Rachel Notley’s NDP campaigns against university free speech policies like the University of Chicago’s principles, despite Alberta’s "Strong and Free" motto, targeting conservative voices—$64K in legal costs from Reynolds Mirth, armed removals of journalists like Sheila Gunn Reid, and demands for private documents. Gunn Reid, a veteran defender of free expression (from Danish cartoons to Tommy Robinson), faces weaponized bureaucracy, yet supporters rally behind her at savesheila.com. Meanwhile, left-wing climate-driven "birth strikes" mock parental duty, echoing authoritarian humorlessness, as seen in Orwell’s warnings and Khomeini’s edicts—while free speech advocates stand firm against ideological censorship. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey folks, today's podcast, I think it'll get you revved up.
I'm so mad about it.
I can't believe it, but Rachel Notley, the disgraced former Premier of Alberta, who's now the leader of the opposition, her big campaign this week, I'm not even kidding, I'll prove it to you, is to call for censorship on university campuses.
She's literally opposing something called the Chicago Principles, which is a free speech declaration that campuses in Alberta are making.
This is her Hilda die on.
She wants censorship.
I think it's amazing.
Anyways, before I get out of the way and you listen to the show, can I invite you to become a subscriber to our premium content?
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All right, here's the podcast.
Tonight, it's shocking but not surprising.
The NDP officially comes out as an anti-free speech party.
It's August 1st, and this is the Es or Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a 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 is government about why I publish them is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Amazing.
Amazing and heartbreaking and enraging.
Rachel Notley, the disgraced former Premier of Alberta, has made opposing free speech on university campuses her latest crusade.
I suppose her weird campaign to make sure gay student sex clubs in high schools remain secret from parents.
Jason Kenny's not banning those gay straight alliances.
He's just stopping them from being secret.
I suppose that campaign was getting a bit stale for Notley, so she's moved on.
She's chosen to fight for censorship now.
She's not even hiding it.
As I mentioned earlier this week, the first universities in the province are now rolling out their free speech principles based on a template from the University of Chicago.
This is good for everyone.
Should I remind you that Alberta's official motto is strong and free?
It's taken from our anthem.
But here's what Notley wrote yesterday.
This is not about free speech on campus.
We already have free speech.
This is the United Conservative Party dictating that universities and colleges owe everyone, including hate groups, a platform.
And she was replying to a comment from her former education minister, David Eggan.
Just a quick reminder of who he is.
No new approvals.
No new approvals.
Yeah, so he seems to be someone who likes to use free speech himself to make a bit of a fool of himself, but that's the fun of free speech sometimes.
So he likes his point of view having free speech, but not for others.
He said, he was tweeting about letters sent from the new Alberta government to universities asking them to adopt their own free speech policies.
Egan found this scandalous.
And I'll get back to these politicians in a moment.
Give me a second just to recap what we're talking about here.
Now, twice I've told you about the Chicago principles for free speech on campus, right?
And it's called that because the University of Chicago really worked out its rules on freedom of speech on campus and their resulting declaration was so good.
It's just two and a half pages long and it's written in really plain language.
It's not a technical or a legal document.
Now that's a miracle in itself if you know professors.
I mean that a group of professors can say something in plain English which is sort of the opposite of the kind of postmodern gobbledygook that you hear so often from professors.
And I should say one more thing.
Chicago is a city that has a deep communist history to it, like Winnipeg in a way.
Chicago has communist activists.
It's where Bill Ayers, the terrorist, is from.
It's got communist politicians.
It's had communist riots.
It has a deep left wing.
It's where Barack Obama has his base.
It's where Saul Alinsky, the communist professor, developed his theory of North American Marxist activism called community organizing.
It's where Alinsky wrote his antifa cookbook called Rules for Radicals.
So that's Chicago.
In fact, as I showed you the other day, the Chicago principles refer to when the leader of the Communist Party came to speak on campus and there was a protest against the communist.
But the university held firm and said free speech for everyone.
I read this to you the other day, but please let me read it again.
30 years later, a student organization invited William Z. Foster, the Communist Party's candidate for president, to lecture on campus.
This triggered a storm of protests from critics both on and off campus to those who condemned the university for allowing the event.
President Robert M. Hutchins responded that our students should have the freedom to discuss any problem that presents itself.
He insisted that the cure for ideas we oppose lies through open discussion rather than through inhibition.
On a later occasion, Hutchins added that free inquiry is indispensable to the good life.
The universities exist for the sake of such inquiry, and that without it they cease to be universities.
And that's the thing about freedom of speech.
It's something you have to give to your opponents if you want it for yourself.
I'm sorry, that's just how it works.
Free speech for both sides, for all sides.
That's just the only way it works.
I point this out because, of course, the left has used free speech as a tool historically when they have had no other source of power.
Three obvious examples come to my mind in North America, the suffragette movement to give women the right to vote, the black civil rights movement in the 60s, and the gay rights movement of the 70s and 80s.
In each of those cases, the proposed reforms were opposed by the establishment, by the money, by the power, by inertia.
But the power of free speech to promote an idea overcame that all.
That's one of the wonderful messages in that great movie about the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.
The movie's called Amazing Grace.
It was argued that slavery was in the economic interest of the British Empire.
I put it to you that it was not, but many people back then obviously thought it was.
But the power of ideas and free speech overcame everything.
Or back to the Chicago principles.
Let me quote.
It is not the proper role of the university to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.
As in, I'm sure those progressives or leftists or reformers or whatever you want to call them who called for the abolition of slavery or the abolition of male-only voting or the abolition of Jim Crow laws in the South or for the end of the criminalization of homosexuality.
I'm sure all of those activists would have been called unwelcome, disagreeable, and deeply offensive, to quote the Chicago principles, because being offensive is in the eye of the beholder.
And new ideas that call for the change of the old ideas are, by definition, they're offensive to the order of the day.
Surely a radical should know that.
Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals depend completely on freedom of speech, by the way.
That's the American version of his Marxism.
The Leninists in the Russian Revolution used guns.
Alinsky saw he didn't need guns if he could convince people in America through political action, through free speech.
He liked free speech, at least for himself, because he regarded all the power structures of the day as right-wing, the church, the university, the Congress, the military, whatever.
Now, 50 years later, Alinsky's disciples have taken over many of those institutions, which is maybe why leftists today don't like free speech so much anymore, because now they're on the inside, not the outs.
And I tell you all this, because the biggest opponent of this new free speech policy in Canada right now is a leftist, Rachel Notley.
Her opposition NDP is making it their big focus.
I showed you Notley's tweet claiming that free speech is just fine in Alberta and her former education minister saying he's outraged by the government, asking schools to develop free speech policies.
It's the whole crew.
Here's Kathleen Ganley, who was Rachel Notley's justice minister until they were all thrown out by voters.
She said, my colleague David Eggin received these letters from post-secondary leaders concerned about the extreme Chicago principles, which will allow hate speech to spread on Alberta campuses.
Now, if she means by hate speech, simply speech that she and the NDP hate, then I think she's 100% right.
Because no longer will left-wing activists like her be able to ban their enemies from speaking on campus.
They hate their enemies.
They hate our own Sheila Gunn Reid, and they sent an armed sheriff to kick her off the legislature.
They hate her.
That was under Kathleen Ganley's watch, by the way.
You know, Ganley's office actually sent us a bizarre letter saying that no one even connected with the rebel.
Does that include my mechanic?
By the way, he's connected to the rebel.
What does it even mean?
No one connected to the rebel can attend any government event ever.
That's the kind of letter a child would write, but it actually came to us on official stationery from Alberta's Justice Department under Kathleen Ganney.
So yeah, she's full of hate for people like Sheila and me and others.
But I'm sorry, that is not enough to ban people, or at least not anymore.
Sorry, NDP.
Here's a few more quick comments from her.
I think it's important.
Someone pointed out to her that hate speech as defined in the criminal code, which I don't really like being in the criminal code, but it's there, it still would be banned under the Chicago principles.
And she responded by saying, hate speech is prohibited.
On its face, this should be enough, but that standard to prove is high and the weight to hearing long.
Basically, the privileged group gets to spew hate.
Those affective can try to get legal remedy at cost to themselves.
Oh, okay.
So what the NDP means then is that, sure, hate speech, actual law breaking of the criminal variety, it's still ban.
Okay, fine.
And that's enforced by the government, police, prosecutors, real courts.
But what she wants banned, and what she's sad that it won't be banned anymore, now that she's not in charge, is speech by privileged groups.
Now, that's quite something to hear coming from a rich white liberal lawyer.
But again, she just really means the people she hates, like journalists and public interest lawyers to disagree with her.
Here, let me read, this is incredible.
She said, people, including lawyers and judges, differ on where the balance is.
The point of this move is to allow the Ann Coulters and John Carpés of the world to speak from a stage.
In my view, the existing policies strike the right balance.
So she's not even talking about banning actual Nazis, if there were any.
I don't think there are really any Nazis in Canada who are real Nazis.
There's a few basement dwelling failure to launch losers, pretending to be Nazis on the internet.
There's about 100 undercover cops and agent provocateurs.
That's not who Ganley is worried about.
If there is a real Nazi in Canada, Kathleen Ganley didn't mention him.
She wants to ban, you saw her, Ann Coulter.
She's a conservative journalist and author.
And John Carpe, you know John Carpe.
He's a free speech lawyer.
We've had on our show a dozen times.
We always knew this is who Ganley and the NDP wanted to ban.
It's just weird to see her admit it.
It's not about banning Nazis.
I don't even think there are any.
She wants to ban her conservative opponents.
This is not about banning criminals or for those even calling for violence.
It's about censoring people who disagree with her like they tried to do with Sheila.
Actually, they're still doing that to Sheila through the election commissioner that Notley handpicked and that Jason Kenney has allowed to continue investigating Notley's enemies list.
It's still going on under Jason Kenny.
Anyways, another tweet from Ganley, just because she's really letting us see the NDP's mind.
She said, I hold this view because I think that the Chicago principles rely on the assumption that everyone in society has equal power.
These speakers are allowed to come, claim they won't incite hate, then the onus is on the listener to prove the hate incited was intentional.
Yeah, that's how it works in our society.
We don't, the default is for freedom.
The default isn't that you have to make your case to be free.
The default is on the government to ban something.
The onus, excuse me, the onus is on the government to ban something.
We don't have to prove we're innocent.
You have to prove we're guilty.
That's how it works in a free country.
But Kathleen Ganley doesn't understand how free speech works today or historically.
I gave you some examples earlier.
Ganley doesn't understand Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi or the suffragettes.
They didn't have power.
If by power you mean government power or commercial power or any establishment, they did not.
But instead, they had the power of an idea whose time had come and the right to communicate it freely, even if the justice minister, the Kathleen Ganley, of the day, was offended by it.
So those otherwise powerless people use free speech as their power.
Ganley doesn't know that, or she knows it, but she doesn't believe conservatives should have access to that power too.
Everyone in Canada, no matter how rich or poor, has the right and the power of free speech.
Ganley doesn't understand that free speech is for the powerless.
If you're already a senator, if you're already rich, if you're already, you don't need free speech, you got it all.
All right, one last tweet from her again.
This is Notley's former justice minister until a couple of months ago, Kathleen Ganley says, John Carpe's legal interpretation is hardly the gold standard on this one.
There are different opinions on where the delicate balance is, but you propose no balance at all.
It's an intentional move to broaden policies to invite in racists, homophobes, and misogynists.
All right, well, first of all, although I don't support people being racist, homophobic, or misogynistic, all of those words imply a hateful bigotry.
So, I mean, obviously, I'm against that.
But I also know that those are not, those are not crimes.
Those are ideas.
Those are philosophies or bigotries, I suppose.
And if you oppose ideas, okay, well, then debate them.
And anyways, and more to the point, Kenley and the left, I don't think they actually care that much about those things in reality.
They just care about using those things as insults to label and deplatform and silence their opponents.
It's Trudeau's move to label everyone they don't like as Nazis.
So I don't even think this is a good faith objection by Ganley.
I'm going to stop there, but believe me, that is just a sample.
The Alberta NDP and all their disgraced former ministers and their party staff are making this their big push.
David Egan's Concerns00:12:25
This is their big thing right now.
And they're just coming right out and saying it.
They're against free speech on campuses of all places.
They're not even pretending anymore.
They were pretending until they lost the election.
Now they're showing us who they are, who they always have been.
I've always known.
Maybe you have too.
I guess it was no joke.
You know, Notley used to wear a watch with Shea Guevara, the racist communist murderer on.
He was a murderer.
20 times as eight, when she looked at what time it was, she would look at Shea Guevara.
Who does that?
Now she took that watch off when she became premier and reporters noticed it.
I bet she's wearing that watch again now that she's not premier anymore.
I guess the NDP weren't kidding when their MLA celebrated Hugo Chavez, the late communist butcher of Venezuela.
Hugo Chavez.
I guess they really always were censors and authoritarian bullies.
They just tried to hide it for four years.
I'm shocked by them, but I'm not surprised by them.
And I'm not surprised that the mainstream media doesn't have a word to say about any of the censorship by the NDP.
In fact, judging by the little coverage of it that there is, calling free speech controversial, it's controversial to be for free speech.
It's not controversial to be against it.
It looks like the media party agrees with Notley.
Some voices just shouldn't be heard, apparently.
It makes me think of another Chicagoan, or he was born in Kentucky, moved to Illinois.
I mean, Abraham Lincoln.
You know, he's the saying about slavery.
He said, Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Isn't that a great line?
Now, Lincoln didn't mean it, of course.
He didn't actually want to clap his opponents in chains, but he was making the point, you seem to like freedom for yourself.
You just don't want it for others.
I feel the same way about Rachel Notley, Kathleen Ganley, and even more so about the mainstream media journalists who agree with those NDPers on the need for censorship.
Let me tweak Lincoln.
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for censorship, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Yeah, I got to say, sometimes I do too.
Stay with us for more on this.
Well, I, for one, am not surprised that Rachel Notley is finally letting the mask slip and revealing that she doesn't believe in free speech for her opponents.
She has some of the craziest kooks in the province in her party, and that's all fine, but someone she disagrees with, new, new, new.
She wants them censored.
Well, someone that Rachel Notley has tried and failed to shut up is our favorite person.
Sheila Gundrid, our chief reporter in Alberta Bureau, Chief who joins me now, Wise Skype.
Sheila, great to see you.
You're free.
And Rachel Notley is lost.
The world is as it should be.
Yeah, you know, she's not handling her loss very well, is she?
She sure seems bitter and authoritarian, and she's not used to not having power.
Yeah, which is funny because she was powerless for so much of her life.
I mean, she was the leader of a fringe party that accidentally in this perfect storm was given all the power for four years.
And boy, did they brutally use it.
You know, I covered a lot of ground in my monologue, but one thing I did not talk about was how, for example, David Egan brutally suppressed the freedom of speech of Christians by shutting down Christian schools.
He literally shut down some schools, by the way.
I'm not just talking about his kooky extremist curriculum revisions.
Christian schools, homeschools, he basically went to war against people with a different opinion.
They always tried to finesse it, though.
They never really showed their true hatred for opponents.
That's what's new in the last month.
The way they're talking now is a lot more honest.
In that way, I suppose it's an improvement.
They're no longer even pretending.
These people just hate those who disagree with them.
Yeah, you know, you raise a really great point when you talk about the former education minister David Egan's.
I would call it hatred of Christian education.
We know that, you know, I might be a little bit fuzzy on my numbers, but I believe it was one-third of all the homeschooled children in Alberta were out of school in one afternoon through an act of David Eggan, and that was a Christian homeschool association called Wisdom Homeschooling.
He just shut them down just like that.
They fought back and they, you know, eventually they did get their schooling back.
But we've seen attacks on Christian education just outside of Edmonton.
Alberta Education was basically silent when the local school board was demanding that a Christian school censor parts of the Christian Bible.
David Egan, especially in education, has been trying to create these perfect little NDP soldiers out of our children through this constant censorship and blocking children from being exposed to these other ideas.
I remember that we actually did some crowdfunding, I think, for one of those schools.
I think John Carpe was representing them as he so often does.
The school board was literally telling the schools which passages of the Bible they had to delete.
Just unbelievable.
I don't think that they would try that with a Muslim school telling them which passages of the Quran weren't allowed.
But to me, the most chilling and revealing tweet was not actually by Rachel Notley, but by her enforcer, Kathleen Ganley, the no-repute lawyer.
Like she was really the most unaccomplished woman in cabinet, except for she had a law degree.
So, well, better put her as Justice Minister, Kathleen Ganley.
She, again, I mean, I'm using that phrase, let the mask lip, but that's what it was.
The two examples that she used for people who she's worried will have the right to come and speak are not Nazi groups or violent groups or ISIS recruiters or anything where I think a lot of people would say, ooh, yeah, should they be allowed on campus?
She lists an extremely popular American conservative pundit, an author, I mean, what, seven, eight, nine, ten best-selling books, Ann Coulter.
And I just mentioned John Carpe.
Those are the two people that Ganley mentioned by name that she doesn't want to see have a platform on campus.
A public, popular, fairly mainstream conservative columnist and author, and then a civil liberties lawyer who runs a charity for free speech and other civil liberties.
Imagine actually saying that's who your censorship law is targeting.
They're not even pretending it's about racists.
And even if it is a racist, I'm not sure what the definition of that is.
But they're not even, they're going after Ann Coulter and John Carpe, and they don't care who knows now.
Yeah, I mean, with regard to Kathleen Gainley being a lawyer, I mean, you're a lawyer or you got a law degree.
They're giving those things out to anybody.
But, you know, the point of free speech, and I don't think I have to tell this to you, is not only to just express yourself, but to argue against ideas.
And it really speaks to the quality of the NDP ideas.
If they can't have John Carpe show up because they don't have the intellectual depth to challenge him on things, it's the same as when in the United States, universities break out and deplatform people like Ben Shapiro.
He's an accomplished debater.
You're really taking your life in your hands if you show up to challenge Ben Shapiro.
So instead of experiencing the constant embarrassment of the left taking a run-up on Ben Shapiro, they just completely deplatform him.
There's also something else I think is pretty sinister in all of this.
Kathleen Gainley, David Egan, Rachel Notley herself says that this is giving a platform to hate mongers.
They routinely throw around words like Nazi, homophobic, racist, Islamophobic, even anti-Semite to people like me.
That's insane.
But then they deplatform you, and then they take away your free speech as in your ability to rebut these dangerous allegations about you.
That's just the only narrative that's out there.
That's what's hanging out there about people like me sometimes and really any mainstream conservative.
They don't allow you the opportunity to at least try to rebut the damage they've done to your reputation by allowing you free speech.
That's a great point.
It's something that Tommy Robinson says to me.
He used to have more than a million followers on social media.
He actually had a million on Facebook, almost a million on Twitter.
So if someone were to lie about him, he could choose to rebut them if he wanted to, and at least his side of the story would be heard.
But he's been banned from everywhere.
So how does he even fight back?
And since he has no one willing to champion him, and that's absolutely what they would do to you and me.
In fact, they are trying to do it to you.
Obviously, we're talking to you because you're an Alberta Bureau Chief, but because you yourself have been the most acute victim of their attempts to censor, going way back to when they sent the sheriff to kick you out of the legislature.
I'm embarrassed that the sheriff did it, by the way.
I mean, just like I'm embarrassed that that staff lawyer at the Department of Justice actually signed a letter on Alberta Stationery saying no one with the rebel or even connected to them is allowed.
I mean, surely you don't just follow orders if you know it's against the law, which Alberta Justice should have known, or you're an armed sheriff.
Surely you don't let yourself be ordered around as a political paramilitary.
Surely you just say, all right, Premier, I'll handle it.
And maybe he comes over and says, hey, just behave yourself, okay?
Or something like that.
But imagine being a sheriff and actually kicking you out with a gun.
Imagine being a Department of Justice lawyer and actually going through with it.
That shows how precarious our freedom is here.
I don't think we have a culture of freedom that fully marinates through our civil society.
I think what we have seen is how close we came to tyranny under Rachel Notley.
And I put it to you that Justin Trudeau has all the same instincts, but he's smarter about it, or at least his handlers are.
I think Justin Trudeau is getting far more censorious and far more clever about it than Notley ever was.
Yeah, I mean, Notley, although I do think Justin Trudeau has a lot more power to do the things that Rachel Notley would probably love to do.
He has the ability to lean on Facebook and Google and Twitter to censor his political enemies.
Rachel Notley is just the Premier of Alberta.
She really didn't have the power to do those things, but boy, I bet she would have loved to.
And she did her things to censor political speech, particularly with me, but it started smaller.
She started trying to crack down on our billboards, which is really just an editorial opinion, no different than what happens in the editorial pages of the Edmonton Sun or the Calgary Herald.
We just express it in a cheekier way.
Rachel Notley created, you know, it's interesting that you brought up the civil servants that are so apathetic to freedom.
Rachel Notley created an entire bureaucracy weaponized against conservatives, a censorship bureaucracy called the Elections Commissioner.
High Legal Bills, Big Investigations00:04:09
Their sole job is to investigate political speech, including books and billboards, and target people like me.
And it is staffed with what I'm told at least nine investigators, much of them former law enforcement, RCMP, city police.
So people who are well-versed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, whose job it is to defend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but they have no job right now taking a paycheck to stomp all over mine.
Yeah.
Well, Sheila, just this morning I sent you an email, I don't know if you got it yet, of our latest bill from our law firm, and it is $32,000.
I sent that to you.
I was just trying to show you.
I mean, obviously we're paying it.
We're crowdfunding the money.
We need the best legal help we can find, and we will win.
We absolutely will win.
These investigations in a free country like Canada, the police do not have the right to say to an author, give us your editorial notes and your emails.
I'm sorry, that's just not how it works for the sin of criticizing Rachel and Ollie.
It's not how it works.
But we have to fight them tough and smart.
And so that brings the total amount of money we have spent fighting the election commissioner to almost exactly $64,000.
And I think that's the point, is they want to make the process the punishment.
Either they think that we'll just collapse, bend the knee, surrender.
Maybe they think we'll do that.
I think that's contrary to everything we've ever done in my life and your life.
But I think they know that we'll fight and they just want to ring $64,000 you could hire, you could hire a new staff and expenses for a whole journalist for a whole year.
But instead, we've got to pay lawyers to fight back.
But we will, Sheila, I promise you that.
Yeah, I mean, they're making, like you said, the process the punishment so that even if we win, we'll still be out.
I bet over $100,000.
We'll be levied fines for not producing those documents because I'm not producing a damn thing for these people.
And they'll anticipate that we'll pay them.
The idea is really to just, to use a hockey term, reg the puck until we run out of money because we're not the CBC.
We don't have deep pockets.
We don't have government money.
But I think the Alberta government really underestimated our supporters.
Like always, they continue to underestimate everyday Albertans and their resentment of the NDP's continued attacks on Alberta freedom.
Yeah.
I've had a few people write to me and saying, Answer, those are very large legal bills.
What's going on there?
I should tell you that we have two lawyers and a legal assistant at an excellent firm called Reynolds Mirth.
Fred Kozak QC is the premier media lawyer in Alberta.
And he has another lawyer, Michael Swanberg, working with him.
And they have a system, of course.
I believe that they are billing us very fairly, very reasonably.
The reason the bills are high, and I'm just telling this because we have people saying, Answer, how come the bills are so high?
Because most of the work we're doing, we have not even disclosed publicly.
There are investigations and prosecutions and things afoot that just for strategic or other reasons, I mean, as you know, Sheila, this complaint, this demand for your private author's papers came to us in April, and we only told the world about it a couple of weeks ago.
So people will see in due time why our bills are so high.
So I just want to let people know we're not being taken for a ride.
That's how much legal work there is.
We've got a constitutional challenge to the law.
We're dealing with three or four or five parallel investigations.
We're dealing with rogue cops who are doing so many things.
But I promise our viewers, we will see it through to the end.
Promise to Fight00:08:31
And I saw you in Alberta a couple days ago, and I made you that promise personally, that we will do whatever it takes to fight and win.
And we met up with a farmer for justice.
That's one of those wheat farmers a couple decades ago who actually went to prison for the fake crime of selling their wheat freely.
The Liberal Party of Canada put them in prison for that.
We met someone who actually went to prison for that.
And I know he gave you a pep talk.
I'll do everything I can to make sure it doesn't come to that.
But we will not allow freedom to go out on our watch.
That's my promise to you and to our viewers.
Yeah, I mean, with regard to our illegal bills, we're up against the government's lawyers.
They have an entire Justice Department who will eventually have to weigh in against us.
We're up against an entire bureaucracy.
And as you pointed out, we have two really good lawyers and a legal assistant.
And yeah, fighting against the government adds up.
It's not a cheap venture, but it is also priceless.
It's priceless to be able to fight for freedom.
And quite frankly, I'm sort of pleased that the Alberta government came for me because I feel like I work for a company and I have the right kind of attitude and the right kind of family and the right kind of support that I think that we are the perfect people for this fight to put an end to these continued attacks on the free press in Alberta.
You know, it's funny, you just made me think of something that I haven't thought of for more than a dozen years.
Because I remember when I published the Danish cartoons of Mohamed at the Western Standard in 2006 and I was prosecuted by the Human Rights Commission.
And I remember saying, and that's 13 years ago now, Sheila, I remember saying, and it was so strange for people to hear it.
I said, thank God they came for me.
And why would any sane person say that?
And I remember what I said at the time.
I said, because had they gone to another newspaper, they would have caved.
Had they gone to another journalist, they would have caved.
And I felt like in that moment, at that time, I had the combination of personal qualities and support and an attitude and allies that I thought, I mean, maybe there could have been someone else to fight that fight.
And Mark Stein fought that fight very well, and he was very lucky too.
But I felt like it was actually, I don't want to sound too dramatic, but it was almost like it was my moment.
It was meant for me, or if it was even my calling, that I had to do it.
Once in a while, maybe once every 10 years, something comes along, and I think, I absolutely have to do this.
I felt that way when Tommy Robinson was thrown in prison.
He wasn't working for us anymore.
He left our company.
I had no real ties with him.
But I saw him get put in the back of that police van and I saw he didn't have support around him.
And I just felt in my bones, I thought, oh my God, no one is going to help him.
No one knows how to help him.
This is absolutely a moment meant for me.
I have to do it.
And I'm so glad I did.
That's how I felt a dozen years ago when they came for me in the Danish cartoons.
I thought, I have to do this.
And in a way, I'm the perfect person for it.
And I don't even mind because of it.
And I think maybe what you just said is exactly, I think I know exactly what you feel.
And so let me say this to all our viewers.
They're not coming for you because they're going for Sheila.
Sheila is your flak jacket.
She's your bulletproof vest.
She's the first line of defense.
She's got the fighting spirit.
She's got the attitude.
She's got the family on side.
She's got us on side.
She's got good lawyers on side.
And we're going to pay these bills, these legal bills.
So in a way, we're all lucky they came for you, Sheila.
And I don't mean that in the wrong way.
I'm not glad they're coming for you, but if they're going to come for anybody, frankly, going for Sheila Gunread is the best thing that could happen because Sheila Gunread will fight, unlike 99% of the media party journalists who have been silent as mice.
Don't mind me, Sheila.
You just made me think about how I felt with the cartoon fight.
This is your version of the cartoon fight.
And I hope you don't go to prison.
But actually, in a roundabout way, and God knows I don't want it to happen.
May it never happen.
But if it came to happen that you were to go to jail over this, and may it never happen, and we're fighting to make sure it doesn't happen, in a way that would be a tremendous moment that I believe would galvanize Canadians for freedom.
I don't want it to happen.
Let me say that a fourth time.
But if it happened, good things ironically would come from it.
Yeah, I think that's sort of part of our Alberta DNA, you being an Alberta expat in the center of the universe.
But, you know, we did speak to that Farmer for Justice.
Albertans have a long, long history of civil disobedience against bad laws, unconstitutional laws, and unfair laws.
It's part of who we are.
Whether Rachel Notley succeeded in undoing that over the last four years, that remains to be seen.
But I think that Albertans truly still believe in freedom, and they believe in making sacrifices for that freedom.
And they believe in getting behind people who are willing to make those sacrifices.
You know, I was speaking to some people at that event that you and I were both at the other day.
And they said to me, Sheila, we are with you because when they're done with you, and if you lose, then we are next.
So you're the first ditch.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Yeah.
Well, very powerful, very interesting.
I just want to say we're talking about Alberta because you're an Albertan.
I'm an expat Albertan.
We were in Alberta when we met that Farmer for Justice.
But I know that you have supporters from all across Canada.
And I've discovered that in my several years here in Toronto.
There are people here who care about freedom.
And in some ways, they're more on the front lines.
For quite a while, they were behind enemy lines in the battle of freedom.
When Kathleen Wynne was the premier, for example, there was a real, I mean, to be a conservative, to be for freedom in Ontario in some ways was more difficult than in Alberta.
So I do want to acknowledge we have supporters around Canada and even around the world and even around the world.
For folks who haven't chipped in yet, please do.
Please go to savesheila.com.
We're not ready to tell you all of the things we're working on legally because for strategic reasons we want to time some of that.
But I expect we will have news for you in about a week's time that will not only show you how we're fighting back and why our lawyers are billing us, but will also show you the abusive conduct of Rachel Notley's out-of-control appointees.
And I know you're thinking, why are you talking about Rachel Notley?
She's gone now.
Well, not her staff who she appointed and Jason Kenney has kept.
So I think we'll have news for you about a week on that.
All right, Sheila, it's great to talk with you.
I saw you in person the other day and I gave you my personal pledge that we would stand by you until the end.
And we will and I do so again.
And I just know so many of our viewers believe the same thing.
So thank you for being one in a million.
Thank you for fighting like so few would and we all rely on you and thank you for that.
Well and thank you to you and everybody at the Rebel for being behind me in this fight and thank you to everybody at home who sent their messages of support, have been financially supportive of the ordeal that I'm going through.
I just cannot express my gratitude enough.
Right on.
All right Sheila, well you take care of there.
You fight for Freedom Out West.
We'll cover Toronto and we'll get the whole country free before you know it.
Take care, my friend.
Great.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right.
There you have it.
Sheila Gunread fighting for freedom every day.
She lives it.
She lives it.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about Prince Harry promising only to have two kids because of global warming.
Keith writes, the way the UK is going, the current queen could very well be the last one.
Humor Under Attack00:03:02
Well, I hope that's not true.
I love the tradition, the history.
I love the fact that they are keepers of the Constitution.
I don't know.
There's something reassuring about it.
There's something limiting about it.
There's something that tamps down the madness of elected politics about it.
I hope not.
But what do you know?
I mean, we've been extremely lucky with Queen Elizabeth, would you agree?
John writes, it is probably a good thing they only want two children.
With parents like that, you would not want to place too many impressionable young children in that environment.
Yeah, I mean, it's just sad, though.
I mean, I see all these lefty deep think articles in junk websites about birth strike, why I'm not going to have babies because of the globe.
And my reflex is good.
I'm glad you are taking yourself out of the gene pool.
But I don't really mean that, actually, because although, you know, they're only condemning themselves, they're actually condemning their own future because of a foolish fad.
And I am absolutely certain that 5, 10, 20 years from now when they're alone in their house in Brooklyn eating an avocado toast with their cats, that they will be very sad about it.
I'm absolutely certain of it.
Those things sound more like a child's tantrum than a thoughtful think.
On my interview with Count Dankula, Paul writes, humor is dead on the left.
They want to kill it everywhere.
When your goal is to destroy freedom, I guess humor won't be your thing.
Well, who was it who said that every joke is a little revolution?
I think that was Orwell.
Or you could look at it on the other side.
I think it was Ayatollah Khomeini who said there is no joking in Islam.
Well, of course not.
Solzhenitsyn, I think I've told you this before.
You know, he was sent to the gulag because in a private letter, he wrote a little joke.
It wasn't even that big or that funny.
He called Stalin the Whiskered One.
Like, that's not even really a joke.
That's like a nickname, the whiskered one, because he had a bushy mustache.
Sent to the gulag for that?
Yeah, yeah.
Welcome to authoritarianism.
You're not allowed to make fun of certain things.
You know, listen, I'm sensitive to anti-Semitic or Holocaust jokes.
Of course I am.
But I agree.
First of all, I know Count Dankula enough from our various conversations to know he's absolutely not anti-Semitic or a Nazi.
That's absurd.
I also know, even though I've never met his dog, that his dog is not a Nazi either, because I am aware of the fact that dogs cannot be Nazis.
Just like they can't be veg, vegans, or transgender, that's probably a projection of their owners.
I also know that it's possible to make jokes about dark things.
Anyone who's heard of the show called Hogan's Heroes knows that there was a whole comedy set inside a German POW camp in Nazi Germany.
You can make jokes about it.
You can, folks.
All right, that's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.