CBC’s investigation into Sandra Solomon’s YouTube video—featuring Mufti Asim Rashid’s 2017 remarks on Sharia law arbitration and a staged Trudeau image—ignored her background as a born Muslim who later rejected Islam, including its treatment of women. The outlet spent 1,000+ words rebutting the video without showing it, while omitting key context: Rashid’s comments targeted Ontario’s M103 anti-Islamophobia motion, not Trudeau, and Solomon faced no charges after Peel Police dropped her 2018 investigation. This pattern aligns with CBC’s election war room and a $150M bailout fund critics say incentivizes attacks on conservative viewpoints—like "mass Muslim immigration"—while shielding Trudeau’s policies, including his funding of M103. The episode frames CBC as a government-aligned smear machine, contrasting it with past media under Harper, and warns of press freedom erosion through interviews like TNC.news’ Andrew Lawton, who hints at state surveillance of private posts. [Automatically generated summary]
Today is, I take you through a very weird story of the CBC.
I know that doesn't narrow it down, but this one's special.
They have this huge, rambling, thousand-plus-word rebuttal of some video on YouTube.
I mean, it had 50,000 views, whatever, but it was such a nothing, but because it dared to criticize the precious one, Justin Trudeau.
Oh my God, did the entire CBC go to work rebutting it?
The crazy thing is, they spend thousands, over a thousand words rebutting it, but they never actually show you the video itself.
I will.
So you got to watch today's.
You're listening on a podcast, but you know you can watch these podcasts too.
I mean, it's a TV show, and it's eight bucks a month to subscribe, but you get a show every day from me, and you get one once a week from Sheila Gunread and David Menzies.
It's eight bucks a month.
Sorry, eight bucks a month.
Or that's 80 bucks a year if you buy it all in advance.
And you even get a bigger discount if you use the coupon code Podcast.
So, I mean, especially today when we're showing you the vid, you really got to see it with your own eyes.
So please go to the rebel.media slash shows to subscribe.
Okay, here's the podcast.
Tonight, the CBC rolls out its election war room on behalf of the liberals.
They're turning the propaganda up all the way.
It's July 23rd, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish them is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Once upon a time, oh, right until the moment Stephen Harper stepped down as prime minister in 2015, once upon a time, the media party knew what its job was, hold the government to account, speak truth to power, balance the mighty resources of the governing class by shining a light of public scrutiny on them.
Dissent was positively patriotic, and no form of criticism of power was too rough.
When an extremely rude bigot drove around in Alberta with a truck with an extremely rude sign about Stephen Harper, the CBC championed him as a free speech hero.
Gee, they don't do that a lot with Trudeau, do they?
They even told people how to chip in to that guy's legal defense fund.
And when not enough people were disparaging Stephen Harper crudely enough, naturally, the CBC did it themselves.
Remember this rant?
Stasi Steve Hare Harper?
That's implying that Stephen Harpy was a, Harper was a Nazi.
But hey, it's okay because journalism or something.
Remember this?
So, help save poor Stasi Steve this season.
God knows Hare Harper doesn't have enough sense to save himself.
So that's what the media used to do when Stephen Harper was prime minister.
And the media was even worse with Rob Ford, the late mayor of Toronto.
I remember when the homepage of the Toronto Star had a cell phone picture snapped by a source of Rob Ford walking into a Kentucky fried chicken to buy lunch.
That's all it was.
You just walked into a KFC.
But this was a huge gotcha moment for the Star because Ford had said he was trying to lose weight.
And the Star's massive network of informants caught Ford going to KFC.
He's a liar.
Resign, liar.
The star literally paid cash to Ford's friends to record him secretly on their cell phones in private homes in private conversations.
It was an absolute invasion of privacy.
Nothing to do with his public conduct.
But hey, it was about holding government to account.
So the grubbier the better.
That was then.
But under Justin Trudeau, the media has flipped sides.
Now they hold the public to account on behalf of the government.
They hold independent media to account like us.
The CBC, the media party, demonize us and any independent media, but really, it's you they want to regulate.
Let me show you a bizarre story on the CBC.
Now that they formally launched their pro-Trudeau election war room, look at this.
How a misleading YouTube video is stoking fears about Sharia law before the federal election and the subheadline, video posted to Facebook groups that spread disinformation.
It's a huge story.
I think the reporter must have worked on this for weeks.
It goes on and on and on.
To do what?
Holding some Facebook users to account for watching a video that they have watched too?
What, for having the wrong point of view or something?
Here, let me read this story.
A short, grainy YouTube video circulating on social media purports to show evidence of an imam claiming that if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is re-elected, he will institute Sharia law, the legal code of Islam based on the Quran.
So that's news.
You know, there are one billion hours of YouTube watched every day, right?
I mean, it is endless.
It is unlimited.
There are lies and there are truths.
There's jokes and satire.
There's lonely people talking to nobody.
There's surprise celebrity stars.
There's animal videos.
There's a billion hours a day.
I'm not sure how that's even possible, but it is.
And the CBC found something on the internet they disagreed with.
It's like that cartoon I showed you last week.
Come to bed.
I can't.
Why?
It's important.
Someone on the internet is wrong.
It's a laugh when you say that.
It's fun for you and I to talk about things on the internet.
That's what the comment section is for on YouTube or Facebook or Twitter.
It's just a big comment section.
We can mouth off if we like, but for a government journalist at the state broadcaster to spend a week going deep on rebutting some video she didn't like very much.
How weird is that?
Like I say, a normal journalist might want to, you know, hold powerful people to account on behalf of citizens.
Not in Canada.
In Canada, the state broadcaster holds powerless people to account, hold them to account for the government.
The CBC is really a species of snitches, to be honest.
They're hallmoners.
But let me read a little bit more.
But the video was taken out of context, according to the man featured in it.
And it was created by Sandra Solomon, known for her anti-Islam views.
Oh, well then, if Sandra Solomon is known for her anti-Islam views, then the video must be wrong.
I've met Sandra Solomon once.
She is known for her anti-Islam views.
And I think she comes by them honestly, though.
She was born a Muslim and grew up in Islam.
I wonder why the CBC never mentioned that in this huge article.
Don't you think it's relevant?
Don't you think it's important?
It's like those women in that amazing video who were freed from ISIS.
The first thing they did, they all ripped off their niqabs to feel freedom, to feel the sun on their face.
It's relevant that they were under the yoke of radical Islam.
Why would the CBC leave that part out about Sandra Solomon?
She grew up as a Muslim woman and has rejected Islam and especially its treatment of women.
Why would they hide her Islamic nature from viewers?
Is it because they're trying to paint her as some, I don't know, white supremacist or something?
I put it to you that Sandra Solomon knows more about Islam than anyone in the CBC does, both about Islam in theory, but more importantly, Islam in practice, especially if you're a woman.
They have a story about her being harassed by police.
Let me read that part.
Sandra Solomon was investigated by Peel Police in March of 2018 for ripping out pages of her Quran and placing them on windshields of cars parked outside an Islamic center in Mississauga, Ontario.
At the time, police investigated the behavior as possibly hate-motivated, but they did not lay charges in the case because it was determined that no criminal offense has taken place, a Peel police spokesman said.
Again, why is the CBC keep it a secret that she herself was born Muslim, growing up on the Quran?
Obviously, she's rebelling against it like some Catholics rebel against Catholicism.
Just for an example, why is she cast as a hate criminal when obviously she's railing against what she thinks is a hateful book that choked her for however many years of her life?
Why would the CBC even say she was investigated if no charges were ever brought?
Why the smear?
Because they're the CBC, they're a smear machine.
This will be a regular feature in the run-up to the election.
So back to the video that the CBC was correcting.
What's funny about this extremely long article is that they never actually show the video to you.
I'm curious about it now, aren't you?
I mean, normally if something is fact-checked, whoever's doing the fact-checking, they show you the thing and then they check it.
Why didn't that happen here?
Again, it's very weird to fact-check some private citizen on a private YouTube page.
That's not the CBC's mandate.
That's the Liberal Party's war room mandate.
So Sandra Solomon had no voice in the story.
She's not quoted in the story.
Her video has no voice.
It can't speak for itself.
But the Muslim man featured in her video has a voice.
Here, let me put some more of the CBC propaganda to you, the rebuttal.
And then I'm going to end actually by showing you what the CBC doesn't show you, what they're correcting.
The video itself includes a short section from a speech about Islam delivered by Mufti Asim Rashid in Kamloops, BC in October 2017.
It also features a picture of Justin Trudeau praying at a mosque and ends on a clip of Trudeau championing diversity, which is then covered up by a photo illustration of a small child wearing a Make Canada Great Again hat.
Okay, this is a really weird story.
It sounds like a goofy video, but the CBC spent a week on this.
Here's some more.
Greeted by phone, Rashid was surprised to find that a clip of his speech was circulating.
I had no idea that someone would use that clip in that way, he said.
Rashid told CBC News that his comments on arbitration referred to the Ontario government, which had allowed religious-based arbitration from 1991 until Premier Dalton McGuinty said in 2005 there will be no Sharia law in Ontario.
There will be no religious arbitration.
The Liberals then passed an amendment to the province's Arbitration Act.
In fact, the CBC said, nowhere in the video does Rashid mention Trudeau or the 2019 federal election.
In fact, during the portion of the speech used in the misleading video, Rashid said he was actually referring to the former Stephen Harper Conservative government.
Okay, it's a bit of a ramble there.
But the point is, according to the CBC, Sandra Solomon is full of hate.
She's a liar.
I mean, the Muslim Imam himself explained things.
Just accept his explanation.
And even if she is telling the truth about Sharia law, this Sandra Solomon liar, well, it's Stephen Harper who was going to bring in Sharia law, people.
Yeah, no, no, no.
Sharia courts.
That was a project of the Liberals in Ontario that was thankfully stopped.
Now, what we're talking about here is a YouTube video.
That's it.
But you're not allowed to see it because the CBC doesn't trust your ability to make up your own mind correctly.
They want to give you a thousand plus words of rebuttal, but they won't show you the actual video.
But of course they're going to take a run at Maxime Bernier.
They hate him because he talks about immigration and Islam and things like that.
And it's also a warning to Andrew Scheer, if you dare talk about immigration or Islam, we'll treat you this way too.
Here's what the CBC says.
Just this week, People's Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier accused Trudeau in a tweet of having room in his party for people who want to institute Sharia law.
In another tweet this week, Bernier accused both Trudeau and Conservative leader Andrew Scheer of pandering to people who promote Sharia law.
I'm sorry, Maxime Bernier has nothing to do with this video other than the CBC hates him, so they're just going to lump him in.
Oh, oh, and the Yellow Vest movement?
This is quite a conspiracy theory the liberals are making here.
I mean, they're tying together a YouTube video and Maxime Bernier and the Yellow Vest and Stephen Harper.
That is quite a theory.
Some might even call that fake news.
But here's my favorite part of the story.
You see that photo there?
Here's a poster.
That's what they call it.
Whereas it's obviously just a printed piece of paper in a plastic sleeve.
It's not a poster, but the CBC includes it.
And here's how they caption that.
They say, this poster spreading disinformation about Trudeau was passed out during a yellow vest protest in Alberta in January.
Name withheld by a request.
But hang on, hang on, hang on.
What's the disinformation?
Let's read that poster.
What's the falsehood in it?
Remove sovereignty.
That's what the UN does.
Create divisions in Canada.
Yeah, every pollster will confirm that's happening, not just regionally.
Trudeau demonizing Alberta in the West, but along grievance lines.
Exacerbated by Trudeau's identity politics.
Mass Muslim immigration.
Yeah, that's happening.
If you look at the proportion of Muslim immigration, 50,000 from Syria alone.
Obvious example.
Ruin the economy.
Yeah, check.
He's destroyed the oil patch and $100 billion worth of projects.
Canceled all the pipelines.
He's done that.
Massive debt.
Check.
Money to the UN.
Check, check, check.
I'm sorry.
I'm going through this.
And not only is it pretty factually accurate, but most of these things aren't even true or false.
They're just matters of opinion.
They're conservative opinions, but they're opinions, and that's what the CBC hates.
It's like the anti-CBC, this little poster.
How pitiful it is that the mighty state broadcaster with $1.5 billion a year is going to war against some poor schmo on the street who printed out like a poster and carefully put it in a plastic sleeve.
Total cost of that, I don't know, 10 cents.
Cost of living rent free in the CBC's minds, priceless.
What a strange story this is.
But the strangest part is the video itself isn't in there.
No link to it, even with warnings.
Now, I found it fast enough by myself by Googling.
I'm sure Trudeau will try to get it taken down from YouTube.
Imam's 2017 Speech00:05:24
I want to show it to you in full.
It's only about two minutes long.
Most of it is that speech by the Imam in BC.
No edits.
It was a speech in 2017.
And the last part of the video is some opinions about Trudeau dressing in Muslim desert garb and saying the Shahada.
That's a Muslim prayer that is actually the only requirement to convert to Islam.
You say the Shahada.
The prayer basically says there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger, his only messenger.
Trudeau has said that prayer.
He says he says it.
I don't believe he's a Muslim.
I don't believe Trudeau has any religion.
I think he only worships himself.
But I know that he said the Shahada as a bit of a dress-up.
I mean, he dresses up for everything.
He's like an actor who actually means nothing.
He just loves the costume.
So here's the video in full.
This is by Sandra Solomon.
This is not by me.
I wouldn't even show it to you.
I don't even think it's that interesting or that well produced.
But my God, the CBC is obsessed with it, but they will not show it to you.
So here, I will.
Here's what we're talking about in full.
And what I said about the Canadian government, The Canadian government wanted the Muslims to be able to regulate their own issues of marriage and divorce and set up systems of mediation and arbitration to solve their problems amongst themselves through Sharia law so that it's not a burden on the tort system which is already so bogged down.
The Canadian government wanted people like myself to sign off on custody cases where there was an allegation of parental abduction to verify that is the parent who has taken the child off of that country.
Are they Islamically authorized to do so or not?
Because there are many Muslim countries that would need to see that from a Muslim scholar.
That's what Sharia law means.
And the government told us that we would like you to have this system and you would like to work on these initiatives too.
At the Montreal Mosque, Trudeau was photographed participating in a prayer ritual reserved for practicing Muslims or those seeking admittance to the Islamic faith, the Maghreb Salah.
Part of the prayer is called the Shahada, which in Arabic means to testify to the truth that Allah is the one true God and Muhammad is his one true prophet.
We are a place that has figured out that diversity can be a source of strength, not just a source of weakness.
And that's it.
That's the whole thing.
The first and most obvious point is the CBC seriously spent a thousand plus words rebutting that.
That wasn't even a thing.
It was a clip of a speech and then a brief comment about Trudeau dressing up like he's in Aladdin and saying the Shahada.
The production value of the video is very low.
It was clearly homemade.
True, 50,000 people have seen it, but so what?
People watch a billion hours a day.
First off, what was actually false about the video?
The Imam said what he said.
Trudeau dressed how he dressed.
And he did say the Shahada.
That's sort of all that's in there.
What's disinformation about that?
What did the yellow vest have to do with it?
What does Stephen Harper have to do with it?
What does Maxine Burney have to do with it?
Nothing.
Nothing, nothing.
And everything.
Because this is what the election campaign is going to be like.
Panicky, crazed left-wing activists pretending to be journalists, screaming at ordinary Canadians for discussing things they're not supposed to be discussing.
This is the journalist behind this, Andrea Belmar, but she's not really a journalist.
I mean, she's a government journalist, but that's more.
She's a hall monitor, telling other people what they can or can't do, tattling on you if you say something she doesn't like.
That report on Sandra Solomon was journalistically unethical.
It didn't quote Solomon herself.
It misled viewers by hiding the fact that she was actually born and raised a Muslim.
It said she was investigated for a hate crime when, of course, she wasn't charged at all.
It's clearly a political setup.
That's a smear.
It smeared others too, basically the Trudeau CBC hate list.
I'm shocked they didn't mention the rebel.
It wasn't journalism.
It was politics paid for by taxpayers and laundered through the CBC.
Expect a lot more of it.
That video by Sandra Solomon on YouTube, it wasn't particularly persuasive.
It wasn't particularly newsworthy, and it was pretty unobjectionable.
I mean, the Imam said what he said.
That video contained no hate, no call to violence, nothing really.
It was just amusing, just a point of view.
And the CBC condemned it because you're only allowed one point of view.
Justin Trudeau's.
And as far as Sharia law coming to Canada goes, maybe Andrea Barama might want to do some real journalism and actually report on the tens of millions of dollars Trudeau recently announced that he's going to shovel into the enforcement of M103, the anti-Islamophobia motion.
But that would be too much real journalism, too much real work.
And more to the point, doesn't help Trudeau in this election, does it?
Maybe in that way, maybe Sandra Solomon's right.
Bailout Controversy00:12:55
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, the last time we saw our next guest, it was in Old Blighty.
Andrew Lawton of TNC.news joined Sheila Gonreid and me at the UK-Canada Media Freedom Conference.
He joins us now by Skype.
You're back in London, Ontario.
It's nice to see you.
We've talked a little bit about that UK experience.
And we're back in Canada, which has more press freedom than the UK.
But I think the threat to our press freedom, Andrew, is as much from the stick of censorship, but it's also the carrot of bailout money.
Tell me the latest with I understand there's a new bailout scheme, an additional bailout fund that's being offered to Canadian journalists.
What's the details?
Well, I'm still trying to sift through the full scope of this, but it appears like an expansion, not just in terms of the dollar figure attached to bailing out media enterprises, but also the definition of who qualifies for it.
And this is very much an example of, I think, moving the goalpost and perhaps a very politically motivated example where you've got a number of outlets from the guidelines that were released by the committee last week, outlets that are saying, oh, we don't think we'd qualify under this.
So by even talking about expansion, I think there's a bit of damage control there of, okay, anyone we missed in the first round of defining this, we're probably going to get in the second round.
So I'm not optimistic that this is much more than just an attempt at mending some of the frustration that media outlets who don't think they're eligible are experiencing, which unsurprisingly are all of the independent outlets who I think are a lot more deserving and probably a lot more in need of these funds than the big centralized corporate media.
You know, I have in front of me an article from Le Devoir, which is, of course, a French language newspaper in Quebec.
And it talks about a complaint by my old boss, and I know you were on the Sun News Network for a bit, Quebecor.
They looked at the government grants and they said, hey, this benefits our competitor, La Presse.
We want more.
And so instead of saying, oh, we'll make it more even-handed, they're just adding more millions to the pot.
And so it's actually new money.
And basically, it depends on how connected your lobbyists are.
I mean, I like Quebecor, but I don't want my tax dollars going to pay them off because they're in some welfare contest with La Presse.
I don't think any media should be paid by Justin Trudeau.
And here's another observation, and you were making this to me just before we turned the camera on.
The more and more money Canadian media takes from Justin Trudeau, the more it seems they obsess over Donald Trump and his flaws, rather than inspecting our own leader and his flaws.
It's almost like for every $100 million the media gets, they'll drop one story about Trudeau and add one story about Trump.
What do you think of that?
Well, obviously the motivation is a bit unclear as to whether it's the bailout causing it.
But I do think that the whole problem with the bailout is that it forces, I think, any thinking Canadian to question what impact, if any, that's having on coverage, because he who pays the piper calls the tune.
And when hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing into media coffers, you have to question everything that media outlet receiving the money does.
And one trend that I've seen a fair bit of in the last couple of years, but I'd say even more so now, is the media's incessant obsession on Donald Trump, not just covering what Donald Trump says and does, irrespective of any Canadian context, rather, but even asking Canadian politicians what they think about Donald Trump when we are, I think, three months to the day away from an election.
And a notable example of this, of course, is Trump taking aim at the so-called squad of congresswomen in the U.S. saying, if you don't like what's happening in America, leave.
And irrespective of what one thinks of his tweet or tweets on that, I don't think anyone could argue that Andrew Scheer's position on it is particularly relevant, nor is Justin Trudeau's.
But again, the media was putting to both of them, to Andrew Scheer and then separately to Justin Trudeau, this idea of will you condemn Donald Trump's tweets?
And of course, what they say, it doesn't go far enough.
So then the media reports on that.
And when we're this close to an election and the stories are, in my view, distraction stories, there's a big problem with the caliber of coverage here.
Yeah.
And it's not even a responsible question for a politician to ask.
You know, that's for pundits to ask and answer if you're obsessed with U.S. minutia.
It was a domestic political matter between two parties, asking the leader of the opposition of Canada.
I mean, put the shoe on the other foot, it would be weird if Canadian journalists or American journalists asked Trump to weigh in on a spat between Trudeau and Scheer.
It's just junk journalism.
I want to say I've got in my hand here the Ledvar article, and it's translated into English.
I want to read one sentence from Pierre-Carl Pelidot of Quebec Corps.
He was complaining that the money was going to the pro-liberal Le Press.
But here's what he said, and I want to give the guy some credit.
He said, in addition to raising serious questions about the ability of journalists to remain independent and free from economic and political influence, this concern is all the more justified because the press has always supported the Liberal Party of Canada and its various leaders since past decades.
So I think Pierre-Carl Peladot, the boss of Quebec Corps, understands the risk, but his solution is just give me money too.
I don't see a lot of people calling for an end to the bailout.
Let me ask you about that.
I see Andrew Coyne is grousing about this media bailout in the papers, but his paper, the National Post, is going to take it, just like Andrew Coon takes money from the state broadcast or the CBC.
I don't see any principled objectors out there, Andrew.
I don't see anyone who could take the money not taking it.
I see most journalists being silent about it, a few of them noisily saying, I'm against this, as they cash their checks.
I really think mission accomplished for Trudeau, he's managed to corrupt the Canadian media, not with a stick, but with a carrot.
You know, I actually think that there have, I've seen a little bit of pushback from journalists, although, to be honest, they should be pushing back to their bosses, to the publishers.
And I don't know if these battles are happening quietly.
I'm not seeing them unfold publicly because it's their bosses, the media publishers in Canada, that are putting now Canadian journalists in an untenable position where they have to be the ones that are writing.
And, you know, if editorial directives are coming down that, you know, go beyond just the typical endorsement or editorials we see, then that's going to be an area where their integrity is going to be called into question.
And you and I talked months ago about the idea that I had put forward that any journalist who's a member of Unifor should have to disclose that status in stories they write about the election, the rationale for that being that Unifor has declared war on Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives, effectively supporting the liberals.
So anytime there is some connection or affiliation that could call into question the caliber of content, even if it's just an optics one, we need to be asking what are we doing to avoid that.
And I'm not seeing a lot of that here.
What I would say is important is that we focus on the overall structure of this and the existence of it as well.
I mean, the Canadian Association of Journalists has put out lots of critiques of the process, but critiquing the process doesn't go so far as to get at the real crux of this, which is that this bailout shouldn't exist in the first place.
So the discussion shouldn't be, how do we do it?
It should be, how do we stop it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not enough voices saying that because I think they know what their publishers would say.
Publishers would say, well, we're going to lay you off next week.
So it's take this money or leave.
And these journalists, you know, journalists are the ultimate voyeurs.
They are not the man in the arena.
They're the critic.
As Roosevelt said, it's not the critic who counts.
And it's very easy for journalists to be principled when they have no skin in the game.
As soon as they get skin in the game, they throw all their principles away.
And I say that as a member of the journalistic class.
And I'm proud that we don't take dough from the government.
I know you don't either, Andrew.
I want to ask you about one last thing.
And thanks for letting me pepper you with all these different subjects, but I think they're all a little bit related.
Today I took our viewers through a CBC fact-check story of a Facebook video made by Sandra Solomon.
It wasn't particularly viral.
It had about 50,000 views.
It wasn't particularly controversial.
She actually never makes an appearance in it.
It's just a clip of an imam in BC talking about Sharia law.
And then like a 30-second commentary about Justin Trudeau dressing in desert garb and saying a Muslim prayer called the Shahada.
So, you know, I didn't think it was that interesting a video.
It was shared a little bit on Facebook and Twitter, but no big deal.
And the CBC did this enormous fact-check debunking of this private citizens online video.
And I just thought the whole thing was really, really weird.
Instead of fact-checking the government, the CBC was fact-checking citizens' criticisms of the government.
That truly feels like a state broadcaster.
I mean, it wasn't even that interesting a video.
It wasn't that well-produced.
It wasn't that well-watched.
I was just thinking, what is going on when the CBC is going after individual private citizens for Facebook posts?
What's going on?
Well, one of the big problems here is that the word of the day, I think, this year is disinformation.
You've got newsrooms that are hiring disinformation reporters.
You've got outlets that are starting up these entirely new sections to deal with fact-checking in the election.
And the problem is that for all we hear about the threat of disinformation and fake news and, you know, this grandiose Russian conspiracy that the Russians have, you know, installed a president in the U.S. and they're going to come for the Canadian government next.
We're not actually seeing the volume of disinformation that you'd think.
This is like the Y2K scare all over again.
There's all of this sizzle, but absolutely no stake whatsoever.
And these outlets now have to justify their own existence.
And if you say find disinformation, well, you know, there's nothing that's getting 50 million views.
There's nothing that's getting 10 million views.
Nothing that's getting 1 million views.
Oh yeah, here's this thing that your uncle shared on Facebook that four people saw.
Let's do a fact check of that.
And we're going to see a lot more of that, Ezra, because these people have committed themselves to this narrative that our elections are being upended by fake news.
And if there's none there, they have to create it.
Yeah.
You know, I'm still waiting for the CBC to do a fact check on the fake news about Trump-Russia collusion.
They probably published a thousand stories about it.
It was debunked, and then they just sort of went silent.
Listen, Andrew, you're one of the good guys.
We love the website you're with, TNC.news.
It was great to see you out in London.
Maybe give us 30 seconds about your plans for the months ahead.
What can we expect to see on TNC.news?
I know you're there, Anthony Fury, Candace, Malcolm.
You guys got a great lineup.
What else are you up to?
Well, we've got a scoop coming tomorrow that actually ties in with what we're talking about now, except instead of the media monitoring what private citizens are posting, it's actually the government.
So that'll be coming down the pipeline in the next 24 hours.
Very interesting.
I'm really pleased to see you guys growing and succeeding.
And it's great.
I feel less alone now to know that there's another independent conservative media group out there besides the Rebel.
Congratulations and may you go from strength to strength.
Thanks very much.
Good to talk to you as always.
All right.
There's our friend Andrew Lawton.
One of the good guys, that's for sure.
And by the way, in addition to TNC.news, there's also that website, The Post Millennial.
Our friend Barbara Kaye writes for them.
I have a little glimmer of hope that there is an alternative set of sources of news besides the media party.
And I think the misconduct of the media party is making us all grow.
All right, stay with us.
Some final thoughts next.
Well, my friends, as you're watching this, I am actually coming home from the United Kingdom.
Tommy Robinson's Torture00:00:40
I recorded this and then I hopped on a plane and I went to London to go to Belmarsh Prison to visit Tommy Robinson to see how he's doing in the clink.
As you know, he's being jailed for contempt of court, the first journalist in the UK imprisoned in nearly a century for that non-crime.
It's not a crime, civil contempt.
I'll let you know how he's being treated because he was tortured last time.
He was starved.
He was thrown in solitary confinement.
He was subjected to threats of violence.
So as soon as I'm back, I'll give you a full report for those of you who are interested.
And then I know not everyone cares about Tommy Robinson.
But to me, I see him as a canary in the coal mine.