Ezra Levant debunks CBC’s claim of 9.6 million foreign troll tweets targeting Canada, exposing only 21,600 over five years—mostly retweets of pipeline critics like Greenpeace’s Mike Udima in January 2017. The CBC excluded figures like Stephen Harper or Gerald Butts while cherry-picking accounts to smear conservative media, including The Rebel, as part of a censorship narrative. Trump’s border wall emergency deal locks Democrats out of future concessions, while figures like Beto O’Rourke push open-border rhetoric, risking welfare-state collapse. Newsom’s $98B rail cancellation for illegal alien healthcare mirrors Democratic priorities, revealing ideological overreach. Butts’ orchestrated smear highlights systemic bias against dissenting voices. [Automatically generated summary]
You're listening to a free audio-only recording of my show, The Ezra Levant Show.
Today I show you something bizarre.
It's a shocking headline at the state broadcaster that 9.6 million tweets from foreign trolls were targeting Canada's politics.
That sounds like quite a headline.
If you read the story, it starts to fall apart pretty bloody quick.
Anyways, I'll let you watch it because I get into the details.
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So that's the real deal.
This is real talk, people.
And without further ado or to-do, may I invite you to listen to this bizarre tale of a fake news story in the CBC that itself was fake news.
Tonight, Gerald Butts and the CBC have determined who the threat is to the integrity of the next election.
And it's me?
It's February 18th, and you're watching 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'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Hey, I follow Gerald Butts on Twitter.
Well, he's officially blocked me, but I read his tweets anyhow.
I follow him because he is the de facto prime minister.
That's not a snide comment.
It's what Trudeau himself says.
Here's a story.
Shortly after Trudeau was elected from December 2015 in the Hill Times newspaper, Mr. Trudeau sent the message at the first meeting of liberal MPs that principal secretary Gerald Butz and Chief of Staff Katie Telford are his inner circle and that they speak for him, a liberal source told the Hill Times.
They're told that any emails from him should be taken as if they come from Trudeau himself.
Now, we know that Trudeau, we know it's true, and here's how we know that's true, because no prime minister of a G7 country can take 40 personal days off a year in addition to weekends and holidays.
If he does, he's obviously not the one who's actually running the G7 country.
Justin Trudeau is not running our country.
And he shows you that by going on holidays every other week.
Someone else is running the country and his name is Gerald Butz.
So I think that's why it's worth following Gerald Butts on Twitter because you really know what's important to the government by seeing what's important to him.
And Butts is quite willing to share his thoughts on many subjects.
He has very little self-control.
I found it terrifying a few years back when he was praising a new book on Marxist economics by the French economist Thomas Piketty.
Literally a new communist manifesto.
Unbelievable.
And Gerald Butts was in love with this book.
So yeah, it's worth following Gerald Butts.
He's the guy, by the way, you might recall, who took foreign money for his lobby group, the World Wildlife Fund, to fight against Canadian pipelines.
I've shown you this clip before, but you must see it again.
Him saying no pipeline will ever be built no matter the route.
We think that the oil sands have been expanded too rapidly without a serious plan for environmental remediation in the first place.
So that's why we don't think it's up to us to decide whether there should be another route for a pipeline.
Because the real alternative is not an alternative route.
It's an alternative economy.
So I follow Butts, and you can tell when he's agitated because he doesn't control himself.
It's so weird for a man of such high station.
He lashes out at his enemies.
He lacks self-control when he's angry.
He calls his opponents Nazis.
Oh, my God.
And he even called me that, and I'm Jewish.
So I watch him because it's a premonition about what the government's going to do.
Normally powerful men don't tweet their real thoughts to the public.
They don't get their hands dirty in fights.
But I sense that Gerald Butts is a micromanager.
And more to the point, he doesn't quite trust his staff, certainly not his token cabinet ministers who are there just for gender, racial, affirmative action reasons.
So he sometimes loses patience and just writes things himself, says things himself that he wishes his staff would do, but they don't.
So he's just going to do it.
So the other day, when this Jody Wilson-Raybold scandal was just blowing up, Butz was frustrated that the media were getting off narrative and thinking for themselves.
So he started pushing distractions on them.
And he does that on Twitter sometimes because that's one of the ways he communicates to most media, including to CBC staff.
He's smarter than to put things in a memo or an email or even a text.
He just says, he telegraphs what he wants on Twitter.
And within a day or two, you can see that show up on the message tracks on the CBC, for example.
I always say, if you want to know what that government comedy show, This Hour Has 22 Minutes is going to do, if you want to see what they'll say this week, just look to what Gerald Butts was tweeting about last week and add a laugh track.
So anything attacking Donald Trump, obviously, anything attacking conservatives, especially anything about global warming, Gerald Butts tweets it today, next week it'll be on 22 minutes.
Okay, enough preamble.
Here's a Gerald Butts tweet.
It's not even one word long.
It's not even one letter long.
It's just an exclamation point, which is like having a little siren on saying, hey gang, hey guys, hey guys, that Jody Wilson Raybold thing.
It's sort of ugly.
This is an emergency.
need you to follow these little rabbit tracks instead of hunting big game and quoting this fool.
Mr. Wilson-Raybould gave you for why she decided to resign from cabinet?
Do you want me to answer that question in English?
Um, yeah.
I'm just trying to remember.
Okay.
As a government, we take very seriously our responsibility to grow the economy, to invest in jobs, to invest in a strong future for Canadians.
I love that.
I'll have to use that.
If my wife asks me a question like, Ezra, why didn't you take out the garbage?
You know, we missed pickup this week.
I'll have to start by saying, do you want me to answer that in English?
And then I'll say, I forgot the line.
And then I'll talk about how I'm working hard to create new jobs or whatever.
That was just classic.
I love that line.
I'm going to use that in my personal life.
If I get a tough question, I'm going to say, do you want me to answer that in English?
Anyways, Gerald Butz really wanted to change the channel hard.
He's had a bad week, the poor lad.
So he tweeted an exclamation point and linked to a story on the state broadcaster.
Do you see it at the bottom there?
It said a CBC Radio Canada analysis of 9.6 million tweets from accounts since deleted shows that pipeline and immigration debates in Canada were inflamed by trolls thought to be based in Russia, Iran, and Venezuela.
Oh, okay.
Let's look at that because that'll help us understand what Gerald Butts, Trudeau's boss, the de facto prime minister, is thinking.
Right?
So here's the story.
CBC investigates.
Ooh, uh-oh.
Twitter trolls stoked debates about immigrants and pipelines in Canada.
Data show.
Is that true?
Is the debate in this country about immigrants and pipelines, is it fake?
Is it all just fake news?
Before I even read the story to you, what do you think?
I know Gerald Butts wishes those two huge issues were fake because they're both a pain in his neck.
The Pipeline Fiasco, which he personally helped create, and the immigration fiasco, which Trudeau created, really with a single tweet telling the whole world just to walk into Canada, and they have 50,000 bogus refugees just walking in on top of 50,000 Syrian refugees, none of whom actually came from Syria.
As you know, they were already safe in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon.
I bet Gerald Butz pressed Trudeau to tweet that.
tweet about the open borders.
It was done as a reaction, a slapback to Trump's executive order on immigration two years ago.
Butts hates Trump.
I bet he was the mastermind behind that disaster.
I guess next week we'll learn that only Twitter trolls care about Jody Wilson Raybold.
It's a fake story too.
That's my hunch.
So let's see.
Let's see what the story says.
Let's read it.
By the way, the sub-headline says, 9 million troll tweets released by Twitter reveal foreign campaigns to influence Canadians' opinions.
9 million troll tweets released by Twitter.
That sounds like a lot of tweets by trolls.
And if you read those words as they were written, it sounds like all 9 million were focused on Canada, didn't it?
That's how it was written.
But immediately the story is less than it appears.
Here, let me just start reading it.
I'm just going to start reading the story.
Twitter trolls linked to suspected foreign influence campaigns stoked controversy over pipelines and immigration in Canada, according to a CBC Radio Canada analysis of 9.6 million tweets from accounts still deleted.
Okay, so I'm really excited now.
Roughly 21,600 tweets from those troll accounts directly targeted Canadians.
Many of them with messages critical of Canadian pipeline projects and tweets that highlighted divisions over Canada's policies on immigration and refugees.
Oh, so hang on there.
So the number that was used in all their headlines, it's not 9.6 million tweets targeting Canada.
It's just 21,600 tweets.
It's not 9.6 million.
I came for the 9.6 million tweets.
It's how you got me in the door.
So you know, there's half a billion tweets published every day, right?
500 million.
More than that, actually.
And over the course of five years, CBC Investigates says that there were 21,600 of them written by foreign trolls that mentioned Canada in five years.
So that's about 4,000 tweets a year.
So it's about 10 tweets a day.
There's 7.5 million Twitter users in Canada.
And we got ourselves a case of 10 tweets a day by obscure Twitter accounts that were targeting Canada.
I'm not making this up.
I'm just telling you what the CBC is breathlessly reporting.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
9.6 million tweets.
Actually, there's 10 a day out of half a billion.
Gerald Butts is so excited about this, he's exclaiming it with an exclamation point.
Here, I'm going to read some more.
Get out of this.
The troll accounts, which have since been deleted by Twitter, are suspected of having originated in Russia, Iran, and Venezuela.
Since 2013, 245 of these accounts retweeted messages from Canadian activists, politicians, and media reports about various issues from potential environmental impacts to grassroots movements against the projects.
Okay, it's a little bit more interesting, I guess, but 10 tweets a day, I'll be honest, I got a little bit of a Twitter addiction.
I write more than 10 tweets a day, personally.
So it's a bit weird that the CBC has invested so much in the story.
They put two senior investigative reporters on the story.
But it's a bit interesting that these Twitter trolls they're talking about came from Iran, Venezuela, and Russia.
I wonder why they don't also have Saudi Arabia in that list.
I wonder if it's because one of Twitter's largest investors is this guy, Prince Al-Walid of Saudi Arabia.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that Twitter's not disclosing Saudi propaganda.
But the allegation that there's 245 troll accounts over the course of five years who retweeted what some real Canadians were saying.
I'm still waiting for the bombshell part here.
I came for the 9.6 million.
I quickly realized that was just false advertising, fake news.
I'm still waiting for the bombshell.
Let me read some more.
I think this is their most damning thing.
Most of those pipeline tweets were sent on January 24th, 2017, when U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to greenlight the Keystone Excel and Dakota access pipelines.
Tweets mentioning those pipelines were retweeted some 9,420 times across Canada and the United States.
Now, just so you know, the trolls in question were tweeting against the pipeline.
They were from Iran, which makes sense.
Iran and some other OPEC countries don't want North American oil.
I'm not sure what half of that has to do with Canada, though, because the Dakota access pipeline is Canadian, but I get the Keystone Excel part.
Let me read some more.
Iranian tweets well-versed in pipeline debates.
So they're really getting into it.
Now, here's how devastating this was.
The trolls appeared well-versed in Canadian debates about pipelines, quoting and retweeting prominent figures.
The account of Greenpeace, Canada Climate, and Energy Campaigner, Mike Udima, for instance, was the eighth most retweeted by Trolls.
Houdima has been highly critical of Canadian pipeline projects and oil sands developments.
The Trolls retweeted him 53 times.
Now, I know Mike Udema.
He's a Greenpeace activist.
He's based in Alberta.
He hates the oil sands.
Greenpeace is headquartered in Amsterdam, of course.
Houdima helps organize actual crimes against the oil sands in real life.
Not online, but people trespassing, people doing vandalism.
I think Mike's an idiot.
On Twitter, he's just a crank.
But the problem with Mike is not that he was retweeted a grand total of 53 times amongst the 9.6 million here.
That Mike was retweeted 53 times by some foreign Twitter account.
That's not the problem.
The problem with Mike Udema is that he's paid by Greenpeace, a foreign multinational company, to jam up the oil sands in real life every day for 10 years.
Oh, and he worked with Gerald Butts on that, by the way.
Here's Mike Udema's group.
You can see Greenpeace, the logo at the bottom there.
And on the same page at the top right, you can see the World Wildlife Fund.
That's Gerald Butzole group.
This is taken from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund tar sands campaign plan, where they were dumping millions of dollars a year, as you can see, through Canadian front groups to attack the pipelines.
So Mike Udema and Gerald Butts were actually taking real foreign money to actually fight against real pipelines.
CBC's Unlikely Fact-Checking Initiative00:12:46
Frankly, who cares that some tweet that appears to originate in Iran retweeted Mike Houdima 53 times?
That didn't stop the pipelines.
Gerald Butts and Mike Udema did.
What about the fact that they took actual foreign money to actively campaign in real life?
And the Butts has in fact killed pipelines in real life directly, overturning the cabinet approval of the National Energy Board approval of the Northern Gateway pipeline, killing Energy East by changing the terms of the approval process, letting the Trans Mountain pipeline being delayed interminably.
I'm not really worried about 53 retweets of Mike Udema.
I'm really worried about Mike Udema, but well not really.
He's just like an Occupy Wall Street ragamuffin.
I'm actually worried about Gerald Butts.
So what does this all mean?
I mean 9.6 million tweets was the sexy headline, and then that fell to 21,600 tweets, and that was over five years.
And then at least part of that was really just retweeting what real people were saying, but the numbers are so small.
53 retweets in five years?
I mean, not to brag, but I sometimes write a tweet that people find interesting, and it's retweeted by other people 10,000, 20,000 times.
That means it's shared 20,000 times.
Sharing Mike Houdima's tweet 53 times out of 9.6 million.
So whoa, why are we even reading this?
I'm reading through this story, and I'm not really getting the point of it yet.
I'll read one more part about immigration, and then I'll get to their methodology.
I just want to show you what else they're talking about besides pipelines.
Russian trolls boosted immigration fears.
Alongside the possible Iranian influence campaign, a slew of inauthentic Russian accounts also tried to target Canadians with messages, stoking immigration fears and conspiracy theories.
Many of these tweets reacted to major news events such as the Quebec City mosque shooting and the travel ban on Muslim countries enacted by Donald Trump.
The chart below shows the daily volume of troll tweets by topic.
The peaks coincide with major events.
Oh, this is going to be amazing, I guess.
See, Angus Reid has polled Canadians, and I mean real Canadians, real people, and found that 94% of Canadians do not support Justin Trudeau's plan to increase immigration.
As you can see, the bottom line there, only 6% want more immigration.
49% want less immigration, that's the red line.
31% want it kept the sane, and the rest don't know.
So does the CBC have some bombshell proof that we were all just sort of hacked by Russians?
That maybe that refugee camp of Trudeau's migrants in Toronto, is that fake?
Is that like a Twitter thing?
Or that the accused murderer and rapist of Marissa Shen, the Chinese girl allegedly murdered and raped by this guy, one of Trudeau's Syrians in Burnaby, was that some Russian troll thing too?
Well, they have charts.
Here's the charts the CBC rolls out.
And that's what they've got.
You can see that immigration chart in the top right there.
There are a couple of hundred tweets over five years.
Not a couple hundred million.
Not a couple million, not even a couple thousand.
A few hundred tweets over five years.
I say again, Twitter has 500 million tweets a day.
How is any of this a news story?
Why is this a news story?
Why is this so exciting for the state broadcaster that they actually publish this instead of saying, yeah, sorry guys, 21,600 tweets over five years is a rounding error.
And all they really did is just retweet real Canadians for better or for worse.
Why all the fuss here?
Well, look at this.
Methodology.
CBC downloaded and analyzed 9.6 million tweets released by Twitter on this page.
To isolate tweets targeting Canadians, the CBC searched the tweets of 67 keywords, including the names of public figures.
Justin Trudeau, Andrew Scheer, Ezra Levant?
I'm on there.
Places, Toronto and Alberta.
And organizations, Kinder Morgan, CBC, NDP, as well as popular hashtags like Canadian Politics, Ontario Politics, and Quebec Politics.
So my name was put in there?
As a public figure.
So they checked Justin Trudeau, okay, good idea.
They checked Andrew Scheer, good idea.
And Ezra Levant?
Hmm?
This over five years.
I emailed the researcher and I asked him, why didn't you check Stephen Harper?
Why didn't you check Dalton McGuinty?
Why didn't you check Rachel Nodley?
I, Ezra Levant, a YouTube guy, I'm one of the three people mentioned by the state broadcast promoted by Gerald Butts of the PMO.
Why wasn't Gerald Butts?
I mean, I like to think I'm a very important person.
Yeah, not really.
Gerald Butts is an important person.
Why didn't they test his hand?
Why are the three names that focus on Justin Trudeau, Andershear, and Moi?
Yeah, and then they have this chart.
The most retweeted accounts by trolls in Canada.
And then can you see it?
Number one, oh, CBC News, 196 times.
Number two, the Rebel, 191 times.
Number three, Moi Ezra Levant.
Then RT, Press TV, Global Mail, Real Donald Trump, Micodema.
So the Rebel was retweeted 191 times, and I was retweeted 148 times in five years.
What are we doing here?
Out of 9.6 million retweets, I was retweeted 148 times.
Frankly, I'm disappointed.
It was so low.
But what does it even mean?
Look at the top there again.
The CBC itself was retweeted more than we were, but we don't even know what that means.
We don't even know what those tweets were about.
It's so weird.
At the Rebel, we just mainly tweet our news stories.
I tweet about whatever I like.
I've actually tweeted more than 100,000 times.
I have a little bit of an addiction.
I have more than 150,000 followers.
I'm actually a bit upset that over the course of five years, I was only retweeted 148 times by all these foreign powers.
I asked the CBC researcher, I said, well, what tweets were even retweeted?
Why are you implying I was tweeting like some Soviet propaganda?
And he sent me privately the list.
Most of the tweets that were retweeted had nothing to do about Canada.
I was in court in London at the Court of Appeal retweeting Tommy Robinson's trial.
That's the bulk of it.
Why would that be included?
Why would those numbers, I'm overseas in the UK, covering a trial about contempt of court.
Why would he put those numbers in a story about pipelines and immigration and not disclose that?
Isn't that unethical?
Isn't that completely misleading?
And why were the only journalists tested?
There were a couple other people tested they didn't mention there.
Why weren't any liberal journalists tested?
Wendy Mesley, that conspiracy theorist of the CBC.
David Suzuki.
I like to think I'm a big shot.
I'm smart enough to know I'm not as big a big shot as David Suzuki.
He's a journalist and a politician and an activist who had a lot to say about pipelines.
Why wasn't his name tested?
Because any name you test only comes up positive.
And so you put in David Suzuki, it's going to by far have more retweets than me.
So they only tested people they don't like.
They threw Trudeau in there too because it would be weird to test me and not him.
This was not science.
This was not math.
This was not journalism.
There was no story here at all to begin with.
9.6 million tweets and their big fish they pulled out of the sea was a.
It's not even a minnow, it's plankton.
What have we learned from the story?
Well, you have learned nothing from the story.
You have not learned in the story what we tweeted.
That was repeated.
You have not learned who repeated it.
You have not learned anything other than the CBC wrote a torqued up headline that it was immediately evident as fake news.
There were not 9.6 million tweets about Canada by foreign actors.
There were 21,000 over five years.
The story does not tell us anything about the world.
The story does not tell us anything about foreign influence.
Certainly a lot less than the fact that both Gerald Butts and Michaudema took foreign money to attack our oil sands.
What this does instead is it shows you Gerald Butts and the CBC's motives and mission.
They seek to imply somehow that we here at The Rebel are foreign trolls or fake news.
And in fact, that any liberal political problems, pipelines, immigration, Jody Wilson raybolds soon enough, are fake problems.
They're not real.
That's a Venezuelan troll.
Forget about unemployed Albertans.
No real person cares about pipelines.
Forget about the urban refugee camps in Toronto or opinion poll after opinion poll upset with immigration.
That's all fake.
Russian spies told you to think that.
And whatever you do, whatever you do, people, don't listen to the number three public figure in Canada, Ezra Levant.
He's just a troll.
And whatever you do, don't watch the number two news source in Canada, The Rebel.
Watch the number one news source for these trolls, Trudeau CBC.
They were retweeted 196 times, but don't listen to the Rebel, people, because they were retweeted 191 times.
What does this even mean?
It means nothing other than to bamboozle you.
It itself is fake news, but it is fake news with a purpose to justify the massive government intervention in social media.
We showed you this a year ago.
Trudeau threatening Facebook that if they don't censor Trudeau's enemies in this election, he will force them to do so.
And then just last month, when the Liberals announced their plan to have the government media monitors and have public awareness sessions to train people not to trust media that Trudeau himself doesn't like, that's what this is.
This is gobbledygook.
That is a word salad of a news story.
It is fake news.
It was junk news.
It was designed with bias hardwired in it.
It is nothing.
But it has been repeated and retweeted by every liberal who got their new marching orders, their new talking points from Gerald Butts.
And by that, I mean the mainstream media, of course.
By the way, the CBC says they got their raw data from Twitter and gives you a link where you can too.
So I went to that link and I filled out the very short three-question form asking for the data.
I gave them my name, my organization name, and my purpose to fact check the media.
Isn't that the point of this data?
And Twitter wrote back to me denying my request.
No reason given.
They just refused.
So I applied again, saying I was personally named in a news story using the data.
Could I please check it myself to see what they're talking about?
No reply at all from Twitter.
That's weird.
It's almost like Twitter's working with Trudeau, I wonder.
I mean, they're banning conservatives in the UK and the U.S.
They kicked off many of my friends from Twitter, from Tommy Robinson to Gavin McInnes.
Is that what this is?
In this entire deep research investigation, this big story, they never actually mention what Rebel tweets or which of my tweets were retweeted.
Privately, the journalists said it was mainly my Tommy Robinson trial stuff.
But they make me the third most important person in Canada, and they make the Rebel the second most important news source in Canada.
I'm flattered, but it's not true.
So it can't be news.
It can't be for news reasons.
The story is not a news story.
It's an anti-news story.
The whole reason for this was for censorship, which is probably why Twitter won't give me the raw data.
Mark my words.
Mark my words.
This story is a pretext.
We hear the Rebel, we're the only media that Gerald Butts can't control.
We don't submit to them.
Can't Have Both00:12:55
We're not going to take their $595 million payoff.
They can't silence us in the courts.
We've done nothing wrong.
We'll beat Rachel Notley in her attempt to silence us in Alberta Court.
So just get Twitter to do it?
Is that what's going on?
My friends, that's my theory.
It's not based on any foreign trolls.
It's based on Trudeau's conduct, Butz's conduct, this bizarre CBC story, and what their reporter told me.
It's a speculative theory, I put it to you for sure, but it's a lot more sensible than this bizarre conspiracy theory strung together by Butz's government journalists at the CBC, don't you think?
Stay with us for more.
I'm going to be signing a national emergency.
And it's been signed many times before.
It's been signed by other presidents.
From 1977 or so, it gave the presidents the power.
There's rarely been a problem.
They sign it.
Nobody cares.
I guess they weren't very exciting.
But nobody cares.
They signed it for far less important things in some cases, in many cases.
We're talking about an invasion of our country with drugs, with human traffickers, with all types of criminals and gangs.
Well, there you have it, President Donald Trump agreeing with Congress's plan for border security and deciding to proceed with an emergency, an official declaration of an emergency, to build the wall without Congress.
I think it's a bit technical, so we're going to our favorite expert to help figure it out.
And by that, I mean Joel Pollack, the senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Now, Joel, I need your help to decode this.
Let me read your headline in Breitbart.com.
The border wall deal with the national emergency is a win for Trump.
I have seen objections from immigration hawks like Mickey Kaus and Ann Coulter who say that this will be stopped by the courts.
Trump capitulated.
This is a disaster.
I see the White House shooting back at Coulter.
Why do you think it's a win for Trump?
Why do you think Coulter is wrong if you do?
And is that wall actually going to get built or will it be stopped by some Obama judge?
Okay, well, first of all, it's certainly going to be stopped by an Obama judge, but then it's going to eventually come before a Trump judge or a Trump panel of judges.
Whether or not he ultimately prevails, what's most important about this border wall deal plus the national emergency is what's not in it.
And what's not in it is any sort of concession by the president on immigration at all.
There's nothing here about immigration.
The only concessions have to do with border security.
And what Anculture and others are worried about is that there is a provision that allows people who are sponsors or potential sponsors of unaccompanied minor children to avoid deportation.
The reason they do that is often when an unaccompanied minor comes to the United States, they may have a relative who's also an illegal alien.
There's no other way to care for that child unless you want to hold them separately, other than to release them to the custody of the person who may be an illegal alien, but they may be unwilling to come forward if they're going to be deported.
So in order to avoid the political problem of having quote-unquote kids in cages again, they decided to make sure that the children who are stopped by border patrol can be housed with a relative or someone who's not going to be deported.
Now, there's some very good criticism of this.
It's not a great policy.
It's really more done for political reasons.
But as to whether it throws the door open wide for masses of illegal immigrants, I don't think so.
It may incentivize some people to send their kids on the dangerous journey.
That's a problem.
But that becomes less of a problem over time if indeed the wall gets built.
So it's a loophole, but it's one that closes.
And what Trump did not give away is any sort of legal status for the so-called dreamers who were here under Obama's DACA program.
He also didn't give any sort of legal status or path to citizenship for the 11 million plus illegal aliens here.
That's what Democrats wanted when he first proposed the wall as one of his four pillars in his State of the Union last year.
So Democrats got nothing in terms of immigration reform, and now they have no leverage.
They cannot negotiate anything.
The deal that everybody thought would be made was that Democrats would give Trump the wall in exchange for some kind of amnesty.
They got nothing.
And so I understand there's lots of loopholes here, lots of things people are worried about, and there will be challenges in the courts and technical challenges, all kinds of things.
But what's really important here is that Democrats accepted the principle that a border barrier is necessary and therefore not immoral, while at the same time not getting any sort of immigration legal status, path to citizenship, any of that stuff.
They've lost all their leverage going forward.
And look, I know I'm in the minority here.
I have to be honest.
Most people think this is not a good deal, but I feel that it is.
I'm prepared to be wrong about that.
However, I do think that as this retreats into the rearview mirror, we are going to see people start to realize that Democrats no longer have any leverage to achieve anything on immigration, even though they have control of the House of Representatives.
And when it comes to the 2020 election, they're going to have to face their own voters and tell them we didn't get anything for you.
And they're going to start squabbling amongst themselves the way they have with the Green New Deal and all sorts of other things.
They're going to compete with each other to be more radical than the next.
And I think it's going to look very, very bad.
Already you have Democratic presidential candidates vowing to take down Trump's border barrier, which is just completely ridiculous.
Yeah.
You know, I remember you and I spoke about this a couple months ago, and you said that while the border wall is a hot issue in certain states where it's very real and present, in other parts of America, it's not a top issue, especially with independents or Democrats who might consider switching over.
But I noted that Beto O'Rourke, I just want to point out he's Irish Catholic, but he calls himself by a Hispanic nickname because he knows how to do politics in 2019.
He came within 2% of being the senator from Texas.
He's clearly thinking of running for president.
I call him Dento O'Rourke because of his live streaming his dental procedure.
That was quite the way he's trying to catch up with Alexander Ocasio-Cortez.
But let me play a very quick clip of Beto O'Rourke saying that he would tear down walls.
And I think he's saying he would tear down even existing walls.
He says he's against walls as a concept.
And I've seen him say things like this.
Here's a quick clip of dental dental.
Take a quick look at this.
You know, would you, if you could, would you take the wall down now?
Here?
Yes.
Like you have a wall.
Absolutely.
Knock it down.
I'll take the wall down.
And you think the city, you think if there's a referendum here in this city, that would pass?
I do.
Here's what we know.
After the Secure Fence Act, we have built 600 miles of wall and fencing on a 2,000-mile border.
What that has done is not in any demonstrable way made us safer.
So it was one thing for Joel for you to say to me a few months ago: look, this really isn't as hot an issue for independence as it is for the Republican base.
And I think you're probably right.
But it looks like Beto O'Rourke and the rest of the Dems are going harder and harder down that road.
Maybe they're right.
Maybe the demographics, maybe the number of those millions of illegals is just so high that the winner will be the one saying, tear down the wall, let in the Trojan horse, let in the millions.
Maybe we've passed the tipping point, and yeah, an open borders Angela Merkel-style candidate will actually win.
What do you think of that?
Well, the choice Democrats have to face is a real one between having a generous welfare state with free Medicare, free health care for all, and all the great, wonderful guarantees of federal jobs that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez promised in her Green New Deal.
They can have all that, or they can have an open border, but they can't have both.
And you saw that choice happening this week in California, where the new governor, Gavin Newsom, canceled the state's high-speed rail program.
Why did he cancel it?
Because the cost was approaching $100 billion.
It was originally supposed to be $37 billion.
Now it's up $77.
Some estimates say $98 billion.
He needs that money if he's going to extend health care to illegal aliens, which is one of his other campaign promises.
And actually, in terms of votes, helping illegal aliens who may become citizens at some point is more important than giving joyrides to environmentalists through some farm country that they're never going to visit again.
And he decided he's going to choose to have the open borders rather than the big public infrastructure project.
But he's going to have to make choices.
The states can't print their own money.
The federal government can, but within reason, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democrats aren't just proposing a radical environmental policy.
They're also proposing socialism, essentially, and they're planning to pay for it by printing money.
That's not a joke.
That's not me satirizing their plan.
Their plan essentially is to print money.
The one joke I would tell about it is, borrowing from Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the whole series, I think they should just declare the leaf, the official currency of the United States, so that money grows on trees.
Then there will be an almost unlimited supply of money for whatever they want to do.
You know, I know you're joking, but I know that many on the left would not regard that as a joke.
They'd say, yeah, man, why don't we?
I have one last question, and that is the reality that Gavin Newsom has grappled with and chosen.
I think it surprised some people.
You can defer that reality.
You can't fight against reality forever, but you can delay it.
I think Angela Merkel delayed it.
I think a lot of European countries have delayed it.
I think maybe the UK delayed it.
Yeah, reality bites sooner or later.
But really, the question is, can Democrats delay that moment of reckoning past the year 2020 or maybe 2024?
Can they say you can have it all, open borders and a welfare state?
And sure, there's going to be an economic crunch or collapse five years from now or so.
But Barack Obama shows you can rack up debt and keep it going for a while before there's a collapse.
And again, all they need to, if Beto O'Rourke can get 48.5% in Texas in 2018, I think he can win in 2020, 2024, whatever.
And so I'm just saying the reality you're talking about, if it can be kicked down the road long enough, America can be swamped and the Republicans will never win again.
Last word to you, what do you think?
Well, they are certainly looking toward 2020.
They see this sort of hyperbole as an opening ask in a negotiation.
They think they're learning Trump's lesson, which is to promise the moon, and maybe you get somewhere into the stratosphere.
So you get in the direction you're moving if you lay out the most ambitious possible formulation of your plan.
But what they don't get is that Trump was promising his voters things that were in the general public interest, like a border wall, for example.
What Democrats are promising is in nobody's interest.
And I said this earlier today, but they can vote to amend the laws of the country.
They can vote to amend the Constitution, but they can't vote to amend the laws of thermodynamics.
And they can cancel natural gas and coal and nuclear and all that stuff and hydroelectric.
They don't like hydroelectric because they say it harms the environment.
So they're not even into that kind of renewable energy.
But they are going to need to provide for the country's energy needs in some other way.
And they can't just create energy.
They can't spontaneously combust.
They can't do that.
So they're either asking us to accept shortages and blackouts or they're going to have to scale down their plans.
Democrats Can't Amend Laws of Thermodynamics00:01:49
That's not a matter of political expediency.
It's a matter of science.
And they like to think of themselves as the pro-science party, but they have long since left the planet when it comes to thinking about how climate works and how energy works.
Well, I was listening to you and I was thinking you have perfectly described, even though you probably don't know it, Justin Trudeau, our prime minister, and his environment minister, Catherine McKenna.
I think they actually learned their craziness from the Democrats, actually, not vice versa.
They're probably sharing bad ideas.
There you have it.
Joel Pollack, Sr., editor-at-large of Breitbart.com.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Well, that's our show for today.
What do you think about that weird fake news story about fake news?
I read it with some excitement.
9.6 million tweets trying to massage the Canadian conversation.
That's a lot of tweets.
That could make a dent.
No, no, no.
It was 21,600 over five years.
That's 10 a day.
That's not in.
And when I actually reached out to the CBC reporting, I have to do a follow-up on this.
He showed me the names that he tested in this troll list.
He didn't test any liberal journalists by name because the only thing that happens when you test a name is does it show up?
So it looks bad.
Even out of 9.6 million tweets, if I only show up 148 times, that looks very bad.
I think the reason they only tested me and actually Candace Malachman and Barbara Kaye, and that's it for journalists, is because they didn't test any liberals, is because this was a smear.
It was a setup.
It was biased.
And that's why Gerald Butz was promoting it.
I think we got a tire by the tail here.
What do you think?
All right, that's the show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.