Ezra Levant slams the UK’s July 4–5 contempt retrial of Tommy Robinson, calling it punitive despite no disruption, while accusing BBC and state media of amplifying minor incidents to silence dissent—even citing "Stasi-level snitchery" after reporters allegedly interrupted a judge. Sheila Gunn Reid exposes Canada’s Trudeau government spending $317K on ministerial office renovations since 2018, ignoring crises like Grassy Narrows’ mercury poisoning or Montreal Lake Reserve’s opioid epidemic, where systemic overspending rewards bureaucratic waste. The episode also debates Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition, featuring a plus-size model amid backlash over "normalizing obesity," revealing a double standard where weight is praised while anorexia faces criticism—raising questions about media’s evolving role in health and representation. [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, it's the never-ending story, isn't it?
I speak of Tommy Robinson's contempt of court trial, and now, of course, the retrial.
Rebel Commander Ezra Levant has just returned from London, and just will you hear what he has to say about the absolutely astonishing behavior in a bad way regarding the UK's media party.
Thanks to a faltering economy and pipeline paralysis and new taxes, well, times are tough for so many Canadians.
That means scaling back and downsizing and tightening one's belt.
Oh, but not if you happen to be a member of Team Trudeau.
Sheila Gunreed has all the depressing details on how liberals are lavishly spending your money at a clip that would make even a drunken sailor blush.
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 my recent Man on the Street interview in which we asked folks to weigh in on Sports Illustrated's decision to add a plus size model to their iconic swimsuit issue.
Those are your rebels.
let's round them up.
Ezra Levant here, I'm in London.
Tommy Robinson, let me give you the headline right at the top.
He's been committed to stand trial again for contempt of court.
He'll be back in court here on July 4th and 5th.
I think it's a two-day trial scheduled and this stems back to those incidents back at Leeds a year ago.
As you know, he's already been held in contempt for that, served 10 weeks in solitary confinement for that.
The Court of Appeal has quashed that ruling and yet he has to go stand trial again.
I don't know if in the entire history of the UK this has ever been done before.
It's so punitive and there's no cause for it.
The trial outside which he was reporting was not disrupted in any way.
This is clearly punitive.
So that's the news and you can find other videos that we go in some depth on that.
But I want to focus in on something I mentioned in passing in another video and that is the media culture here in the UK.
You know the old saying, if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear, did it make a sound?
That's sort of a Zen question.
I mean of course it made a sound, but if no one knows it made a sound, it was like it didn't make a sound.
And that's how the media is.
If they report on something, you know about it, but if they simply ignore something, how do you know what even happens?
And if they all get together to tell a pack of lies about something, how can you ever know the truth?
These are all different ways of describing their treatment of Tommy Robinson.
When he does amazing things, when thousands of people show up for him at an event, if the press can't say anything negative, they'll say nothing at all.
But if he's in any sort of trouble, the press will go to town.
And there was about a thousand people here today, maybe more on the streets.
I'm sure out of those thousand, there were one or two who were a bit rough, maybe one or two who had a drink.
That will be on the front page of the newspapers.
It is the worst media in the free world.
I watch Russia today.
That's Putin State Broadcaster.
I watch TRT, the Turkish State Broadcaster.
I watch Al Jazeera.
The British media, especially the state-run media here, is worse than those.
Wow.
And even worse, the biggest media player in the UK, the BBC, is of course taxpayer-funded, just like our dearly beloved CBC.
So in essence, Brits, including those Brits who are passionate Tommy Robinson supporters, are paying the freight when it comes to journalism that is so overtly a leftist that it borders on outright propaganda.
And just back from his triple across the pond to cover all things, Tommy, is our rebel commander, Ezra Levant.
Now, Ezra, as you stated in your commentary, the UK media is actually worse than the media in some regimes such as in Russia or Turkey.
Please tell me you were exaggerating to make a point here.
I consume media very widely.
I even try and consume some media in foreign languages with what little linguistic skill I have.
I deliberately follow hostile media accounts on my Twitter because I want to know what the bad guys are saying.
I follow the Turkish authoritarian Erdogan.
I follow the Venezuelan dictator Maduro.
I follow RT, that's Putin's Russia Today.
Al Jazeera from Qatar.
TWT, that's the Turkish World Service.
Why am I telling you that?
Because I believe that I am somewhat fluent with propaganda from state broadcasters around the world.
And I must tell you that I think it was Lenin who had the phrase useful idiots.
And here's what he meant.
There were agents, there were communist agents who were part of his team, had a personal loyalty to him.
There were agents that he paid.
He corrupted them.
But then there were what Lenin called useful idiots.
Those were people who voluntarily helped Lenin undermine the establishment out of some deluded, and they were, quite often, the most accomplished destroyers for him.
The useful idiots of the West.
And so when I tell you that the BBC is a state broadcaster, of course I do mean that literally.
It's owned by the government, you must pay for it, and they have the sensibilities of the establishment.
So they have the worst of the state broadcaster.
They're afraid of the government, they're institutionally left-wing, they're not accountable, but they're full of useful idiots.
So whereas on RT or TWT or Al Jazeera, they're just simply, all right, I'm paid by the dictator, let's go do our job.
These BBCers, these leftists at The Guardian, that used to be, I mean, there's a lot of newspapers in the UK that used to be influenced by the KGB directly.
They lustily do the work of the left, whether it was the Soviets during the Cold War, or it's the Islamists now.
And watching them cover Tommy Robinson's trial.
I'm not sure what clip you used of me, but was it where I talked about them interrupting the court?
Well, yeah, this is the thing, Ezra.
It's not so much that they subscribe to a leftist agenda and what they're putting out there is propaganda, but in that particular case, where they are asking a judge to, oh, you know what?
Somebody's tweeting there, somebody who's allowed to tweet.
First of all, A, it's none of their damn business.
B, why aren't they tweeting their reporters?
They should be doing this too.
Well, it was, first of all, he had a British accent, so I was straining to make sure I heard things.
There wasn't a microphone, so I had to listen very carefully.
It was technical legal jargon referring to case law and documents.
So it was, I had to concentrate very, very hard to understand what was going on in court.
And I'm not dumb.
It was just hard.
And the judges were variant, everyone in that room was trying to catch every word that was said.
This was a very important trial.
A man's liberty hangs in the balance.
This is in the most grave court in London called the Old Bailey.
It's like, it's so high security.
There was a terrorism inquiry going on at the same time.
To get into this court, you first have to stand in a sniffer room, like an enclosure where they sniff you for explosives.
Then you go through the metal detector.
Then you go through another.
I have never been anywhere other than the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa that has higher security than this court.
This is a heavy place.
I was straining to get it right and listening.
And I'm not even going to call them my counterparts in the BBC and the British Media Party because I refuse to say I'm colleagued with them in any way.
Instead of that, instead of paying attention to the substance of what was going on, all they could think about is that Ezra from Canada is saying things that are sympathetic to Tommy.
Or I wasn't even talking about Tommy.
I was trying my best to...
Imagine you're not even paying attention to a trial.
Imagine you're obsessed with someone who has a different point of view with you.
Okay, that's not hard to believe, neither of those two things.
But then you dare, you arrogate unto yourself some standing before this court to say, Your Honor, excuse me.
It wasn't quite like that.
They wrote a note saying, Your honor, and passed it to the clerk.
The clerk passed it to the judge.
The judge was interrupted.
The judge was paying attention.
The lawyer was, you know, getting some momentum.
Then this note comes to the judge and the judges get up and go back and confer.
Who?
What arrogance.
if there's a fire tell the judge if there's a if there's someone with a gun tell the judge you're interrupting a grave trial in which a man may be sent back to prison because you don't like what you i mean there's tattling to the teacher yeah There's snitch.
This is what I mean.
I mean, this is Stasi-level snitchery.
And Andrew Lawton, our mutual friend, when he went with me to London last year, they didn't know who he was.
Right?
Because they didn't recognize.
And he overheard them saying a few things.
He was sitting there.
It's not just the BBC, it's all of them.
And he told me, and I believe Andrew, because he's not an exaggerator.
Andrew said, Ezra, one of the journalists said that you should be jailed for your reportage because it incites hate.
I believe Andrew Lawton.
Look, I wasn't there, but Andrew Lawton told me this privately.
He had no reason to lie to me.
I trust Andrew Lawton.
He was there.
He said, Ezra, they didn't know who I was.
Staying Above an Old Pub00:02:22
I was sitting next to them, and they were speaking freely because they didn't recognize me.
And they said that you, Ezra Levant, these are reporters.
And then the cherry on top is that Dominique Cassiani of the BBC did, in fact, contact the police last time.
So yeah, I don't know any reporter at Russia Today, Al Jazeera, TWT, Xinhua, maybe Xinhua, that's the Chinese state agency, would call the cops.
Because basically all Xinhua reporters are Chinese spies anyways.
But I don't know anyone from Russia today who would literally pick up the phone and call the police to arrest a rival.
I don't even regard myself as a rival.
I'm just over there to report the news to my rebel viewers, and people can ignore it or watch it, whatever.
But these British media party types literally wanted me imprisoned, and by complaining to the judge in the middle of the trial, not only did they show contempt of court, but they showed that they wanted me to be held in contempt of court simply for reporting.
That is upside downville.
And as I use the phrase again, I'm maybe overusing it, but I think I've got it when I say going to the UK.
People say, how's your trip to the UK?
I said, well, the food's not bad, and I like hearing the accents, and the weather was actually really nice this time, and I can't get enough of the architecture and the history.
And I stayed above an old pub that was in a Charles Dickens story.
Like it's a 300-year-old pub.
I stayed in a room upstairs.
So I got all these fun stories, but then I've got this story of this dystopian future, this dystopian future, and I was standing on the street actually, and just a hundred little vignettes make me think, oh my God,
I've got to show my kids what the UK is like now when it's still recognizable, because in 10 years, that country will bear little resemblance to the country I know, and I should say that It already bears little resemblance to the country that I thought I knew.
Sadly, I think you're right.
And you know, you've very well stated how the media is shutting down freedom of the press, ironically, perversely ironically, I should say.
But there were other videos too.
I mean, we saw Tommy Robinson having his jumbotron truck being shut down by the police.
We saw Jessica, whose last name I still cannot pronounce properly, being told by a female police officer, get back to the other side and shout your questions over.
Football Hooligans and Real Problems00:02:53
And in both cases, the narrative, Ezra, was what you're doing with the truck, what the questions might be that you might be asking might cause a problem, might cause some kind of crime.
All I could think of, Ezra, and I'm not exaggerating here, is the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, where we have law enforcement thinking of potential future crimes, and you're placed under arrest in the present, so you can't carry out that crime.
That's scary.
Yeah, oh, you're exactly right.
Future crime, why didn't you do it?
They have this, you know, there were some real problems in the UK.
They had the IRA terrorism problem.
That was a real problem.
And it's tough to deal with a terrorist threat, domestic terrorist threat in a democracy.
It's very challenging.
And then they also had a phenomenon called football hooligans.
Basically, normal people who love their team so much travel from stadium to stadium following their football team.
That's what they call soccer.
And they get drunk and they fight the other fans from the other team.
So they're called football hooligans, or we would say soccer hooligans.
And they would, like, let's say 500 would come to a town and meet five.
So it would be like street fights, just drunken street fights.
So how do you deal with that in a way that respects civil liberties?
So they have this thing called ASO, antisocial behaviors, an ASO, anti-social order.
And there was a real problem they were trying to fix.
These soccer and football hooligans.
There's a real problem, and there's ways to solve it.
But you put in a law to deal with a real problem that frankly could probably have been dealt with by regular policing.
The idea of a drunken brawl, that's not new in the history of law enforcement.
I mean, drunkenness is as old as civilization, which is as old as alcohol, really.
Alcohol and civilization go together.
It's how they had drinkable water for millennia.
Before we had water treatment, you drank beer or fermented things because it wasn't, it would kill the bacteria.
But these anti-social orders, these pre-crimes, I'm serving you an ASO order to clear or you'll be arrested, which was meant to deal with hooliganism, is now being used for anything-ism.
It's now, oh, you didn't say you did anything wrong, but you might do something wrong, so I'm worried that you're going to cause an offense, so you must leave now because you haven't caused an offense, but if you don't leave now, that's an offense, so you will actually be causing an offense by not leaving now, even though you didn't do an offense.
And that's Kafka.
Kafka couldn't dream that up.
Orwell couldn't dream that up.
That's reality.
Ezra, there were so many other baits I wanted to cover, but Mr. Producer is screaming in my ear that we're out of time.
Liberals and Lavish Offices00:10:55
What incredible reports you and Jessica filed.
Thank you so much.
And you know, there you go, folks.
I mean, the soccer hooligans talk about the good old days, if you will, because the hooligans right now in the UK, it's the government, it's the police, it's the media.
And Ezra said, you want to see UK Classic, book your Air Canada flight right now and get over there before it gets even worse.
Keep it here.
more of a rubble roundup to come right after this.
This order paper question comes from conservative MP Bob Sorolla.
He asks the government, with regard to renovation, redesign, and refurnishing of ministers or deputy ministers' offices since April 1st, 2018, what is the total cost, if any, spending on renovating, redesigning, and refurbishing for each ministerial office broken down by basically every available minuscule detail.
And then Soroya asks for the same to be done for the deputy minister's offices.
And just look at the amount of time Soroya is asking for.
It's not even a full year.
It's from April 1st, 2018 to February 25th, 2019.
Now, I think Soroya wants to know if the Liberals are splurging on themselves on their way out the door.
And it looks like they are.
Now let's go through some of these expenses together.
And like always, we will link the documents in full so that you can see them for yourself.
And you can even double check my work if you want to.
I mean, this isn't the CBC.
You don't have to just take my word for everything.
Okay, let's start on page 50.
The public health agency spent $117,000 on renovating their president's office and buying new furniture.
And here I heard there's an opioid crisis out there.
Page 56, the Immigration Review Board is fighting their years-long backlog in their bureaucracy by spending $22,000 on new furniture for the head of the review board offices and another $10,000 in general renovations.
I guess when the government is giving $50,000 annually to refugee claimants, it sort of makes it open season for the bureaucrats involved to start taking care of themselves.
Oh, what the heck?
Just put it on the tab, won't you?
The taxpayer tab, that is, of course.
Look, nobody is asking MPs and bureaucrats in Ottawa to carry out their business while sitting in mud huts.
But just check out those numbers being bandied about.
And of course, the timing is suspect.
Given the polling numbers, it appears unlikely the Trudeau Liberals are going to enjoy a secure second mandate.
So isn't the whole idea of renovating and redecorating offices akin to painting the deck chairs on the Titanic after hitting the iceberg?
With more on this latest example of your tax dollars hard at work yet again as the host of the gun show, Sheila Gunread.
Welcome to Rebel Roundup, my friend.
Hey, David, thanks for having me on.
Hey, always a pleasure.
So Sheila, the first thing that sprung to mind when I saw your rundown of spending was this.
Our military veterans are being screwed out of compensation they deserve because in the words of our illustrious prime minister, they're asking for, quote, too much.
But it seems to me that when it comes to doing the Martha Stewart shtick with their own offices, money is no object.
So Sheila, the optics of this, to say the very least, are brutal.
But why are they on this spending spree in the first place, given that so many of them might be packing up their offices come the morning of October 22nd?
Yeah, you're assuming that they have foresight.
And after four years with these liberals, I'm pretty sure we figured out that they don't.
I mean, it's not just the military, though.
As I was reading through this information package that we had, there were stories breaking just that day in the news that places like Montreal Lake First Nations Reserve in Saskatchewan, 50% of their population, not can identify.
I mean, and it's hard to identify people who are drug users between severely addicted and then the casual drug user.
50% of their population, a town of 1,200 people, 600 have meth addiction.
And then you have Crown and Indigenous services spending nearly $200,000 making sure that their butts are sitting in fancy chairs.
I mean, it is really outrageous.
Grassy Narrows still has mercury poisoning, and all they get is a smug comment from Justin Trudeau.
Nobody is helping them.
Another, let's move off reserve and talk about the greater opioid crisis happening in Canada.
Again, House Canada is spending money on office renovation instead of treatment beds for people.
Families are being destroyed.
Entire cultures are being destroyed.
When you look at First Nations communities, but the liberals are focused on spending on themselves when they say they don't have money for anybody else.
You know, you've made excellent, great points there, Sheila.
I mean, the opioid crisis, I think, is one of the most underreported story happening in Canada right now.
And certainly, Grassy Narrows, their drinking water, still contaminated with mercury poisoning, as you said.
Instead of getting help or some funds to improve it, they get mocked and joked at when a protester shows up to a Liberal Party of Canada fundraiser.
But here's the thing, Sheila.
Personally, if I was in a position of a politician or a bureaucrat in Ottawa and I was responsible for one of those files, I just wouldn't have it in me to have such chutzpah, such audacity to spend lavishly on my own office as the people who really need the money go without.
I mean, how does that square with the very idea of liberalism in the first place?
Well, liberalism in Canada means that you're a member of the natural governing party, so they like to call themselves.
So, you know, they feel like Canadians are in line with liberal ideology and they feel like they are entitled to form governments in Canada, except for a few blips here and there where people get sick of them and elect conservatives.
These liberals genuinely believe that they are entitled, I suppose, to their entitlement.
And if that means nice office furniture while people are languishing, waiting for drug treatment beds, then that's just fine.
I mean, David, the reasons you cited why you couldn't do it are the reasons you don't work in the public sector.
Well, you know, Sheila, I hearken back to more than a decade ago.
It was an absolutely fascinating story that happened in Toronto when Rob Ford was still a counselor.
And it was Rob Ford and another City of Toronto counselor, I believe it was Doug Holiday.
They submitted their expense forms and it was zero or next to zero with both men.
Can you believe it, Sheila, that Toronto City Council launched an investigation as to why their expenses were so low?
So, I mean, is there almost a culture that seems to be in any level of political office in Canada that you must go out of your way to spend this money?
Because I think when it comes to the likes of a holiday or Ford, they should be applauded, not investigated, for not spending the taxpayer dollar.
Remember when Doug, or I'm sorry, Rob Ford, the late great Rob Ford, he sat down and did that video where he demonstrated all the free perks that city councilors get.
And it's, you know, he was just weighing down card after card after card of all these person, expensive things that they get access to as members of city council.
So it's not just the stuff that we know about, the constant expenses, the spending on themselves, but there's this whole loss of free stuff that they get that the taxpayer pays for that we don't even really know about.
And yes, that's not enough.
They need new office furniture now.
And Sheila, is part of the problem the system itself, because as I understand it in government departments, when it comes up to the end of the fiscal year, typically March 31st, if you have any, like if you've done good diligence and watched the pennies and underspent your budget, there isn't, instead of, you know, reporting a surplus,
there's this idea that you better go out and spend this as quick as possible because if the bean counters see that you only spent 80% of your budget, then they're going to reduce next fiscal year's budget by 20%.
So I guess what I'm saying, Sheila, is that there's no incentive to spend prudently.
In fact, there's a penalty if you spend prudently.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it.
So the following year, you're penalized because you've managed to save the taxpayer money.
You make a point, it is a cultural problem within government bureaucracies that you have to spend every last penny of your budget so that you get the same budget for next year.
But this is just the way governments work, rewarding bad behavior all the time.
In Alberta, we saw contests, excuse me, contests within the bureaucracies here to see which bureaucracy could delete their emails faster and at a greater volume.
I mean, it's destruction of records, but they said it's an inbox cleanup, and whatever government bureaucracy can do it faster is going to get some iTunes cards.
So in the bureaucracy, they don't look at it the way that you or I would look at our family budget or the way you or I would look at a business budget.
In our family, if we save money, that's a great thing.
If we're in a business, if we can set aside some money, put the money in the bank and pass along some savings to a customer, that's a great thing.
In the government, that is the last thing they want to do.
Yeah, the world's upside down.
Well, Sheila, we've got to wrap it here.
That last example you gave was obscene.
Too bad Hillary Clinton isn't an Alberta bureaucrat.
She'd be Miss America in that contest.
David, they deleted more emails than Hillary Clinton.
Oh, no.
There was nearly 1 million emails.
Models and Body Image00:06:01
1 million.
Oh, sadly, it's worse than I thought.
Sheila, we're going to have to wrap it there.
You have a wonderful weekend, my friend.
I will, you too, David.
Great.
And that was Sheila Gunnread in Northern Alberta.
Keep it here, folks.
More of Rebel Roundup to come right after this.
Well, Sports Illustrated is at it again when it comes to diversity of models in its iconic swimsuit edition.
Last month, it made news when it announced that a Muslim donning a burkini would be part of its stable of models.
And most recently, we have a plus-size model that's going to be part of the swimsuit edition.
It is Hunter McGrady.
And it seems to be part of a trend because last October, Cosmopolitan magazine featured the very plus size Tess Holiday on its cover.
So the question arises: is this all about a celebration of diverse body types?
Or is this perpetuating an unhealthy message given that there are indeed health complications that come with being overweight and obese?
Let's see what the people here at Young Dundas Square in Toronto have to say.
This is the new, one of the new swimsuit models for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.
And as you can see, not the typical swimsuit model, and we're just asking people what they think.
She's beautiful.
She looks absolutely beautiful.
If you love that figure, why not?
Show it.
Well, I think the controversy around this is that there are some that say this is good because it's a diversity, it's a celebration of diverse body types, if you will.
But there are others that say, look, she's overweight.
This is an unhealthy lifestyle.
It leads to health complications.
No, no, not at all.
Nope.
Everyone's put together differently.
It's okay.
She looks very healthy.
Okay.
I completely agree with her body type, 100%.
Okay, then.
I mean, the thing is, there's no reason you should starve yourself to death just to make to sell coffee.
It's disgusting.
Well, my recent Man on the Street interview regarding the inclusion of Hunter McGrady as one of the not-so-typical models to grace the pages of the most recent Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.
Well, it generated a ton of feedback, both pro and con.
Here's what some of you had to say.
Too legit to quit writes, fit.
In what universe is morbidly obese fit?
Well, to legit to quit, I think obesity being accepted as a form of physical fitness would indeed make sense in a certain DC Comics universe.
He's like your exact opposite.
So he's Bizarro Jerry.
Bizarro Jerry?
Yeah, like Bizarro Superman.
Superman's exact opposite.
Who lives in the backwards Bizarro world?
Up is down, down is up.
He says hello when he leaves, goodbye when he arrives.
Samoan Mayajana writes, remember the tale of the Emperor's clothes?
No one dared but a child.
Oh, he's wearing nothing!
All the people then started shouting the same.
He is wearing nothing.
The emperor was extremely embarrassed.
Yep, other than Rebel Media, that's where you got to go to get the truth these days, folks.
Fairy tale rat land.
Jason Jackson writes, Next issue, Caitlin Jenner in a thong.
Angela who's Carl writes, proof the brainwashing of the left is almost complete.
I've learned the lessons, son!
I see now what I've never seen before!
I'm cured!
Praise God!
DCTIB writes, leftists fight childhood obesity but praise female obesity.
Oh, indeed, or as NDP MPP Jill Andrew would say, When I get out of the shower, buck naked, I just stand there and say in my best Broadway voice, I'm a big bright shining star and I'm gonna shine forever.
Fake Account writes, I look like Quasimodo, but feel like George Clooney.
Any supermodels out there want to date me?
Oh, by the way, I'm broke.
I get around pretty fast myself, but I don't go around bragging about it.
And finally, Rob writes, I believe healthy at any size when they start putting anorexic women on the covers of magazines.
Valeria Levitin has suffered from anorexia for more than 25 years.
She weighs just four stone.
Rob, I think you pretty much nailed it when it comes to the double standard regarding weight these days.
We are now living in a society that deems models suffering from anorexic nervosa to be a bad thing.
And it is indeed a bad thing given the health complications with that condition.
Yet we are also being led to believe that bigger is better when it comes to female models, including Tess Holiday, who has a very pretty face but is also most certainly morbidly obese.
Yet when it comes to the modeling business, isn't there a happy medium somewhere, you know, a healthy weight that falls somewhere between anorexia and obesity?
Or am I just spouting so much crazy talk here?
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 could be no glory.