Ezra Levant marks Rebel Media’s fourth anniversary, tracing its rise from a $2,000 crowdfunded launch in 2015—after Sun News’ CRTC shutdown—to Canada’s top YouTube news channel, defying demonetization and ad cuts. Investigative hits like Sheila Gunreid’s UN climate exposes and David Menzies’ migrant caravan reporting clashed with mainstream media’s cozy ties to figures like Trudeau, fueling its anti-establishment brand. Meanwhile, Klobuchar’s 2019 snowstorm campaign launch and "Hillary-level" staff sabotage highlighted conservative media’s scrutiny of progressive elites, while Trudeau’s SNC-Lavalin controversies and Virginia’s blackface governor exposed systemic hypocrisy, proving Rebel Media’s role as a watchdog against power. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello Rebels, you're listening to an audio-only recording of my show, The Ezra Levant Show.
It's free as a podcast.
Today, I take my time and give you a half-hour monologue.
It's a recap of four great years of the Rebel.
Do you know that we turned four years old?
Four years old?
Someone mentioned to me that's longer than the Sun News Network was on the air.
Yikes, that's incredible.
If you like listening to this podcast, then I think you'd like to watch it.
I mean, I show video clips.
We're in the video business.
You just need to be a subscriber to premium content.
That's what we call it.
It's pretty easy PC.
It's $8 a month.
You get access to my show, Sheila Gunnery's show, David Menzies' show.
If you subscribe to a whole year, you actually get two months free.
And if you're a podcast listener, just type in podcast as the coupon code when you subscribe and you'll get an extra 10% off.
So just go to the rebel.media slash shows to become a member.
And hey, if you wouldn't mind leaving a positive review on iTunes or wherever else you listen, that'd be great.
It's a good way to support us without shipping in a dime.
So without further ado, enjoy this free audio-only version of my show.
Tonight, it's our fourth anniversary tomorrow.
Let me share with you some thoughts.
It's February 14th, and this is the Ezra Levance 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.
Four years ago, I read on Twitter that I was out of a job.
Someone had leaked the news to a rival news channel that the Sun News Network was being shut down.
It was a depressing way to learn it, though I imagine there was no good way.
If I recall, it was a Thursday night, I think, and we all just went into the office the next morning to find out if it was true, and it was, and we commiserated and said some goodbyes and cleared out our desks.
It was pretty sad, but frankly, no one was that surprised.
We had been euthanized by the CRTC.
Our owner, Quebecor, hadn't, I mean, I put in, what, $50 million into Sun News on the expectation that we would be treated the same way by the government regulator as the two existing all-news channels in Canada, owned by CTV and CBC were.
But we weren't, and the regulator shut us down again and again, making it impossible for the company to survive.
I won't get into the details, but it's a reminder that Stephen Harper sometimes lacked the killer instinct of his partisan opponents.
There's simply no way that Jean-Cretchen or Gerald Butts would have allowed a regulator to kill a liberal-leaning TV news channel.
Harper just watched as the CRTC killed Sun News in an election year, no less.
Trudeau showed he was no dummy, immediately giving a massive increase to the CBC.
And now he's adding $595 million to control the private media too.
So yeah, that was all four years ago today.
I recall that day that night.
Like I say, we all knew the end was coming.
It was a slow-motion death, so I had been thinking a bit about the possibilities of life after Sun News.
And that day when we were all commiserating, I invited some of my colleagues to come to my house to see if we could, I don't know, hammer out a plan to keep the momentum going online that we had on TV.
I knew our audience wasn't huge because, of course, the CRTC ensured we were hard to find on the dial, hard to order, in many cases simply not available at all.
But we had built up a loyal audience over the years and I knew we had to catch them quickly to let people know we had a plan.
So immediately we put up this video just to let people know we were working on it.
Sun News Network is off the air.
Bang.
Gone.
That's basically what happened.
Sun News Network went off the air today.
Sun News Network has gone dark.
The end of Sun News Network.
Sun TV faded to dark.
The sun gone, there's a hole on the far right side of the dial.
Ezra Levant fighting for freedom in Calgary.
Well, after spending a day talking about how things could work, we put out our very first video from my living room.
Here's a few moments of that.
So here's my plan.
I want to create something to take the place of the Sun News Network.
It won't be as big, at least not for a while.
It won't be as much content.
It won't be 12 or 16 hours of video content a day, not as many bells and whistles.
Yes.
But all the heart, all the independence, all the great conservative ideas.
I've reached out to a number of my former colleagues to invite them along, and I'll reach out to still more.
Some are still mourning the loss of the sun and trying to figure out what comes next.
We're all still reeling a bit, but we all know that we still care about the things we cared about last week.
And I think you do too.
But what should we call all this?
I got an idea.
The rebel.media.
You know, most of the rest.
We started making videos, very homemade, almost all of them outside.
And it was as cold four years ago as it is this week.
We did about 50 videos or so just to show we could do it.
Just to practice, just to show we could do it the next day too.
My old studio, The Sun, had cost more than a million dollars to build, they told me.
It was massive.
It had huge robotic cameras that cost more than a quarter million bucks each, I was told.
The control room had five or six people running it.
It was a big operation.
At Sun News, it was about 200 people altogether, including, for example, a whole makeup team.
Well, none of that for the Rebel.
We used little $2,000 handheld video cameras.
We edited things on our laptops.
We uploaded videos to YouTube.
We could do our own TV makeup.
I still do.
We knew we had to go ultra low cost to survive.
The name The Rebel, I'm not quite sure if I'd choose that again if I could do it over.
I know why I chose it back then.
I felt it summed up our spirit.
We were rebelling against the system that killed Sun News.
And by that I mean the CRTC and the regulators and the fact that the government could decide what's on TV.
Four years ago, that was before internet censorship really took off.
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook were non-political bastions of free speech back then.
So we were saying we don't need a Stephen Harper to look out for us.
We don't care if Justin Trudeau hates us.
We rebelled against the system, the technology, the cost, the media party think-alike narrative.
We were rebels against all that.
The Rebel.media was a weird internet name.
It wasn't a .com.
But I thought it made sense since it wasn't geographically limiting like a .ca would be.
And it wasn't just about me, EzraLevant.com.
And I thought the .media might catch on.
In truth, I don't know of a single other website that has used .media.
It's still weird to this day, frankly.
I'm thinking of changing our name to the Rebel.com, a domain we now own.
I suppose the main reason I now wonder about the name is that why should we be called the rebels?
It's true we are rebelling.
It's true we are dissident, that we object and oppose, but that implies we're the minority, or more to the point that we are abnormal or outsiders or the other.
And worse, it implies that our critics and opponents are the center, that they're normal.
On so many issues, though, it's simply not true.
The entire media political establishment, for example, they love Omar Cotter.
The vast majority of Canadians don't.
Angus Reed polls show that only 5% or 6% of Canadians want more immigration.
The entire media, political, and industrial complex wants more, including, I might add, Andrew Scheer, the conservative leader.
Sorry, we're not the outliers on that.
The establishment is.
We became, and we still are, the largest YouTube news channel in Canada, measured by the number of our subscribers.
now have 1.145 million.
YouTube, which started to treat us poorly in the months after Trump's election win, has punished us by cutting off ads to us, not just to us, but to all conservative news sites.
But they haven't banned us yet.
And in fact, they have sent us plaques commemorating our huge milestones, 100,000 and then a million subscribers.
And you know what?
Time has flown and we have now actually Been operating the Rebel for longer than Sun News was on the air.
Isn't that something?
I loved Sun News Network and I wish it had been allowed to live.
But no point in lamenting what's gone.
Let's focus on what is here.
We have published, we have broadcast more than 11,000 videos and we upload around 10 more every day.
We're still alive.
Our critics who despised us merely because we dared to have a conservative point of view, well, they've had some hard times themselves, even in recent weeks.
I guess there's only so much pro-terrorist, pro-transgenderism, pro-Trudeau, anti-Trump clickbait the world can consume.
One more fond memory.
I remember when we unveiled our business plan in a video.
Well, I was standing on a very, very cold street in downtown Toronto.
Let me play the whole thing for you.
It's a couple minutes, but I want you to watch and you tell me, did we more or less keep to the plan?
Hi, I'm Ezra Levant.
I was the anchor of the source on the Sun News Network, but the sun has set and thousands of people say they miss us dearly.
Is there anything we can do?
I think so.
Along with a handful of former staff, we pledged to create something new called www.therebel.media.
As the .media part suggests, it's everything you love.
Videos, news stories, podcasts, updated around the clock and available on your computer screen or even on your cell phone.
We started right away, literally out of my living room last week, but we're already producing national quality TV clips and we're reporting stories that nobody else will.
Here's our simple business plan.
Produce enough quality news, opinion, and activism to inspire a loyal following.
Aim for 50,000 people a day coming by the site for a quick look.
That sounds huge, but we're growing like crazy, already getting about 20,000 hits a day.
Now, most of those will be casual users, and we'll make a few pennies off each of them in display ads, but we hope people will love what we're doing and become engaged in our community and buy a membership.
Members would get special paywall-protected content that casual viewers wouldn't.
I'm talking about exclusive documentaries, feature interviews, special things you could only get from the Sun News Network in the past and that you'll only be able to get from us now.
That's our business plan, but we can't start this business alone.
Will you help us?
In the past week, we've shown you what we can do on a shoestring budget.
Imagine if we actually had some real tools, professional cameras, video software, even a studio.
Will you chip in?
We're asking everyone who loved the sun and was sad to see it die to crowdfund the rebel.media and help it be born.
So we've set up a crowdfunding page on our website, almost like a wedding gift registry, where people who want us to start our business can help us.
I've told you our plan.
Please help us get the tools.
I've listed all of the things we need right on our website at therebel.media.
From buying lunch for the team for $40 to endowing a chair in investigative journalism for $40,000 and everything in between.
If you want to cover Ottawa seriously, then you've got to be here in the foyer of the House of Commons at microphones like these asking the tough questions.
This is the only place where the media really holds politicians to account.
Thanks, Brian.
Did you love the sun?
Let's build something even better.
If you give us the tools, we'll finish this job.
Thanks, my friends.
Visit the Rebel.media and good luck to us all.
You know, I think we sort of did that.
I think we sort of did.
In fact, we get way more than 50,000 viewers a day.
Sometimes we get that in an hour.
So we started out in my living room.
After a week, my wife kicked us out.
We moved into a hotel boardroom and then we had our first little tiny office, one of those shared office spaces you can rent.
It was too small, as you can see.
Then we moved into an abandoned daycare, if you can believe it, where we just set up some used office furniture and just did it.
You'll recall we crowdfunded a little studio inside that abandoned daycare.
We stayed there for 18 months or so until we just outgrew the place and the kid-sized bathroom.
In January of 2017, we moved into our current location, a real office.
It's still very modest, all used furniture, low-rent part of town in an industrial park, but we're still alive and kicking, still trying to keep our costs low because we're not going to take any of that Trudeau bailout money.
And over the years, you know, we've grown.
We've grown geographically.
I wouldn't have guessed it back in 2015, but we have a lot of American viewers.
I remember deliberately saying, let's not try to grow in the U.S. My thinking was they have so many outstanding conservative broadcasters there, not just Fox News, but on the radio, like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, and great online websites from Drudge to The Blaze to New Upstarts.
That's what I thought back then.
I thought, we'll never compete with Americans in America.
Let's just focus on our own stuff.
But Americans had a different opinion.
They liked our take on things.
We talked about Trump because we found him interesting and appealing.
Americans watched those vids even more than Canadians did.
And that's one of the wonderful things about being online.
At the sun, on real TV stations, the world is divided up geographically.
The sun was only available in Canada and only in certain parts of Canada, on certain cable companies.
Same with other TV stations.
It's national or regional markets.
Not so with YouTube videos.
We're a global broadcaster, no limits.
And Americans liked our stuff.
And same with the United Kingdom.
We didn't discover Tommy Robinson, but we did propel him into TV.
I would talk to Tommy from time to time on Skype, as you know, and one day I just said to him, hey, Tommy, what do you do for a living?
And if you don't mind me asking, how much do you earn doing it, Tommy?
And he told me.
He worked in construction, really, and by that I mean he would renovate homes, good, honest work.
He was good at it, impressive stuff.
I've been to his home that he built for himself, but I thought that man has a higher purpose in life.
He has to fight for freedom.
Tommy has since gone independent, as you know.
But I will forever feel a small sense of paternity in his media career.
And even after he left us to go independent, when he was falsely arrested and imprisoned for content of court, we knew we had to help him for all the reasons we thought he was important in the first place.
I'm happy to say that although he doesn't work with us still, we're friends.
And helping to get him out of prison by asking our viewers to help crowdfund his legal defense was one of the great public achievements of my life.
And I hope you feel the same way.
In the UK, we met other characters along the way.
Jack Buckby, who does videos for us every day.
And Katie Hopkins, who did videos for us for almost a year, including in South Africa, where she documented the ethnic cleansing of white farmers.
Mission Accomplished00:05:16
Now, like I say, Tommy's a friend, but he's not working with anymore.
Katie Hopkins is independent now too.
And when you look back over the four years, for better or worse, we've had some very interesting characters pass through our doors.
Holy moly.
Lauren Southern, the crusading journalist who did some exciting things, some gonzo things.
She fought against political correctness.
She went to exotic places like the Calais Jungle refugee camp outside of on the coast of France.
Even Faith Goldie, who reported for us from across Canada and around the world, seen here in Bethlehem, the city where Jesus was born, now dominated by the PLO.
As you know, we fired Faith, and we've said goodbye to a few other talents over the years too.
Sometimes it's a deep editorial disagreement.
Sometimes it's young talent wanting to spread their wings and fly on their own.
Some of our journalists were hired right out of school.
Some are still in school when they work for us.
What I like about the Rebel, and what sometimes drives me crazy, is that we hire people who are unusual or unconventional.
You might say, you might say they're rebels.
Down under that was the former leader of the Labour Party of Australia, Mark Latham, who later in life became a bit of a blue-collar Trump supporter.
But all of these people, for better or for worse, they were part of a great project, a project that continues.
I think it's the democratization of journalism, the exploration of citizen journalism.
We're experimenting a bit.
I don't care.
I'm not lingering on people who have left us.
The media is notoriously unstable as an industry, especially political media, especially when you set out in advance to be a little bit prickly and a little bit challenging, a little bit obstinate.
When you call yourself the rebel, don't be surprised if some of the people you team up with are a bit of a prickly porcupine themselves.
But you know, all of it, well, it's been such a refreshing antidote to the sameness, the vanilla-ness, the dreariness of the establishment, especially here in Canada.
And it's even worse in the UK, by the way.
I mean, I'm sorry, I just don't care what the little incestuous circle of panelists on the CBC says anymore.
About anything.
I mean, take these two, Andrew Coyne and Chantalibert.
Andrew Coyne, he's the son of the former Bank of Canada governor, whose cousin, Deborah Coyne, dated Pierre Trudeau and then ran against Justin Trudeau for the liberal leadership.
That's about as close to the real life definition, as incestuous as it gets.
And just for balance, you know, Chantalibert, who's surprised, was on the Trudeau Foundation.
I mean, come on.
We're a country of 35 million people.
You literally couldn't get anyone else on a political panel to discuss Justin Trudeau besides a Trudeau Foundation appointee and the cousin of old man Trudeau's mistress.
I mean, come on.
Yeah, no.
We need a bit more fresh water in this stale pond of journalism.
I'd rather have the odd wild man or wild woman work for us at the Rebel and maybe flame out and have him go too far from time to time, sure, but then just put on those Ottawa lobbyists with their talking points.
That's not even journalism.
And I think Canadians feel the same way, at least a bunch of Canadians do.
Call us the deplorables.
I don't care.
I think the victory of Doug Ford in Ontario against the entire media party was a vindication of our thinking on everything from populism to the carbon tax.
Here's Paul Wells, the ultimate vanilla establishment journalist, tweeting that Doug Ford will never leave.
There's no chance Doug Ford will leave the Ontario Conservatives.
Suspense now is over whether he realized it.
Yeah, yeah.
Same folks who said Hillary Clinton had a 98% chance of winning.
Well, we beg to differ, and so do our viewers.
And judging by the failing mainstream media companies, so do their viewers, their ex-viewers.
I mean, so here we are in 2019, bigger than ever in some ways, more than 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube.
Now, don't think that means $1.1 million.
Those are just YouTube subscribers.
It's free to be a YouTube subscriber.
We don't get paid for that.
YouTube demonetized our site by about 90% shortly after Trump's victory.
We have literally millions of people who have interacted with our site over the years, chipping in a bit to help us crowdfund projects like travel, signing petitions, even helping us put up billboards.
I love doing things like that.
I love our billboards to fire politicians, like the one we did saying fire win.
That was a good one.
Mission accomplished.
And the one we're doing right now saying fire Alberta's David Eggin, mission about to be accomplished.
I love the mobile billboards, the Jumbotron trucks, I call them.
I love the rallies we do.
We've got to do some more rallies, like the one against the carbon tax a couple years back, where we lit the match that's turned into a blazing forest fire.
I love our lawn signs.
You know, we've got lawn signs.
We've got the stop the carbon sax lawn sign.
We've got some fire wind lawn signs.
We've got some new lawn signs coming that you are going to love, love, love, I promise you.
And you know what?
I love our people here.
Our people behind the scenes, our staff, our producers, our editors, our technical people, our computer people, our database people.
They don't get the same public credit that our on-camera stars do, but they're just as important.
I love that we have found people and made them, well, famous is the wrong word, though it's true.
To me, I think more we've made them your reliable guides to the world today.
Minister Billis Answers00:03:24
I mean, do you really trust, by contrast, the CBC and Rosemary Barton to ask real questions of the liberals?
I mean, look at this.
This is really footage.
We slowed it down a bit and put a Valentine's Day hue on it.
But this is real footage from Rosemary Barton's Lovey Dovey interview.
Look at that giggle.
She's in love.
Her Lovey Dovey interview with Trudeau a few months back.
She looks like a girl on a first date.
They're walking in the snow together.
She's flicking her hair.
Am I pretty enough for him?
I don't trust Rosemary Barton to tell me the truth about Justin Trudeau.
Do you trust her?
Do you trust Wendy Messenger?
Do you trust the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail?
I don't.
Tell you who I trust.
I trust people like Sheila Gunread.
I know I can trust Sheila because she's a real-life person, not a journalism school liberal trained assassin, gotcha, conservative hater.
No, she's real life and a better journalist than any in the official press gallery because she's got, she's not trying to audition for a job with Rachel Notley's NDP or Justin Trudeau's liberals.
I love Sheila's reports from the United Nations Global Warming Conferences.
They're great.
David Menzies, too, whether it's on the streets of Toronto or the streets of Mexico.
Remember when we sent him to cover the migrant caravan?
That was great journalism.
Or he does fun stuff too, like streeters, we call it, with Generation Trudeau.
He's so funny.
I like our young Calgary reporter, Kian Becksty.
He's only been with us about six months, but he's been hitting home run after home run lately.
It's just great.
The NDP hate him.
Look at him asking a question yesterday of Rachel Notley and senior cabinet minister Darren Billisk.
Kian found out that Billis, a senior minister, hasn't been paying his alimony, had an affair with the woman who's now the NDP caucus chair, and according to a sworn affidavit from his wife, is a drug addict.
That's all crazy.
That's investigative journalism.
And then look at the courage to put those facts right to their face.
Take a look.
Premier Rachel Notley, documents filed by Minister Billis' wife's sworn affidavits suggest that he has a problem with drug addiction, as well as suggest the details in that sworn affidavit suggest that he might be one of the MLAs who the NDP caucus covered up in terms of sexual allegations.
Can you confirm or deny this?
What I can say is that that question is essentially irresponsible, rumor-mongering, and with the greatest respect to you, you work for an organization that probably ought to be registered as a third party under the elections legislation, and so I have nothing more to say to that.
Minister Billis, will you answer the question?
I have nothing further to add.
Yeah, neither of them said no, did they?
No other Alberta journalist would ever ask a tough question like that.
It's too uncomfortable because you want to be loved if you're a mainstream media journalist.
No other journalist has ever asked, for example, when Kian asked Omar Cotter, the terrorist, some real questions.
It was the first time in his life a reporter actually asked him a tough question.
Where did all the money go he got from Trudeau?
Take a listen.
Even if he gets a passport, which airline in Canada will take him to Saudi Arabia?
You'd have to ask some Canadian airlines.
I doubt that they'd want to take a terrorist across the sea to Saudi Arabia.
He later chased Carter down the street, asking him where the money was.
I don't have time to go through our entire list of talent.
Done, Stronger Together00:06:39
Martina Markota, who covers Culture for Us.
Ben Davies, a working actor in Hollywood who covers movies from a conservative and Christian point of view.
Amanda Head, an accomplished singer and cultural observer.
Kurt Schlichter, tough as nails, U.S. Army veteran, fighting lawyer, and a fun troublemaker.
Speaking of which, it looks like Miles becoming to the Rebel.
Not Gavin.
He's much too toxic masculinity.
But Gavin's twin brother, the woke Miles McInnes, who will pay just 73 cents on the dollar what we paid Gavin out of solidarity as a male feminist.
New voices joining the Rebel all the time.
Janice Atkinson, a sitting member of the European Parliament who won as a UKIP candidate.
Isn't that exciting?
She's just started with us in the last month.
Jessica Sreetzenevsky, whose debut report with us was a powerful investigation of the leftist propaganda event called We Day.
Adam, who goes by the nickname Pathetic Millennial.
He is so funny.
And new correspondents like the delightful Pardes Salab.
There are so many things going on here at the Rebel.
We had such an interesting four years so far, but I think we're stronger and better than ever, if I do say so myself.
But what I mean by that is we've survived some bumps in the road.
And we've thrived.
And we've grown and we've grown stronger.
And we've proved that we're here for the long run.
And I think we've done great journalism.
And most importantly, you seem to want us to live on.
I know this, because if you didn't, we'd be dead pretty quickly.
No government grants here, no corporate benefactor here, like the great Pierre Carl Pellado.
Oh, believe me, I'd take 50 mil.
I'm always grateful for what he did with the sun.
I wish the government didn't shut him down.
But instead of lamenting the unfairness to which he and Sun News were treated, we've gone ahead and built something that's actually been more enduring and has had a farther reach.
And judging from the reaction we're getting from our viewers and from the world, I think we're having an impact.
It is disappointing to see the conservatives and the member opposite 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 conspiracies theories.
I think that's almost been worth the whole four years right there, wouldn't you say?
It's not boasting when I say our viewers love us.
It's an observation because if it weren't true, our crowdfunding would dry up.
The thing about the internet is we have to prove our value to our viewers every single day.
And we know immediately if we're failing, if we can see that people just don't watch our videos, or if we ask people to chip in for something and they don't.
For example, I love our coverage this past year.
It's been a dramatic we have a freelancer, Annika Rothstein, who's down there.
I made a misjudgment.
Our viewers actually aren't that interested in Venezuela.
We did not crowdfund enough to cover our costs.
Okay, fine.
Message received.
Now I'm glad we tried it.
I thought it was a great experiment in citizen journalism.
I'm proud of the work.
I thought Annika did a great job.
But at the end of the day, I work for our viewers and we'll do more of what you do want us to do.
By the way, if you're interested in how that works, we've described it all, including our crowdfunding budget, at the rebel.media slash trust.
We've put our crowdfunding financials right there and we explain how we raise our money and how we spend it and on what we call it social commerce.
You might call it pay it forward.
You'll see that paying for lawyers is a massive expense.
We're always under the attack from some censor, whether it's a Muslim extremist suing us or Rachel Notley trying to shut us down with the elections commissioner or whatever she's up to.
I'm not shy about what we spend our money on because going back to the days of operating out of that abandoned daycare, I know we keep it lean from our low-cost cameras to our economy class travel to our use of Skype instead of expansive satellite connections.
Check it out if you're interested.
Rebel.media slash trust.
And if you want to help, please do.
Sure, we've had our ups or downs, but as Frank Sinatra said, regrets, you know, I've had a few, but too few to mention.
As we mark our fourth anniversary and enter our fifth year, we do so stronger than we ever have been before.
And if I may say so, more needed than ever.
With Trudeau paying off the mainstream media with his slush fund and with social media companies censoring conservatives, our rebel voice is needed in Canada and I think around the world too.
Maybe the Rebel is a good name, after all, because we're still not done fighting.
I'm sure I've left out some names of people I ought to have thanked.
Over the four years, we've had dozens of people work with us, some full-time, some part-time, some freelancers, and some people even just doing one or two videos.
We've all learned how to do this together.
When we started, we really had no examples to follow, no role models, no one who had done this before, at least not in this way.
So please forgive me for my mistakes.
And surely, just as I have personally received credit for great work that my team has done, let me therefore take any blame for any mistakes that we have done as a company too.
But maybe from those mistakes, a little bit of wisdom has come.
Thank you to our staff.
Thank you to our crowdfunding donors.
Thank you to our on-air talents who are routinely abused in public, either through mere slander or unfortunately, actual physical attacks on us, including David Menzies just last week.
Thank you to everyone who believed in us.
And most of all, thank you, our viewers.
You are the reason we do this.
And I hope we will continue to serve you for years to come.
Happy birthday to us.
I promise you, we will keep fighting for free.
So today, on an island in the middle of the mighty Mississippi, in our nation's heartland, at a time when we must heal the heart of our democracy and renew our commitment to the common good,
Amy Klobuchar's Unexpected Rise00:10:21
I stand before you as the granddaughter of an iron ore miner, as the daughter of a teacher and a newspaper man, as the first woman elected to the United States Senate from the state of Minnesota to announce my candidacy for President of the United States.
Well, that is a senator that I, I gotta be honest, I had never even heard of her before, even though she's been in the Senate for a dozen years.
Her name is Amy Klobuchar, if I'm saying that right.
And that was her campaign kickoff in the snow.
I actually thought it looked sort of lovely.
It, you know, it looked fun even.
It's a little weird, though, to be in the snow talking about global warming, a point not missed by President Donald Trump, who tweeted this.
He said, well, it happened again.
Amy Klobuchar announces she's running for president, talking proudly of fighting global warming while standing in a virtual blizzard of snow, ice and freezing temperatures, bad timing.
By the end of her speech, she looked like a snowman woman.
And that tweet went viral, 166,000 likes.
Very funny.
I think this is going to be a great, great season for politics, just like you had, what, 15, 16, 17 Republicans vying against each other in 2015, 16.
It was wonderful.
I think you're going to have the most interesting characters, including the abominable snow woman here.
And joining us now to talk about this live from Washington, D.C. is our friend Pardez Sala, who has written about Senator Klobuchar in media.
Great to see you again, Pardez.
Hi, thanks for having me back.
Well, it's fun to talk with you, and you're right there in America's capital.
Would you agree with, you got a couple of news stories you've written about her.
I want to get to them, but would you agree with me that it is likely that this senator is going to have an interesting time, going to be part of a few debates, get her name out there, but the likelihood that she will get past the first few primaries or caucuses is pretty much as low as the temperature that day in Minnesota.
It's near zero.
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned that you'd never heard of her.
I never heard of her either.
And I, you know, I live here and I'm surrounded by everything.
And I never heard of her.
The first thing that I saw when I looked online was all these just, you know, her former employee, her former staffer is just like ripping her.
And this has been actually going on for a while.
A year ago, Politico reported that she was listed one of the worst bosses in Congress.
She made it to that list.
And she also has one of the highest turnover rates, if not the highest.
So she already had a bad reputation.
And then now that she's announced her candidacy for president, she's now a whole wave of new people are coming up and saying how bad she is, her old staffers, and saying what she did to them when they were working for her.
You know, Donald Trump, I mean, he was famous for a very long time, but I think one of his iconic phrases is, you're fired from the apprentice.
It sounds like when she fired someone, that wasn't enough.
Let me quote from one of your very interesting stories here on MediaIte.
Klobuchar reportedly called new employers of her departing staffers to have their job offers rescinded.
So like anyone can fire someone, but to fire someone and then try and get them fired from their next job, that's special.
I've never heard of that before, Pardez.
Yeah, it sounds like it's like a, you know, she feels betrayed if somebody wants to leave her office.
Why would they ever want to leave?
So she would call their future employers to make sure they didn't get the jobs.
That's crazy.
I mean, that's almost Hillary Clinton level vendetta.
Maybe she has what it takes.
I mean, if you're going to try and dethrone Trump, who's a Manhattan brawler, maybe you need that kind of viciousness.
I don't know.
She seemed very nice as the Snow Woman man lady, whatever Trump called her.
I guess she's got a darker side too.
Very, very exciting.
Does she have a chance?
Does she have a chance at all?
Does she have any allies?
I mean, Minnesota is not a particularly big state.
I don't think so.
It doesn't seem like it.
She has a lot of mainstream progressive views that a lot of Democrats support.
And so I think that's where she gets a lot of her supporters.
But in general, not a lot of people know her.
Donald Trump is someone who, even though he's known for being like a hardcore boss, people knew who he was before he was like, you know, he was on the apprentice.
He had a whole bunch of other things that made him famous.
He was practically a household name.
But, you know, nobody knows who Amy Klobuchar is.
Yeah, I took about five minutes just to make sure I was pronouncing her name right because I certainly wouldn't want to disrespect her.
You wrote another article, and I just, I've been, I've been trying to wrap my head around this next one, Pardes.
Let's put it up on the screen here.
It says, Veep writer, that's a show about a female politician, Democrat.
Veep writer confirms rumor about staffer shaving Amy Klobuchar's legs, inspired joke on HBO show.
Now, Pardes, this is very difficult territory for me because there's certain things I think boys should never know about.
I think there's certain things that should be mysterious and guys just shouldn't know.
And the idea, well, you know what?
Why don't I just sort of go get myself a coffee or something while you talk to the lady viewers about what the rumor is?
Because I don't even think boys are supposed to talk about this stuff.
What exactly is the rumor?
Now, again, this might be disgruntled former staffers.
It sounds like there's a lot of them out there.
But apparently, Senator Klobuchar asked one of her staff to shave her legs.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah, it seems like it, based on what the writers from VEEP are saying, and it sounds like they found out when they took a trip to Washington, D.C., in order to find out more about how things work for the show, multiple people who on Capitol Hill told the writers that Amy Klobuchar had staffers shave her legs for her.
Now, Klobuchar's spokesperson is saying that's not true, so it could actually be made up, but it seems like multiple people have been spreading this rumor, if it's true or not.
Yeah, I mean, but there were other reports, and I was reading online in your story and elsewhere, that it's not debated that she had staffers do other weird errands or personal errands.
And listen, if you have a personal assistant, I get it.
You're a busy senator.
You're flying between Minnesota and Washington, D.C. You have two households, plus you have a family, plus, you don't have time to get your dry cleaning.
You don't have time to do stuff that mere mortals do.
So I can understand having a personal assistant for some things.
But it looks like she had political staff doing personal favor errands, like picking up dry cleaning, packing suitcases for travel, cleaning and washing her dishes at house, at her house.
That's housekeeper stuff.
That's not political staffer stuff.
Maybe this leg shaving rumor is true.
If you're asking a Senate staffer to wash your dishes, maybe you say, clip my toenails too.
I think this set is a little unusual.
It sounds pretty believable.
And it doesn't sound like she's willing to back down and say, yes, you know, this is me or whatever.
She sounds a little bit a tiny bit defensive on this issue.
So it could be true.
It could be true.
The leg shaving could be true also.
And also just a lot of people saying it.
Yeah.
Well, this is extremely weird, which bodes well for all of us, I think.
I think it bodes well for getting Senator Klobuchar press coverage that I don't think she could otherwise earn.
Maybe she's just saying, I'm just going to out, this is a big reality show.
I'm going to be more dramatic and outrageous than anyone else.
That's how Trump did it.
So I'm going to be the leg-shaving lady.
And that's just, you know what?
That's my cross to bear, but it's going to get me to the top of the pack.
I think this bodes well for political journalists who want something more interesting to talk about than her speeches.
Pardon me?
She should own it.
She should say, yes, I'm the leg-shaving lady and make it sound cool in some way.
Yeah, and I bet Gillette would sponsor that.
And of course, this is good for Trump.
I mean, there's a lot of talent out there, but right now I'm leaning towards Klobuchar.
And it's not just because I invested a full five minutes in learning how to pronounce your name.
I've learned so much from you today, Pardes.
I don't know if I'll ever be able to use that knowledge, but it's good to see that Donald Trump is not the only reality TV star who wants to be president.
Last word to you, my friend.
Thanks.
And well, if you watch me, maybe you'll be able to put it to good use.
You'll see the joke and you'll know where it's from.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, listen, keep in touch.
We love what you're doing, and we love to catch up with you once a week for the quirkier side or the lighter side of Washington.
There's some heavy stuff, too.
Racist Governor's Last Chance00:02:44
I remember our last discussion was about Virginia.
Give me a 30-second update on that weird Democrat racist governor.
I call him racist because he dressed up in blackface.
His nickname in college was Coon Man, which is a derivative of a racial story.
It's really weird.
He hasn't stepped down yet, and really, it doesn't look like he's going to, is he?
No, it looks like, you know, this is going to, he can't find another job after this.
This is his last chance at staying in office and trying to maybe change his reputation.
It sounds like he's also taking classes.
His staffers are assigning him like, you know, Black History Month ratings so that he can learn better what to say, what not to say.
So it looks like he plans to stay and everyone plans on keeping him at this point.
Wow.
Well, maybe he can get Rachel Dolezal to give him some tips on how to be sensitive.
Pardes, great to see you again.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks for having me.
All right, there you have it.
Pardes Saleh, a writer with mediaite.com.
Stay with us.
That's more ahead on The Rebel.
On my monologue yesterday about Trudeau essentially calling Jody Wilson-Raybould a liar over the SNC-Lavalin scandal, Billy writes, Trudeau owns the RCMP, no investigation.
He owns the media.
The story will be yesterday's news.
He owns Jodi.
She's afraid of Trudeau threatening her legal career.
Looks like he'll own the election in October, too.
Well, Billy, that's the worst case scenario, and that's what we're going to do our best to fight against.
And I will give credit to Bob Fife, Stephen Chase, and Sean Fine of the Globe and Mail.
They're the ones who started this fuss.
And I don't think they're going to go quietly.
But by gosh, the Toronto Star, the CBC, and a lot of the other media are trying to bury it.
Liza writes, I want to hear about the SNC Lavalon story every day.
I don't want to give Justin and his fellow scum-sucking bottom feeders a moment's rest.
This story only dies if Canadians let it.
Okay, message received.
There are other important things, though, too.
But I take your, I agree with you.
It's very important.
And when we have Trudeau on the run on something, we don't want to let up.
But we will talk about other things, too.
On my interview with Kian Bexti, Paul writes, the questions Kian asked were not inappropriate.
The Alberta NDP are inappropriate.
Well, if you watch Keen's video, and I encourage you to watch the whole thing, he very clearly articulates what kinds of things he did not report from the divorce case.
There are many personal details.
I've gone through the files myself, that are irrelevant to the public and are private and personal.
We did not touch on those.
We only touched on the things that go to the public interest.
Podcast Listening Fits My Workday00:00:43
Mark writes, I want to thank you for making the audio podcast available recently.
I'm already a subscriber, but I usually don't have time to watch the videos.
Podcast listening fits into my workday, so now I have better access to the content, and I will continue to subscribe to Rebel Media.
Well, that's nice, Mark.
I appreciate that.
You know what?
My life is not podcast-friendly.
I don't have that kind of downtime, but I take your point.
If you're driving in your car, if you're on a bus, if you're sort of doing something where you can listen in the background without it distracting you, podcasts are great for that.
Or maybe if you just want to listen to it like people listen to the old-timey radio.
So I'm not really deep in the world of podcasting, but I'm glad you like it.