the other hand, more migration causes less global warming.
It's that same contradiction.
Global warming will kill us all and on the other hand, we want global warming to kill us all.
You can't keep track.
Global Warming Cult Contradictions00:02:50
They're all over the place with their predictions and their philosophy even.
Yeah, it's unlike any other religion I've heard of.
It basically, the global warming cult basically lets you say or do anything you want because they can always point to some kooky study that says this or says the opposite.
And that's why it's so attractive to politicians.
It's got that mystic aura to it.
It has the priesthood, the scientists who they can, who they'll say anything on demand for cash.
And I don't know, it's most bizarre.
I think a lot of grassroots citizens are waking up to it, but I would say that the global warming cult is most strong in Canada, especially in our Prime Minister and our cult-like environment minister.
You don't even know the half of it, Mark.
Our Catherine McKenna, our environment minister, is truly a cult-like member of the thing.
And one day when you come to Canada, we'll give you a fuller briefing on it.
But until then, I appreciate you taking the time to read with us on TV.
Thank you, Ezra.
Appreciate it.
All right, cheers.
Well, there's our friend Mark Morano from climate.com.
The conversation went a bit of a different path, but I hope you don't mind.
And give me your thoughts if you have counterpoints on vegetarianism.
Perhaps I was a bit rough on you, but I didn't mean to be rough on you.
I meant to be rough on the ideology.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
On my monologue yesterday, Ron.
Robert writes, I think Soros admired Hitler's basic dictatorship.
The irony is that Prime Minister Butz is working with Soros, but he claims his political opponents are alt-right Nazis.
Now, I don't think that George Soros is a Nazi, but I think that he collaborated with them in the form of riding his bicycle around Budapest as a teenager, serving summonses to fellow Jews to get on the death trains.
I know he did that.
He admits he did that.
He said it was the most exciting time of his life, and then he later told 60 Minutes he has no compunction about doing that.
So I'd say he's a Nazi collaborator based on those facts.
I wouldn't say he's a Nazi, but I also would point out that he does not like Jews or the Jewish state.
And although he himself has a vestigial Judaism, he was born a Jew, he finances anti-Israel lobby groups.
It's bizarre.
It's bizarre.
It's unnatural.
It's anti-Western.
It's against the very system that gave him life.
But that's the left for you.
Ryan writes, if Trudeau should lose the next election, would Soros put some money towards the conservatives in the next election?
Soros could play both sides of the aisle.
That way he'd have a good plan B, just in case plan A doesn't work out.
Well, Soros has so many tentacles, and this is not conspiracy theories.
I encourage you to go to his website called opensocietyfoundations.org.
Government Money Backed Computer Generated Background00:04:08
He'll tell you what he's up to.
He'll publish the details.
I showed you various links to it yesterday.
He brags about spending $32 billion so far.
That's not some wild-eyed, crazy person saying that.
That's them saying what they do.
And they detail who most of their grants go to.
And of course, Soros has tried to influence politics in America and has been largely successful, but not successful in getting Hillary Clinton elected.
So I think he's decided to colonize Canada instead as his next best thing.
On Shakespeare's sonnets, Zuzanna writes, I never wanted to have kids until I met my late husband.
I admired his self-confidence, quick-wittedness, and aloofness that I couldn't have for myself, but wanted to repeat into the next generation that I had a child with him.
Now that he's gone, every once in a while I get a glimpse of his qualities through our son.
It's like getting a wink and a quick hello from him.
I am so thankful to see that spirit go on.
Isn't that a beautiful thing to say?
And that is exactly what Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago.
I encourage you to pick up a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets.
You can find it online.
I got it on an app on my phone.
It's a free app.
It's free.
And the first dozen or so sonnets are his arguments for having kids.
And that's a beautiful story you just told.
Thank you for sharing that.
On the new set for the show, Graham writes, seeing that Francis Schmanzy news set makes me think maybe Ezra took his flies without warm $595 million Trudeau pie.
Thank you for your flattery.
I should tell you that, I mean you probably know this, that this is a computer generated background.
I am not actually standing in a gorgeous loft overlooking Toronto's downtown with the CN Tower behind me.
I am in a one-story industrial building in a low-rent part of town in a closed box with no windows.
And that's simply a green screen behind me, which is exactly what it sounds like.
onto which the computer projects that gorgeous set.
So I am sorry to disappoint you, or maybe I am thrilled to relieve you of your suspicion that this is actually a million dollar set.
It ain't!
And you know what?
I'm glad because being super cheap and having a computer generated background instead of actually paying downtown rents is exactly why the Rebel will reach our fourth birthday next month while so many other media companies go out of work.
I remember when we started?
We started in my own living room four years ago and I knew we wouldn't stay there, but I knew we would never go fancy because one thing I learned when I was a much younger man, when I started to work for Ted Byfield and Link Beinfield at the Alberta Report, is that there was no sense spending a dollar if it couldn't be detected as value by a reader.
As in, why would you have a fancy office?
How does that improve the product?
Why would you spend money on perks that cannot be valued and seen by the end reader?
And I think there's something to that.
We only have used office furniture here.
We do buy good computers, but you have to.
But even our cameras are rather cheap.
Maybe they're too cheap.
Maybe we should upgrade a bit.
But I think maybe you were joking.
I think you sort of know that that's not a real background.
And I think you sort of know that we would never take the money.
And you probably know that the money hasn't been pursed out yet at all.
But it gave me a good opportunity to tell you that, no, this is a computer-generated set, and we will never take government money.
And let's be honest, no government money would ever be offered in any event.
Well, that's our show for the day and for the week.
It is great to be back in Toronto.
I was away for far too long over the Christmas break.
The missus wanted me to go on vacation.
I hadn't really taken one in a year.
And I did have a couple of business trips I had to jam in there too.