Ezra Levant, Keean Bexte, and Martina Markota dissect Canada’s political and cultural contradictions: Bexte credits viral exposure of Ann McGrath’s communist ties for the UCP’s Alberta victory, while Ezra slams media double standards, ignoring radical Islam critiques like Yves Torres’ Notre Dame fire remarks or ISIS-linked terrorism by 300 Canadians. Martina mocks bulimia.com’s "body positivity" superhero edits—like shrinking Catwoman’s breasts while adding weight—as biologically absurd and culturally damaging. They pivot to Loblaw’s $12M taxpayer-funded fridge upgrades amid bread price-fixing claims, questioning corporate welfare for billionaires like Galen Weston over veterans’ needs. The episode reveals how selective outrage and institutional bias distort public discourse, from politics to pop culture, while empowering predatory corporate practices. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to Rebel Roundup, ladies and gentlemen, and the rest of you, in which we look back at some of the very best commentaries of the week by your favorite Rebels.
I'm your host, David Menzies.
Well, after four years of NDP rule, regime change has finally come to Alberta.
Kian Bexte will offer his take regarding the new UCP sheriffs in town.
So who would make vulgar comments and bad jokes about the Notre Dame Cathedral tragedy?
Well, that would be Eve Torres, an hijab-wearing Muslim activist and a candidate for an Islam-orientated left-wing political party in Quebec.
That's who.
Rebel Commander Ezra Levant will offer his analysis.
And holy heartbreak, Batman, or is it Fatman?
The folks at bulimia.com are pressuring comic book publishers to reimagine their iconic superhero characters to be fatter, less muscular, and less boozomy.
Gee, where is there a crime fighter when you really need one?
Martina Markota shall explain all.
And finally, letters.
We get your letters.
We get your letters every minute of every day.
And I'll share some of your responses regarding our pilgrimage to a Toronto Loblaw store to drum up more signatures for our buyyourownfridges.com campaign.
Spoiler alert, the management types at Lobloss were not happy to see us.
Those are your rebels.
Let's round them up as you can see right behind me the billboard is here It's in Calgary.
It was a quick turnaround, and we're just down the road from Anne McGrath's campaign office.
You can see it right there.
We're going to drive this bad boy around Anne McGrath's constituency to make sure that her constituents know that Anne McGrath in 1984 deemed it a good idea to run under the ideology of Stalin Marx and Chairman Mao.
She's tried to censor us at every turn, but she can't censor this.
I'm very excited.
Let's hop into the truck and start driving.
Well, after four long, torturous years, finally regime change has taken place in Alberta with the United Conservative Party forming a majority government.
There are so many angles to pursue in terms of the bigger picture when it comes to the 2019 Alberta election and what a nasty campaign it was.
But when it comes to the microcosm of one particular writing, namely Calgary Varsity, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that our man in Cowtown, Kian Bexty, might just have been the catalyst when it came to tilting the scales in favor of UCP candidate Jason Copping at the expense of communist come NDP candidate Ann McGrath.
And with more on this feel-good story is the aforementioned Mr. Bexty himself.
Welcome to Rebel Roundup, Kian.
Thanks for having me, David.
Always a pleasure, my friend.
So Kian, that caper you pulled last week with the Jumbotron equip truck.
It was just spectacular.
And by the way, for those who haven't seen this video, please give it a view.
It's must-see entertainment.
But I truly think that given how close the voting was in Calgary Varsity, your exposés on Ms. McGrath might very well have factored into the NDP losing this writing.
And I know it's not official yet.
There's still some belts to count.
But if the fat lady isn't singing, she's certainly warming up backstage.
Anyways, what do you have to say about that, my friend?
Well, it was a great campaign.
We ran that billboard truck after Anne McGrath called the police on me.
And viewers might remember this communist called the Stasi on a journalist, if you can believe it.
And that was her undoing.
You can go to that video and look at the exact moment she dials 911.
And that is the moment that she lost the election.
I hope that for the rest of her life, she remembers that when she dialed 911 and tried to call the police to silence a journalist, that that is what caused her to lose the election that day.
It's nothing that I did.
She chose to lose this election.
And it's shown by how many views that video has, over 100,000.
I haven't checked recently.
I just saw when it passed 100,000 about a week ago.
And that's almost as many people in her whole riding.
And I'm sure many of those views are from out of riding.
But odds are, I'd say, that we swayed the hearts and minds of over 800 individuals in her riding.
Everyone I talked to, who wasn't an obvious NDP shill, when I advised them that she was a communist in 1984, they were taken aback.
And they thought, oh my God, I could never vote for that.
So it really goes to show how little the mainstream media did for the residents of Calgary Varsity.
They really failed them.
And the Rebel was the only news outlet that covered that race seriously.
You know, and that's a very good point.
And by the way, I do agree with you, Kian.
I think going back to the video from two weeks ago in which Anne McGrath is calling the police, she did herself an incredible disservice.
She dropped her facade of the caring, loving left that I'm here for the people.
And you saw this very visceral, bitter woman dialing the police when there was no reason to.
For optics-wise, if she had just chuckled with you and moved on, that video would not nearly have been as powerful.
And then, of course, with the truck, we can see people that you're talking to reading the messages on the truck and saying, well, I'm going to have to reconsider my vote or look into this because certainly the CBC and their ilk, they weren't exposing Anne McGrath's communist past.
So a pox on the media party's house, to be sure.
And congratulations for you for enlightening voters.
And I agree.
I think that might have been the catalyst to undo Anne McGrath from winning this hotly contested writing.
Well, it was very close.
It was one of the closest ridings in the whole province out of the 87 seats that we have.
There were a few closer ridings, but 800 votes is a very small margin of error.
It's under 5%.
And anything under 5%, I'm going to be watching closely here in the next few days while Elections Alberta releases these advanced and special ballot polls because anything could happen, especially in a university riding like Calgary Varsity, where students are voting, perhaps students who went home early or many student votes that were cast in the riding may be counted elsewhere if they decided to vote at a home rural riding or back in Edmonton.
So it's going to be interesting to watch in the next couple of days.
I'm watching, and I'll be keeping people updated on Twitter when the advanced poll results are out, just to confirm that the final nail is in Anne McGrath's coffin.
For sure.
Yeah, I hope we're not getting ahead of ourselves and we're going to have to eat Crow a week from now.
But if we have to eat crow, I'll put some hot sauce on it.
Now, tell me, Kian, in the bigger picture, if we look at the province en masse, were there any writings that were a surprise to you in terms of the UCP candidate not winning or somehow a UCP candidate taking what was expected to be a NDP stronghold?
Well, there's two writings there that I would talk about.
That's Lethbridge West and Edmonton Southwest.
Edmonton Southwest is where Nigerian immigrant Casey Madu won.
He's the United Conservative Party candidate, and it's the only United Conservative Party confirmed seat in Edmonton so far.
He's in a bit of an interesting race.
He stood next to a rebel Stott Notley sign and was skewered by the left.
They called him a white supremac.
Keep in mind, he is Nigerian.
And his opponent, John Archer, the NDP candidate, told people to vote based on their skin color.
And again, this is a white Caucasian John Archer telling people to vote with their skin color.
And their opponent is a Nigerian immigrant.
And the Nigerian immigrant won.
John Archer wanted people to vote based off of their skin color and religion.
And if you're Muslim, vote for me.
If you're gay, vote for me.
Vote like you're not white kind of thing.
It was disgusting.
And John Archer was the real racist, and he lost.
You know, it is disgusting.
And the left is playing a dangerous game.
And it goes right up to the prime minister's office.
When you start calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi or a white supremacist, you are debasing the language.
It is just becoming part of the wallpaper.
In other words, if everyone's a Nazi and a white supremacist, then nobody is.
And it is a despicable game they're playing.
And when they put that label on a person of color, Kian, I feel like I'm in the bizarro universe.
But you know, I can tell you, when I'm listening here in the East Coast, I listen to a lot of talk radio, and it's very interesting seeing the lefty pundits here trying to analyze the Alberta election.
And one of the narratives is, well, you know, it was bad luck with Rachel Notley inheriting what became a very bad economy.
She was a pipeline champion and was thwarted by Ottawa.
And then they almost contradict themselves by saying, but she really believed in an alternative energy economy too.
Well, which is it, oil or alternative energy?
And meanwhile, Kian, who's kidding who here?
This is a woman that was always anti-pipeline and just in the later part of the regime made pronouncements to make it look like she was for pipelines.
Well, we're going to see some upset NDP supporters, I think, going forward.
They want to know why they lost.
They were so convinced that Rachel Notley's brand was going to take them over the finish line and it didn't.
Wow.
So I think that when they all sort of come together as a collective at their next AGM, there's going to be, and keep in mind, Rachel Notley didn't resign.
We got to keep in mind leopards don't change their spots.
And the NDP supporters, the die-hard unionists who, you know, who were behind the party from the get-go before they accidentally got elected, they've always hated pipelines.
They always have.
And so have their leaders, especially the ones that were elected before the Orange Crush of 2015.
That's Rachel Notley.
That's Darren Villis.
That's David Agen.
And Rod Loyola, I think, was the fourth.
He's the actual other communist in the party.
They all hate pipelines.
They've all been at every anti-energy rally that existed from 2000 to 2015.
So I'm going to expect to see a very die-hard anti-oil, anti-pipeline, anti-Alberta candidate running for the leadership once Rachel Notley inevitably resigns.
I think that'll happen in the next three or four months.
Wow.
And to think you might have thought that they would have learned a lesson, but apparently they're so beholden to their dogma.
Kim, we'll wrap it here.
One last question.
What can Jason Kenny do?
This election was all about the economy.
Alberta is in bus mode right now.
But, you know, getting those pipelines expanded, I'm thinking of Energy East through Quebec.
I'm thinking of pipelines in British Columbia, where you have premiers in those two provinces that are anti-pipeline too.
Even with regime change in Alberta, I guess the question is, Kian, what can Jason Kenny do if he's running into opposition in other provinces?
Well, that's a good question.
And I want to go to something Ezra said during the live stream.
And I think it holds, I think it is really important.
Ronald Reagan defined his presidency by firing all of the air traffic controllers in the United States and replacing it with the military.
That was the moment where, as Ezra said, the Soviets realized that they had an opponent who was not going to mess around.
And I can compare British Columbia and John Horgan to the Soviets in the late 1900s and Jason Kenney to Ronald Reagan.
He needs a moment where he says, no, we're not going to screw around.
We're starting right away, day one.
We're going to hit the ground running.
We're going to turn off the taps to BC.
We're going to make them pay three bucks, four bucks a liter for their oil and gas until they realize that they have no right, no right to suffocate Alberta, to suffocate our industry and to keep our people unemployed for no reason other than they're on some hoity-toity hype environmentalist perch.
And we're not going to let that happen.
And Jason Kenney has to make sure that Albertans see him as a premier of action in the first 100 days.
I'm giving him 100 days.
If I don't see serious action then, then I will lose all hope because if Jason Kenney's not going to do something, then I don't know who will.
You know, I totally agree, Kian.
And, you know, Kenny has that Trump card.
He can literally turn off the taps to British Columbia if he has the wherewithal to do so.
So let's see if he takes a page out of the Ronald Reagan playbook.
Anyways, great coverage of the election.
It was a fascinating election, Kian.
Fire Double Standard00:05:50
And just watch out for Anne McGrath if you're crossing the street and you see someone speeding up as opposed to slowing down.
But anyways, thank you so much for your time, as always.
Thank you, David.
You got it.
And that was Kian Bexte in Calgary.
Keep it here, folks.
tomorrow.
Rebel Roundup to come right after this.
Let's focus on what she said.
Again, I'm using the Google translation of La Presse.
In a confused message posted and removed from her Facebook page, Torres, who has already been a political analyst invited to the show La Jute on the TVA network, suggests that the fire in Paris Monday would be the result of a divine intervention related to the prohibition of religious symbols in France.
According to Ms. Torres, banning religious signs can stoke the wrath of the imaginary friend.
And then here is the result, according to her.
I would be Prime Minister Francois Lagaud, I would sleep firefighters at the Basilica of Notre Dame Street in Montreal, she continues.
Okay, so pretty clear, but let me be clearer, because that was a funny translation by Machine.
Yves Torres, a hijab-wearing Muslim activist, official spokesman for a large Muslim lobby group, former candidate for an Islam-oriented left-wing political party in Quebec, said that the fire in Paris that consumed the Notre Dame was divine punishment to France for banning the Muslim burqa, which France has done, and which François Legault, they call him the prime minister in Quebec, he's the premier.
François Legault, their premier, is proposing to do the same thing, or a similar thing in Bill 21.
That's the bill I walked you through the other day.
It doesn't actually ban the burqa in public.
It doesn't actually mention Islam or Muslims or any religion.
It just assures that the government itself is secular in Quebec, and it bans face covering for certain government jobs and religious symbols from others, any religious symbols.
Well, Yves Torres says, if I were Legault, I'd have firemen sleeping at Montreal's great cathedral.
That's what she said.
That's what she said.
Yves Torres is one heck of a spokesthing-y for the religion of peace, because, as you just heard, she made some very distasteful, very odious remarks about the tragedy we all witnessed earlier this week in France when Notre Dame Cathedral was devastated by fire.
Yet while most people were mourning the damage done to this magnificent structure, Ms. Torres appeared to be making some sort of a veiled threat pertaining to the potential use of terrorism as a response to Quebec's Bill 21.
Or maybe that firefighter quip was meant to be a joke, a very bad joke, a very unfunny joke without a punchline.
Either way, her remarks are egregious, yet did the media party freak out?
Well, of course not.
But could you imagine the outcry that would have erupted if a famous mosque had burnt to the ground and a right-wing Christian activist made so-called jokes about that event?
Well, cue the crucifixion.
And with more on yet another example of double standards at play is our very own rebel commander, Ezra Levett.
Welcome to Rebel Roundup, Ezra.
Oh, thank you.
It's not just the double standards.
You're so right.
If any politician joked about burning a mosque down, we wouldn't hear the end of it.
They would immediately be marginalized in all polite circles, fired from any job they had.
I am absolutely sure they would be visited by police with guns for a hate crime investigation.
So there's the double-standard aspect.
There's the shocking but absolutely unsurprising fact that no English language media has covered this.
Like it's fairly big news in Quebec because she was a Quebec Solidaire candidate.
She's a Quebec spokesman for the Islamist National Council of Canadian Muslims.
But not one word in the rest of Canada.
That's very interesting.
You're right.
But I think there's something even deeper, which is, hang on, we were all told don't speculate about maybe was this fire set by arson, maybe was this fire set as a terrorist act.
I mean, there was in 2016 a terrorist plot by ISIS against this same Notre Dame Cathedral.
So you're not allowed to say that.
It's all speculation.
You're not allowed to ask too many questions about that because that's Islamophobia.
And here you have a Muslim leader of sorts herself who says, who acts out the very terrorist threat that we're supposed to pretend never exists or never happens.
So it's not just the double standard.
It's this woman just lived down to this stereotype of Muslim thugs who sweet talk what they need to, but threaten what they have to.
And here's someone who's very, oh, I'm against hate and I like using the levers of our democracy.
She testified before Parliament.
I'm very sweet.
Oh, but if you ban the burqa, you better have firemen parked at your old basilica.
And I think you make a great point here, Ezra, and that is that, you know, when it comes to so-called Islamophobia, as you said, she's living down to that bad stereotype of a Muslim that is speaking out against the Canadian community that welcomed her.
Well, not just speaking out, but making a threat or a joking threat.
Yeah, and this is where I'm trying to connect the dots.
Boy Cries Wolf00:02:49
You know, why wouldn't this garner more media coverage?
I mean, is there some sort of narrative that a female Muslim or a Muslim, regardless of sex, is incapable of hate speech to begin with?
Well, I mean, that's what we used to call reverse racism doesn't exist according to the left.
You can't be racist if you're a minority.
You can't be a bigot if you're Muslim.
And there's a lot of incredible things here.
And the thing is, because of social media, word gets out.
And so we all see the silencing in the mainstream media.
And when they don't cover news that is obviously news, it erodes trust in the media further.
So of course, the powers that be have taken to censoring social media to try and stop it.
But I don't know if they can.
I mean, I guess, you know, the great firewall of China, they have pretty solid internet censorship, and Google's helping them do it.
But in Canada, every time the media makes a decision like this, they reduce their own credibility.
And what Daniel Pipes calls the five people professionals, the press, the politicians, the police, prosecutors, and the professors.
Every time they deny reality, every time they say, oh, the emperor's new clothes is wonderful, trust in the establishment falls.
Let me tell you what I mean.
I use the analogy in my monologue of the boy who cries wolf.
Oh my god, there's a wolf ring the bell.
Everyone comes running once.
There's no wolf.
Oh my god, there's a wolf.
Everyone comes running.
There's no wolf.
A real wolf actually comes.
The boy cries wolf.
People say, oh, he's probably just kidding again.
That's the fable.
It might even be an ASIP's fable about the roaring boy who cries wolf.
This is the opposite.
This is the media who did not cry wolf when a wolf came.
And so we see the wolf coming and the media says, there's no wolf.
Huh?
We see the wolf coming.
The media says, no, it's not a wolf, it's just a dog.
No, it's not a wolf, it's just a cat.
No, it's not a wolf, it's a sheep dressed up as a wolf.
No, there's no, don't believe your lying, there's no wolf.
So we have the mirror image opposite, like a photographic negative of the boy who cried wolf.
We have the media who will never call wolf.
And sometimes there's no wolf, but a lot of times there's a wolf.
And if we know that we can't trust the five P professionals, the politicians, the press, the prosecutors, the police, and professors, when there's a bloody wolf, that doesn't help things because then we don't trust the media or the other professionals.
Oh, and you can see that by the way people feel these days.
They are seeing through this, Ezra.
I'm firmly convinced.
And we don't even have to speculate, do we, my friend?
Worried About Wolves00:07:14
I mean, when we say, well, what if that woman had been a devout Christian?
And what if her statements had been anti-Islamic?
Because we know, and you mentioned it in your monologue, the Westboro Baptist Church, which will pick, say, a military funeral in the U.S. and say, and they'll have signs saying God hates gays or what have you.
They're trying to drum up attention for themselves for whatever nefarious reason.
That gets all kinds of coverage.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, any crank or kook on the right or Christian, even if they have no followers at all.
I remember there was some guy, Terry something or other, who claimed to be a preacher who loved burning Korans.
And he tried to, and he had like no followers or something.
But oh my God, international news, because he was a kook who lived down to all the caricatures of the worst of xenophobic Christian.
Like he was a carry.
300 million Christians in the United States who were real people, they found this kook because they preferred to have him as a personification of what they hate about Christians.
So we know that they'll put anyone on TV to discredit Christianity.
And here is a Muslim who is an authoritative woman.
Like she's not just a crank on her own.
Like she is a crank, but she's an official crank.
She's a crank who's testified before our parliament.
She's a crank who ran for public office.
She's a crank who's a spokesman for the NCCM.
So she's not actually that freaky fringe.
She is political Islam in Canada and that is exactly why the media in English Canada have ignored it.
And the CBC has been silent on a mouse.
But boy, they got their stories about Andrew Scheer being a bigot and Jason Kenney being a bigot.
I mean they're hunting for neo-Nazis.
I actually don't know if there's any actual neo-Nazis in Canada.
I know there's a lot of undercover cops trying to find them and a lot of hate crime hoaxes like Jossie Smollett.
But I don't know if there are any neo-Nazis in Canada.
Maybe there are.
I haven't seen any and I'm a Jew.
I got my spider senses tingling when there's Nazism afoot.
But by God, there's a lot of, well, we know for a fact there's about 100 ISIS terrorists back in this country.
We know Omar Qada's back in this country.
We know Aldil Charkawi's in this country.
We know the Ahmed Rasama Millennium Bottom.
We know the Via Rail bombing.
Almost, but every month there's an Islam-linked terrorist act, but the media won't talk about this.
And we also know from earlier this month, we've exported, forget about maple syrup and canola oil, we've exported, I believe the numbers are around 300 Canadians that are acting out on the behalf of al-Qaeda and ISIS overseas.
Yeah, and I mean, I'm impressed that that story was actually published.
It was published, Stuart Bell from Global News, and I give him credit.
He isn't like the other 5P professionals who say, oh, there's no problem with radical Islam.
There's no problem with radical Sikh separatists.
The only problem is with xenophobic white people like you.
That's the official narrative of the CBC and the Liberal Party.
Congratulations to Stuart Bell for actually documenting the 300 terrorist attacks by Canadians.
And you know, when it comes to the five Ps, when it comes to academia, and I mentioned, I did a commentary on this myself earlier this month.
My son goes to Richmond Hill High School, so I received an email about the York Region District School Board conducting a say no to hate seminar.
And it was only one kind of hate.
Now, first of all, I was kind of lied to because it was, of course, the varietal of hate they were talking about was white supremacy.
And at first I was lied to because, oh, this is only going to be one in a series, you know.
So yeah, there'll be Hindu hate, Sikh hate, Muslim hate, right?
That turned out to be bogus.
Also, it turns out the biggest form of hate-based crimes in York Region is anti-Semitism.
It gets tricky when you try to find out who does this kind of hateful group.
But anyway, you spin it.
So anyways, here was a seminar, York Region District School Board, being headed up by Bernie Farber, who could never in his life utter the words radical Islam.
And yet the statistics, these are educators, Ezra.
The statistics show that I'm sorry, the greatest number of attacks carried out in the world today is in the name of Allah.
Yet we can't even talk about it.
We come up with a straw man when we dismiss hate.
Yeah, and the thing is, you can tell people not to worry about things.
You can call people a phobe, a thisophobe, or a thatophobe, but if they're really worried about something, telling them to shut up about it, that not only doesn't alleviate their worry, it probably makes them more worried.
And it proves that they're thinking about something that's so terrifying that the government wants to silence discussion about it.
Telling someone who's worried about radical Islam, who's worried about either the violent terrorism or just the creep of Sharia law, saying not just don't worry, which might sound reassuring, but you're not allowed to worry.
You're not allowed to say you're worried.
You're not allowed to think thoughts of worry.
That makes people more worried.
And you keep doing that and you keep shrinking the bandwidth of the conversation you're allowed to have.
That will not end well.
I believe that there's a correlation between being allowed to ask questions and say things, even rudely and offensively, but freely, and a correlation between being able to vent just with words and peace, and a similar correlation between censorship and violence.
In Saudi Arabia, in Iran, in Yemen, in Syria, because they don't have political freedom, free speech, free association, free media, if someone's upset about the world, they have to act out violently.
Whereas in the Free West, you're allowed to vent and try and convince your fellow citizens.
If we move towards censorship and unofficial and official censorship, and people feel more and more frustrated that their real concerns and fears are not being taken care of, we will have more civil unrest.
And all these politicians who try to shut up legitimate questions are actually the cause of radicalization of Indigenous Canadians.
And we haven't seen that yet in Canada.
But I think, unfortunately, we will if the bandwidth of allowable conversations continued to be shrunk.
I should just say the Alberta election, they tried this.
They tried calling anyone who's conservative, a bigot, a neo-Nazi, a this and that, and it blew up in the face of the NDP.
Jason Kenny got 55%, the NDP got 32%.
So I don't think it's quite working, but boy, they're trying.
Well, thank you so much, Ezra.
We've got to wrap it here.
And, you know, the commander is right, folks.
If it's not censorship, it's another form of quasi-censorship, which is rebranding.
How many times are we seeing acts of terrorism committed by Islamic extremists?
Why Iron Man Isn't Realistic00:10:56
And it's not called Islamic extremism.
It's basically rebranded as mental illness extremism.
And that's another attack on the truth.
Keep it here.
More of Rebel Roundup to come right after this.
When you think of superheroes, you think of prime human species, good-looking and fit to fight crime.
And as you know, the comic book industry and the SJW fans are obsessed with changing our beloved characters.
We are also aware of this trend of shaming fit bodies like when Sidiq Khan banned the beach body posters, but they're into promoting fat, unhealthy bodies as body positivity, like putting Tess Holiday on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine.
So is it really a surprise that bulimia.com and American Addiction Centers edited pictures of superheroes to show, quote, more realistic bodies?
That's right.
Taking a closer look at some of the images, some of them still look fine to me.
I didn't notice much of a difference.
But some of them, like Batman, Iron Man, and Captain America, look plain fat.
And I didn't know that a dad bot is realistic for a crime-fighting superhero.
And I just want to point out bulimia.com.
Really?
Are they saying that to look as fit as a comic book superhero requires bulimia?
I mean, I know lots of people with natural bodies like the original images.
Heck, even I had the body of the original images and I ate everything, including pizza.
I mean, I'm from New York.
Holy reimaging, Batman.
Isn't the superhero realm all about fantasy?
I mean, after all, we're talking about characters who have super strength and who can fly and who have super speed.
Yet there are some social justice warriors out there that want to make these superhero characters more realistic.
I mean, what is realistic about Superman or the Hulk to begin with?
Unbelievable.
And joining me now on this terrible path down the reimaging road is our very own London-based superheroine, Martina Markota.
Welcome to Rebel Roundup, Martina.
Oh, thank you for having me, as always.
Well, thank you for being here.
And I got to tell you, watching your video made my blood boil like lava, man.
I mean, you know, Martina, I think the key thing, and as I said in my introduction, we are talking about a realm that is inherently driven by fantasy.
There are no greenskin Goliaths who used to be a professor who got exposed to gamma rays.
There's nobody from Krypton, you know, leaping taller than a building because there's no such thing as the planet Krypton.
Why then is there this obsession amongst the usual suspects, my friend, in terms of making these fantastical characters more realistic in the first place?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, that's the basis of it is like, okay, first thing is first, this is fantasy land, okay?
We're talking fantasy here.
And if we are talking fantasy and we're talking about crime fighters and, you know, the superhuman, now let's not forget they're superhuman.
Sure, maybe someone like Batman is human, but he's wealthy and has all the time and money in the world and has a bunch of fun gadgets and he goes out and fights crime at night.
you think he's probably gonna hit the gym just a little bit you know so it's like no having them be realistic And I take offense to those images being realistic.
That's not realistic in my world.
But anyway.
But you know, if I can interject, Martina, you raise a really good point when it comes to Batman because unlike so many other characters in the superhero universe, he is a mere mortal man, you know, that he's mastered martial arts.
He's obviously strong and agile.
But the thing is, if you were a mere mortal and you wanted to be a crime fighter at night, if you're carrying around, you know, 25 extra pounds like yours truly, you know, I'm going to fall to my death the first time I shoot a bat a rag.
It's just not.
Talk about realistic.
It's not realistic to have someone that goes out, fights crime and has a dad bot.
I'm sorry.
It's just not going to happen.
And I think they have, I mean, some of the men was the most ghastly thing in there.
I mean, I was a little offended with some of the women.
And don't get me wrong, I think the first picture, you know, Batman had dad bot and poison ivy.
Poison Ivy looked good either way.
You know, she didn't really notice that she had a little bit more on her, but I was like, oh, okay, now I see it.
But as I flip through that article, I mean, I encourage you guys to check it out.
It is incredible.
But the men were the most horrific part of it.
Did you see Iron Man?
Oh, you know, Martina.
Another mortal?
That makes no sense what they did to Iron Man.
First of all, let's think about this.
Iron Man is a mere mortal, but he wears a suit of armor.
So whether he is a Mr. Olympia contestant or he's the proverbial 98-pound weakling, the Iron Man armor should look exactly the same because that's all prefabricated, yet they made the reimagined armor.
It look like a 15-year-old boy that bought some Iron Man costume off the rack at a costume shop.
Right.
And that's the thing is like, okay, let's say the real Iron Man wasn't that much in shape, but when he puts on an iron suit, you bet that iron suit's going to have like six pack and like things like that.
And it's just absolutely ridiculous.
And the thing is, it's dangerous too, because it was put out by like bulimia.com, an American, was it an American Addiction Association or something?
And they were trying to create a conversation and try to make sure people had a positive body image and don't look up to something that looks so perfect all the time.
And I think that's actually really dangerous.
I mean, you're encouraging them to be unhealthy.
You want children or, you know, whatever wanting to look at people that are physically fit and take care of themselves.
And it is realistic.
Go to any gym, go to any Instagram, you know, Jim Buff.
They're very fit and they look just like those superheroes.
And someone on my Instagram made a really good point.
If they wanted to make them realistic and superheroes, they should have had them like emulated after like real-life athletes or someone to model after because people do look like that.
They do.
I mean, if you put the investment and the time and you have the genetics, you can achieve a classical superhero body.
But you know, Martina, even when it comes to the so-called injection of realism, you make the point in your video when you see the before and after reimagined cat woman.
They've made catwoman, in your words, thicker, meaning, you know, a little more plump.
And listen, I love the plumpers out there.
Let me tell you, I'm not a fan of the supermodel, skinny mini anorexic type.
But here's the thing.
In making her more plump, at the same time, as you said, they made her breast smaller.
And that's not how weight gain on a woman works, correct?
No, it's not how it works.
I think I know what they were trying to do.
I think what they were trying to say is that realistic women don't really have big boobs like that.
And it's like, excuse me, what?
Because, you know, try to tell me that when I'm trying to run a few miles or, you know, do something.
Tell a bunch of women out.
There's many of plenty of women out there in the world that would be like, excuse me.
Yeah, women do have big boobs without plastic surgery.
It's a thing.
We have boobs.
And, you know, when I gain weight, I certainly get plumper everywhere.
So it was bizarre for me to see her be thicker, but then her boobs got smaller.
I was like, that's not the way it works.
I'm sorry.
And I also made a point of like superheroes naturally aren't that model looking stick figure.
They actually have the thick thighs.
They are like thick looking.
So.
100%, Martina.
And the other thing that you touched upon briefly is that we can look upon eating disorders in which you're getting unhealthily skinnier.
And, you know, that's a bad thing.
And you'll be recommended to seek out help and therapy.
But it doesn't work the other way, does it?
I mean, if you are becoming obese, and let's be honest, obesity will shorten your life.
You will get more diseases.
It will be harder for you to live.
It's not politically correct, is it, Martina, to say, listen, honey, you've gained some weight.
It looks like you're getting into the danger zone.
I'm wondering why that is.
Is it just because America as a nation is just getting that much fatter so that that is the new normal?
Yeah, I mean, you don't see an 80-year-old obese person, do you?
I mean, obese people don't really live that long.
So, I mean, it is a fact, and I think even doctors are starting to get attacked if they make any suggestion otherwise.
But yeah, it's socially acceptable to say, you know, you have an eating disorder and you should seek help, but God forbid you are obese and someone tries to address that.
And I blame the, what is it, the body positivity movement.
That's what that whole movement is all about.
And that's the whole problem with this whole comic book thing is that instead of seeing something that is better than you or someone that has, you know, worked really hard, it takes, you know, dedication and effort to accomplish something and be healthy and look great.
Instead of aspiring to be that way, everyone else has to live by their rules and go, no, no, no, everything has to look like me.
Yeah, so that's lazy and it's very millennial.
And it's hypocritical.
And Margina, we have to wrap here.
I just want to say, though, I thought the most egregious example of the reimagining, aside from Iron Man, of course, and I couldn't believe my eyes with that one, but was Captain America, where basically, if anyone knows the origin story of Captain America, he was a skinny, unfit guy that wanted to serve in the Army but couldn't pass the physical.
He was the guinea pig for the super soldier serum.
And these dummies reimagine him as the guy who took the needle, the guy who experienced the after effects of the serum.
Loblaws and Gift Coupons00:05:32
It makes no sense to me, my friend.
Yeah, this is what they do.
Clown world.
I know, just ruining everything.
I hope one day there'll be someone brave enough to write a comic about a social justice warrior superhero.
It'll last three issues, probably, and it'll be a disaster.
Martina, great commentary.
Thank you for weighing in on that.
Thanks for having me.
You got it.
And folks, keep it here.
more of Rumble Roundup to come right after this.
Hey, how you doing, sir?
Oh, we can't be?
No.
Thank you.
Oh, who are you?
Thank you.
Anthony Cameron.
Who are you?
Who are you?
Let's get out of the store.
Thank you.
You know, I'll tell you what.
Listen, I'll tell you what I'm going to do for you.
You let us film inside the store.
I got a $25 Loblaw Company's gift coupon for you.
It's a gift card.
This is what you gave.
I can't be doing this.
Why not?
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
Let's go.
But you can't get out of here.
You can't be marketing up the price of bread either, right?
And you did it for 15 years.
Let's get out of the store.
Well, I'll tell you what.
So how about that?
I give you a gift card here.
25 smackers.
Right?
No?
Are you going to think about it or what do you think?
No?
Well, folks, as you can see, there's somebody wearing a Wendell Clark Toronto Maple Leafs jersey.
He's trying to grab our camera.
I know, two minutes were looking so good, right?
But I'm trying to give this guy a $25 gift card.
If you'll go away, that's what Loblaws gave consumers that they were ripping off for 15 years.
So where did Wendell go?
So Mr. Clark, would you like a $25 gift card?
Well, talk about a cleanup in Isle 5 when we ventured into Loblaw's Toronto flagship store earlier this week to garner more signatures for our petition, Loblaw management types, and whoever that guy was in the Leafs jersey.
Well, they weren't happy to see us.
As for Loblaw customers, that was a different story.
They were only too happy to sign our petition, buyyourownfridges.com.
After all, Loblaw Companies Limited is a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, but they aren't a very good corporate citizen taking part in a bread price fixing scheme that actually went on for some 15 years.
So the question is, why indeed should such a company receive a $12 million taxpayer-funded welfare check for new refrigeration.
And here's what some of you had to say.
El Checaberra writes, LOL, the whole time I was waiting for a soy boy manager to come over and start squawking about filming in the store.
Oh, he and other employees did complain about filming in the store, even though there are surveillance cameras everywhere, of course.
By the way, Loblaw has formally complained to YouTube to get the video removed.
So how does that old adage go again regarding crimes and cover-ups?
Pamela Kingwell writes, this is outrageous.
I am going to stop being a customer of Loblaw.
Hey, I hear you, Pamela.
I'm now shopping at my local Longo's instead.
But the fact is, some Canadians in certain communities simply don't have the ability to move their grocery shopping business elsewhere.
Indeed, just consider that Loblaw also owns stores under such banners as No Frills, Fortinos, the Great Canadian Superstore, and others.
But if you can switch to another grocer, I see no reason not to given this company's odious behavior.
And Mohammed TikTok Kaboom writes, I'm surprised Loblaws didn't chase you out of the store.
Well, actually, Mr. Kaboom, they did phone the police, but after that call went through, we were still getting customers to sign our petition for well over an hour.
And get this, Toronto Police Headquarters is just a three-minute walk away from this particular Loblaw store.
So I guess Toronto's finest didn't want to do the bidding of a company that breaks the law in terms of price fixing.
And if that is indeed the case, then Hogtown's cops are tops.
And Aviator writes, how about $12 million for veterans in need?
Oh, Aviator, how dare you?
Hasn't our Prime Minister already adroitly noted that our vets are asking for too much?
Meanwhile, looks like there's plenty of cash in the chill for multi-billion dollar conglomerates that want to do some environmental virtue signaling.
And Terry Greening writes, hey, I need $1,500 for a new fridge.
Where do I apply?
Terry, if you don't have liberal ties, I would suggest you visit your local Leon store and apply for the Don't Pay a Cent deferred payment program for your fridge.
Well, of course, you will eventually have to pay that entire $1,500 back to the store.
Whereas the billionaire Weston family gets to pocket that $12 million worth of taxpayer money forever.
Besides, I heard Galen Weston is in the market for a new mansion this year.
Well, that wraps up another edition of Rebel Roundup.
Thanks so much for joining us.
See you next week.
And hey, folks, never forget, without risk, there can be no glory.