Ezra Levant and Joel Pollwick expose CBC and CTV’s partisan polls—one retracting a 2019 Manitoba "dead heat" claim after Converso’s data error, the other pushing Doug Ford’s corruption narrative via Corbett Communications’ biased polling—while critiquing liberal media’s selective fact-checking. Levant links this to anti-Israel sentiment among progressive Jews, like Ilhan Omar, and "self-hating whites" rejecting their heritage over perceived privilege, contrasting Israel’s success with surrounding nations despite its alignment with progressive values. The episode argues that polls from left-leaning outlets are unreliable, reflecting a broader trend of moral posturing over factual accuracy. [Automatically generated summary]
Maybe you caught them, but I wonder if you did, because the usual fact check media critics, well, they're silent because the fake news came from the left.
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Here's today's podcast.
Tonight, the CBC publishes a fake news poll as political propaganda and then covers its tracks.
Hey, where are all those fact checkers now?
It's August 21st, and this is the Ezra 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.
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Oh boy, did the CBC screw up the other day.
Huge factual error.
Clear attempt to interfere with an election.
Disinformation, meddling, fake news, the sort of things they accuse others of doing.
The CBC has a series they call fact check.
By the way, they make this habit of checking other people's facts.
I wish they would check their own.
It's a sly move, this whole fact-check business, because it pretends that they're a referee, not a player in the ongoing game of political persuasion and manipulation.
Imagine the chutzpah of a government journalist at the CBC State Broadcaster setting himself up as an arbiter of what's true or not.
And yeah, it's exactly what you think it is.
Fact check.
Andrew Scheer, Torx study in claim about the new NAFTA deal by Jonathan Gatehouse.
Conservative leaders' interpretation, not accurate, says Economist.
Fact check!
Why Andrew Scheer's climate plan won't hit Canada's Paris targets by Jonathan Gatehouse.
Fact check!
Maxime Bernier's false claim about Canada's subsidized immigrants by Jonathan Gatehouse.
Yeah, I'm starting to see a trend here by fact check.
The CBC really means liberal war room talking points, going out and discrediting the enemies of Justin Trudeau by trying to dig up some economist somewhere who disagrees with a conservative and calling that a fact check.
That ain't fact checking.
That's just arguing.
This is fine.
That's being a player in the game while pretending you're a referee.
You ain't.
I'll tell you about the CBC's fact-checking error in a moment.
But seriously, I mean, isn't every journalist a fact-checker?
I mean, I check my facts, and I try to show you that by putting on the screen my primary sources for things.
I just showed you three pictures of the fact-check on the CBC's website.
So you can check my facts in real time.
I hope.
Sometimes I just show you a headline, sometimes a chart, sometimes a video clip of someone saying something or showing something.
That's the fun of TV.
As you talk, you can provide little factual proof points online.
Websites can link to an underlying fact.
Newspapers are a bit different.
You have to take their word for it that they quoted someone accurately.
Of course, they can show pictures in a newspaper.
My point is, what is a journalist who says they're a fact-checker?
Well, it's just a critic, really.
I mean, half of the journalism I do is checking the facts on someone else.
Justin Trudeau say, I often check the facts on leftist media like the CBC say.
Aren't we all fact checkers and don't we sometimes disagree on which facts are facts?
And that's the fun of it.
That's the freedom of it.
I mean, the liberals say the conservatives have their facts wrong and vice versa.
And in the end, we need an election to sort it all out.
As in, there's no definitive answer sometimes because what's so often being argued about is opinion and interpretation.
So if the CBC fact-checks me, they're probably just giving their opinion on my politics and vice versa.
Usually our facts are right.
It's the opinions we quarrel with.
So let's fact-check the government journalists at Trudeau's CBC state broadcaster just for a second.
The ones who have so much to say about conservatives.
Oh, and they love calling conservative media fake news, don't they?
Well, let's look at this.
You see this tweet?
NDP and PCs in dead heat heading into Manitoba election, poll suggests.
Whoa, is that true?
An incumbent conservative premier on the ropes and the rump NDP, those losers, a party led by a leader who is, shall we say, a bit physical when it comes to the lady folk.
Yeah, call me a skeptic that they're tied in the polls.
Let me quote, despite leading in the polls since their election in 2016, Brian Paliser's progressive conservatives have fallen into a dead heat with Wab Canoe's NDP right at the beginning of the 2019 provincial election, reads the report out Friday from polling firm Converso.
Wow, it's a dead heat, eh?
Let me read some more.
Converso.
Poll placed PCs at 31%, NDP at 30%, Liberals at 11%, Greens at 6%, on the side of 15%.
Converso.
The name you know in polls.
Converso.
The name you trust.
I mean, it's got to be true.
Converso.
We all know Converso polls.
I mean, come on, Converso.
Yeah, no, it was fake.
Fake news by a pollster that, well, no one seems to have heard of before.
I mean, that's cool.
Even Gallup polls had their first poll once.
They were new once.
But to run a screaming headline that the Tories were doomed and the NDP were in the lead by Converso, a polling company no one seemed to have heard of.
Some people might be skeptical.
Might think that's fake news because it was.
The very next day, Converso.
The pollster in question, they admitted that they got their numbers wrong.
Whoopsies.
And so the CBC sheepishly changed their headline.
Look at what they changed it to.
The day later.
Pollster says there's a data issue with survey suggesting Manitoba PCs and NDP are in a dead heat.
That's their second headline.
They deleted their first headline.
The original one was what I showed you in the tweet.
NDP and PCs in dead heat heading into Manitoba election, poll suggests.
Pollster says there's a data issue.
Yeah, that's the CBC state broadcaster trying to cover their tracks, trying to hide the fact that they were in on it.
They ran with it.
They absolutely repeated and magnified the fake poll at a time of maximum impact.
And now they're saying, oh, yeah, you know that pollster guy?
Converso.
He says there's a data issue.
I'm sure there was a data issue, but there's a fake news issue, and that's the state broadcasters problem, isn't it?
They so lusted for this story, they didn't bother to check it because it was too good to check.
They just really want to believe that the NDP is about to come back and the Manitobans love the carbon tax and the Tories are done.
Yeah, no.
But sorry to ask.
I mean, I don't mean to be a stickler, but where's Jonathan Gatehouse's fact check?
Where are the self-righteous media critics and fact checker?
Where Snopes?
That left-wing fact-checking site, they're so awful.
You know, there are some satirical sites on the internet, good for some laughs.
The other day I showed you a quick clip from The Onion.
Well, there's a slightly Christian satirical site called the Babylon Bee.
It's pretty funny, you know?
But you know it's a parody, right?
Like humor.
They make jokes.
You know, this one's a joke, right?
You know, I mean, that's a joke, right?
You can tell that.
Well, Snopes, the left-wing fact-checker, hates the fact that people click on these funny conservative Christian jokes.
And so Snopes have literally taken to fact-checking the Babylon Bee.
Stories published by the Babylon B are amongst the most shared factually inaccurate content in almost every survey of this research.
Ah, yeah, mate, they're sharing jokes.
They know they're jokes.
You know they're jokes.
Look at this one.
Portland police.
We wish there were some kind of organized armed force that could fight back against anti-fun.
Now, you know that's a joke.
It's funny because real life is absurd as a joke these days.
That's where the laughs come in.
I don't think anyone actually believed the Portland police said that, but Snopes is literally fact-checking those jokes out.
Hey, I just flew in from Toronto and boy are my arms tired.
Fact check.
Actually, no, you didn't fly in with your own arms.
You flew in on a plane.
Yeah, that's a joke, buddy.
I love this response.
Snopes rates Babylon Bee world's most accurate news source.
That's a joke, but I'm guessing Snopes fact-checked that one too.
Hey, guys, maybe we can get Snopes to fact-check Star Wars or the Superman movies, because those didn't quite seem right to me.
I suppose it's easier than say fact-checking whether or not, oh, I don't know, Jeffrey Epstein, that pedophile financier, actually killed himself in prison.
You know, something we could actually use a good fact-check on.
You keep going after the Babylon Bee.
So the CBC ran a fake news poll, and when it was revealed to be fake news, they faked their own headline by pretending it was different.
They changed it to pretend they knew all along it was fake, and they blamed the pollster.
And yes, he deserved blame for the poll, but they were the fools who ran with it because they love what it said too much to check.
Fake, fake, fakeety, fake.
But look at this.
Right after the bombshell last week about Justin Trudeau being convicted of breaking the Conflict of Interest Act for pressuring the Attorney General to drop criminal charges against his friends at SNC Laveland, like that, that's a huge story.
Look at the poll that CTV released about corruption of Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford.
Exclusive!
New poll suggests voters haven't forgotten about patronage appointment scandal.
Huh?
More.
The poll given exclusively to CTV News Toronto shows 56% of respondents perceive the Doug Ford government as being corrupt.
Hey guys, it's an exclusive.
The poll was given exclusively to CTV, so they didn't actually commission it.
They just, you know, are running with it.
Someone gave it to them like the CBC ran with that Manitoba poll.
Also curiously timed, all these are time to change the subject away from Trudeau breaking the law.
Okay, fine, I'll bite.
Who is behind this weird poll that was given to the CTV?
Who gave it to them?
Well, let's read the story first.
Here's from the CTV story.
The corporate communications survey given exclusively to CTV News Toronto shows 56% of respondents perceive the Doug Ford government as being corrupt, while 62% believe too many cronies of the Premier have jobs in government.
Now, first of all, don't you wish someone might have actually asked these questions about Justin Trudeau the day after he was convicted of breaking the law for corruption?
That would be a great fact check.
Let's check the facts to see what they are.
Did Trudeau really do nothing wrong?
As he continues to claim, what do the public think?
We can't ask that, though.
So who commissioned this poll?
Who?
Was it that same no-name pollster in Manitoba, Converso, that was too good to check?
No, no, no.
It was Corbett Communications run by this guy, John Corbett.
And he's got a lot to say.
He says, I'm a pollster.
I'm a professional.
I've been doing it for 35 years.
I'm supposed to be opinion-free and unbiased, but I will no longer listen to lies and call them something else.
Andrew Scheer is lying to Canadians.
He is breeding discord and hate just for votes.
Yeah, John, those are the things you put in your diary.
You don't tell people those things.
If you are professional, you don't say crazy things like that.
Non-biased professional independent, just the facts.
Yeah.
You're a bit off, mate.
Not just crazy in a neutral way, like, I don't know, you believe in aliens.
You're partisan crazy.
You're extremely biased about politics.
You're a little bit mad, I think, which is exactly the one thing the public expects you to be neutral on, or at least fair on.
But hey, just keep pretending that the fake news is on the right or on the independent side of the media.
Fake poll on CBC, fake poll on CTV.
Not a peep from the fact checkers.
It's almost like they're part of an agenda.
It's almost like Justin Trudeau is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the media bailout to rent these journalists and their pollsters during the election.
Jewish Donors and Political Agenda00:16:01
Stay with us for more.
Last year, the Netanyahu government refused entry to American citizen Catherine Frank and my friend, Vince Warren, who had arrived on a human rights mission.
All of these actions have nothing to do nothing to bring us closer to peace.
In fact, they do the opposite.
They maintain the occupation and prevent a solution to the conflict.
Fortunately, we in the United States have a constructive role to play.
We give Israel more than $3 million in aid every year.
This is predicated on their being an important ally in the region and the only democracy in the Middle East.
But denying visit to duly elected members of Congress is not consistent with being an ally.
And denying millions of people freedom of movement or expression or self-determination is not consistent with being a democracy.
Well, she couldn't be clearer.
Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar does not believe that Israel is an ally or a democracy.
And she believes that its treatment of Palestinians is an occupation.
I present to you the face of the Democratic Party in the United States, quite recognizable to those of us who have observed parties of the left in Europe be colonized by a combination of hardcore left-wingers and Islamists.
You see this everywhere, especially in Jeremy Corbyn's Labor Party.
Joining us now to talk about this unfortunate change in the U.S. Democratic Party is our friend Joel Pollwick, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Joel, nice to see you again.
Nice to see you too.
You know, in some ways, the kookiest politician in the room, it's like a reality TV show.
Whoever says the kookiest thing often gets the camera time.
You see that with outbursts in the Republican Party too.
The difference is when there's an outburst in the Republican Party, rogue candidates saying embarrassing things, the party rushes to condemn them.
Sometimes they're thrown out if possible.
They're fired from positions on committees.
I think of Steve King, who's made a few comments that can be interpreted in different ways.
He's been shunned by his own party.
The Democrats have done the opposite.
They haven't shunned Ilhan Omar.
They've made her a star.
Yeah, they've made her a star because she is a useful symbol to Democrats of a number of different constituencies.
She's the first Muslim woman in Congress, along with Rashida Talib.
She's also African American, and she is also an immigrant.
So the ability of her campaign, I suppose, in 2018 and now her congressional office to play that identity politics game has, in a sense, shielded her from criticism.
You'll note, for example, that when she and Rashida Tlaib complained that they were excluded from entering Israel, they keep mentioning that they are Muslim women, as if that were the reason they were excluded.
Of course, that's not the reason.
Israel has let something like 70,000 Muslims into the country to visit or whatever in recent months.
I forget if it was months or years, whatever it was, but there was an interesting figure on the internet from a reliable source, a guy named Abhi Meyer, who's worked in the Israeli government before and now works for the American Jewish Committee.
But there's no doubt that Israel allows Muslims into the country.
Israel is essentially almost 20% Muslim.
What she's doing is distracting from the fact that it's her policy, her support for boycotting Israel, that's the reason she was excluded.
And I think the key fact about that is not only that Ilan Omar supports a boycott of Israel, the BDS movement, but that she ran explicitly in 2018 on a promise not to support BDS, on a promise not to support boycotts of Israel.
You can even Google video of her telling her constituents, her would-be constituents, that she finds boycotts to be counterproductive and would not be conducive to peace.
So she ran on that understanding, and once she was elected, she decided to throw her office behind this idea of a boycott, even though it is really not even a 5% position among the American electorate or among congressional representatives of the country as a whole.
Boycotting Israel basically was soundly defeated in the House of Representatives.
The Democratic controlled House of Representatives by something like 398 to 17.
So she actually represents a very, very marginal minority.
So to protect the, if I can say this, the idiocy of her point of view, she hides behind identity politics.
Right.
Now, I think that's a good critique of Ilhan Omar.
For example, with Rashid Atlaib, it's worth noting that when she said, look, can you give me a humanitarian exemption to go visit my grandma, the Israeli government said, well, okay.
And then she said, well, I'm not going to accept that because I don't want to appear to be a beggar.
It was a very strange excuse.
She preferred the ability to lecture Israel than to visit her own grandma.
Let's put aside those facts of the particulars of what they're arguing.
To me, I mean, the Democratic Party was historically the party of the Jewish vote, just like the Liberal Party in Canada, and I would even say the Labour Party to a large degree in the UK.
Parties are the left.
And in fact, to this day, many high-ranking elected officials in the Democrats, party officials, fundraisers.
I mean, I don't know what the ethnic breakdown is, but it wouldn't shock me if a quarter of all the donations in the Democratic Party were Jewish donations.
It just wouldn't shock me at all.
The biggest donors, for sure, Chaim Saban, Even George Soros, though he wouldn't call himself a Jew, he sort of doesn't like Jews.
Huge donors.
Why hasn't the residual Jewish membership of the party, the Jewish membership that might have properly felt at home 10, 15 years ago, why haven't they said a word about this?
In the UK, Joel, you slowly see Jews in the Corbyn Labor Party saying, I've had enough, I can't, this is no longer the party for me.
Where are the American Jews and the Democrats, Democratic Party, saying, I'm sorry, we've got to fix a problem here?
Well, I think what's interesting is that if you talk to some of the Jewish people who remain on the left, I actually had the opportunity to meet a young Jewish woman from the Labour Party in the UK when I was in Poland earlier this year, and she had not joined the Jewish members of the Labour Party who had left, even though she was deeply critical of Corbyn and admitted that many of his policies were, in effect, anti-Semitic.
And I asked her why she didn't leave.
And I think there is a mental block for people who have become conditioned to seeing conservatives as the enemy and conditioned to seeing Labor Party members or Democratic Party members or the left in general as being on the right side of history, being on the side of the underdog, being on the side of the poor, the weak, the oppressed, essentially being morally correct.
It's very difficult for them to make a shift even when the leadership of that party is against them, is profoundly anti-Semitic, or at least tolerant of anti-Semitism.
And I think also for donors to the Democratic Party, you also have to understand that the nature of ethnic politics, certainly from the Jewish perspective, has changed over the last half century.
It used to be that the Democratic Party was almost like a mutual agreement between various different ethnic groups to pursue each other's interests, a kind of intersectional agreement, if you want to put it that way, where Jewish representatives would essentially convince African Americans to be pro-Israel, and African Americans would convince Jewish representatives to support affirmative action and spending in cities on social programs and things like that, which they wanted to do anyway.
But there was almost a support for each other's causes.
And the rise of the anti-Israel movement and the pro-Palestinian cause and the emergence of Muslim Americans and the Muslim vote as its own unique constituency has really complicated that because it's very hard to fit those two groups together, pro-Israel Jews and anti-Israel Muslims, together under that old umbrella.
And that also dovetails with the emergence of some radical elements in the black community as well in the late 60s, early 70s, which did complicate relations with the Jewish community, talking about not just groups like Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, but others like it, which took a third world perspective and adopted the line that many of the newly decolonized African nations were taking toward Israel, which of course was being pushed by the Soviets, which was anti-Israel.
So there was always a little bit of tension emerging, but with the arrival of this new community, this new constituency, it became very difficult.
And so what many Jews have done, and pardon me while I wave these energy efficient lives back, lights back on, you know, they made us install these things, I suppose, to save the climate or something, but they make work impossible.
The mentality of many of the supporters of the Democratic Party who come from the Jewish community is not that they're pursuing interests that are of interest or that are central to Jewish identity or what Jews are all about.
The new logic is essentially we want to be part of, number one, doing the right thing.
We want to be seen to do the right thing.
So some of it is virtue signaling.
And the other is also, and this is very profoundly, deeply rooted, I think, in the Jewish immigrant psyche, but the idea that our success somehow in the West, our new success, because Jews were discriminated against for a long time and excluded and forced to live in ghettos and forbidden from owning land and joining professions and going to university.
Even in the United States, there were quotas on Jewish attendance at Harvard and things like that.
There's a kind of nervousness about Jewish success.
There's a nervousness that if we are too visibly successful, then we become a target.
And I think that that's a perspective that is broadly shared, even if it's somewhat unconscious, within the Jewish community.
And so supporting the underdog, supporting redistribution, supporting causes other than our own, is actually seen as almost an insurance policy.
It's a way to assuage that insecurity.
And that's why Jews, I think, are one of the few groups that actually seems to regard our own interests as lying in fighting our own interests.
In other words, the ultimate act of Jewish moral expression, we're told by Jews on the left, is essentially Jewish self-negation.
Someone stood up at a Bernie Sanders town hall I was covering the other day, a Jewish woman who said that she believed the highest moral virtue in Judaism was to oppose Israel.
That's not such a strange view to hear anymore on the Jewish left.
That is what they believe.
And it's because the success of Israel makes them nervous.
They don't want to be cast as privileged.
They don't want to be cast as successful.
They don't want to be cast as having something others do not.
And that puts them on the wrong side of the moral scale that has emerged as the basis of intersectionality in the Democratic Party.
So there's a kind of self-preservation almost that's at work in the minds, I think, of many Jewish donors.
Meanwhile, of course, they've left the actual interest of the Jewish community far behind.
That is to say, the actual continuity of the Jewish community.
Many of these Jewish donors to the Democratic Party would think nothing of spending millions of dollars on a super PAC for a Democratic candidate, but would not spend money on Jewish education.
I'm not speaking about all of them, but there are some.
They would not spend money on the education necessary to ensure that the next generation of Jewish people knows what Judaism is all about.
We don't have very wealthy synagogues and so forth.
We don't have a sort of centuries-old institution like the church that will, and even that's not looking so good lately, but we don't have these institutions that stand forever.
I mean, synagogues are very vulnerable and often flimsy institutions.
They rise and fall.
They move around.
The essence of Jewish continuity is essentially education, but education is woefully underfunded in the Jewish community.
And so that's essentially what's happening, is that people are, in their own minds, expressing Jewish values by donating to the underdog.
They're also, in a sense, protecting themselves from being targets for their success, financial, professional, and otherwise.
But meanwhile, neglecting the essence, I think, of what it means to be Jewish.
And that's where you have conservative Jews basically saying, I don't mean conservative in the religious sense, I mean politically, saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, if we're actually talking about the interests of the Jewish community, which are not completely congruent with, but overlap with, the interests of the state of Israel, we do need to have a strong and secure Israel because it's the final place of refuge for Jews to go if things go badly, and because it is our spiritual homeland.
We're patriots of the countries in which we live, Canada, the United States, and so on.
But we do face East when we pray, we pray to Jerusalem, and we care about the welfare of Jewish people in Israel.
Israel is central to our faith, and so we want it to be safe and secure.
And that is essential to Jewish continuity.
And I think that is something the conservative Jews basically weigh more heavily than these other factors.
I think if you had to divide liberal and conservative Jews, it's that liberal Jews believe that the threat to Jewish continuity comes from without, comes from attacks either from the left or the right.
And conservative Jews believe that the ultimate challenge is within, that the major threat to Jewish continuity is not so much without, but really is the failure to transmit values from one generation to the next, which is why I think that conservative Jews tend to support Republicans in this country, because Republicans share traditional values and also believe in a strong and secure Israel.
So that's a lot of words for you there, Ezra, but I think that really is what's happening.
Yeah, you know, I mean, what you said is very interesting to me because I'm conservative and Jewish, but for our viewers who are not Jewish, I think everything you said there applies to the new vogue on the left of self-hating whites or old-stock Canadians, old stock Americans.
Not a day goes by where you don't see some celebrity say, I'm ashamed to be white.
I hate being white.
And I'm not a white supremacist in any way.
I mean, I think many white supremacists don't even think Jews are technically white.
But that same self-loathing that you described in the left-wing Jewish community, I see it with people who are old-stock Canadians, old-stock Brits, old stock Americans, and by that I mean typically white, who are ashamed of their success, feel guilty for their success, have been convinced that success must be because they exploited someone else.
And they've bought the line of white, in a way they've bought into this line of white supremacy by saying, yeah, I must have my power because I'm white, so I hate that part about me.
I guess what I'm saying is the way you just described self-loathing Jews of the left, I see the same thing in self-loathing non-Jews of the left who feel that to prove their moral worth, they have to undermine any Western tradition or heritage or culture or religion or anything like that.
I just think it's a shame.
White Liberals' Privilege00:07:29
And I think it's a result of too much ease, too much luxury, too much free time, not enough hardship.
And so we throw things away too casually that actually took an enormous time and effort to win.
Yeah, I think that's true.
I think this indulgence in the idea of white privilege is something you can only do when you're comfortable enough to do it.
I mean, I often joke also in a similar fashion that I'd be a socialist if I could afford it.
This sort of thinking of redistribution and so forth is of some benefit to people who have enough that they wish to protect by in a sense buying off the opposition through their virtue signaling.
But for those who may be white but who are poor, it's of no use whatsoever because you're not benefiting from whatever white privilege exists.
And you basically have the same struggle as everybody else does, except you have one strike against you, which is that you cannot benefit from affirmative action.
You can't benefit from a presumption that your success indicates success for a broader group of people.
And so you're right.
To some extent, that mentality is born of comfort.
But I also think it's born of a kind of inherent logic in democracy.
And this is something that Alexis de Tocqueville warned about 200 years ago when he wrote Democracy in America, which is that with increasing social equality, every small distinction becomes intolerable.
And he foresaw this 200 years ago, that as social conditions become more and more equal, people start to resent what few inequalities do exist.
And we live now in an essentially egalitarian society.
The difference, of course, is that there are mega-wealthy people who have done very well.
And they will continue to do well because the best way to make money is to have money.
They have money to invest in new companies.
They're the ones who buy real estate, and so they tend to do very well.
There's not a lot of downward mobility among the super rich.
So you are seeing a lot of very wealthy people emerge.
But poor people are no longer experiencing poverty as the same sort of phenomenon it was before.
Victor Davis Hansen has written about this during the depths of the recession, going into a community that was impoverished in California and watching people who are technically below the poverty line put their EBT card, their electronic benefit transfer card, through the credit card reader and taking home consumer goods from the store and things like that, driving pickup trucks.
You know, the experience of poverty is different because our system of redistribution is actually successful.
And so poverty is not experienced in quite the same way before.
We have a more equal society.
The lives of rich and poor are no longer as different, especially in the age of mobile phones.
I mean, the homeless people in LA, and I'm surrounded by them because we have 60,000 of them, homeless people in LA have smartphones.
That means that essentially the way they're experiencing life is not terribly different.
I don't want to exaggerate the similarities.
I have a nice bed to sleep in.
I know where my next meal is coming from.
And I'm very grateful for that.
But essentially, there's a narrowing of the gap in terms of how life is experienced.
And poor people are experiencing a better quality of life than they once did in being poor.
I'm not saying it's easy to be poor, but it's certainly not as difficult as it once was.
And as a result of increasing social equality, small inequalities become intolerable to us.
And what's happened is that the new moral calculus politically as a result of that is that if you have more, you are inherently under some kind of suspicion.
You are higher on the scale of privilege.
And so white liberals tend to feel very keenly that they are, in a sense, in the wrong.
They are on the wrong side of this scale.
They feel that they benefit from their skin.
They benefit, in many cases, from being wealthy.
And as a result, they have this problem to overcome.
There's a great piece about it by a guy named Zach Goldberg, who's a PhD student, who wrote a piece at Tablet magazine called America's White Saviors.
And he writes about how white liberals are the only population group in society that care more about people outside the group than they do about people inside the group.
In other words, it's sort of a natural human thing to care about people who are like you and to want them to benefit, but white liberals do not.
And it's not just altruism.
It may, in a sense, be a form of self-preservation because there's a realization that if you are perceived as having some kind of privilege, the way to defend yourself from any negative action is to renounce that privilege.
So the act of renunciation is perceived as a form of political and social survival.
It's not just goodwill, although for many people it probably feels that way.
It's also a way of surviving.
And I think Jews felt this first because as this moral scale was coming into being, Jews were the most vulnerable.
Number one, because we're just a small minority group, most of whose members in the West happen to be white or light-skinned, although Israel, of course, is a country of many colors.
But the other reason is that Israel is such a stark success compared to the countries it's surrounded by.
And so the illogic of privilege, of success equaling moral suspicion, that was applied to Israel very early on, almost two decades ago, with the start of the Second Intifada.
The reason the left almost axiomatically embraces the Palestinian cause and rejects Israel, even though Israel is a tiny liberal democracy that upholds everything else the left likes, like gay marriage and transgender rights and that sort of thing.
The reason they reject Israel is that Israel is successful in contrast to the other countries around it.
And Obama said it best when he went to Israel in 2013.
He said, it's not fair that the Palestinians don't have a state.
Well, of course it's fair.
Israel and the Palestinians got a state at the same time from the United Nations.
It's just that Israel built their state and the Palestinians didn't.
So you might look at that and say it's completely fair.
They have the same chance to do it.
Israel decided to take that opportunity.
The Palestinians didn't.
The outcome is what's fair.
But what Obama and others on the left do is they look at the outcome and they say, well, some have and others don't.
That means that those who have have an unfair advantage over those who don't.
They don't look at how that advantage was created, even though it was created justly.
They see it as an injustice.
That's the whole notion of social justice.
It's a form of leveling.
Social justice is really just another word for making people absolutely equal in every way.
And so these little distinctions of success and talent and hard work, in a perverse way, they now appear to us as immoral, as the benefits of unjust privilege.
And so I think what you're seeing among Jews is also, as you point out, reflected among, as you say, old stock white liberals, people who do have some claim to privilege simply by virtue of their longevity in one place.
There's nothing really to be ashamed of about that.
No individual who can trace their family back two or three hundred years in Canada or the United States has anything to apologize for.
They may have a few extra things to inherit and they may have a heritage and so forth.
And they're ashamed of it in a sense.
There's a sense of shame attached to it because it is something they have others don't, even though it's just by accident of birth.
And the way to resolve that privilege in their minds is to renounce it.
So the way that you basically make your own life easier is to renounce whatever privileges you may have been born with.
And that's what's going on.
It is a similar process to what's happening in the Jewish community.
You're just seeing it much more acutely because Jews as a minority group, even though most are part of the white majority group, feel the pressure particularly keenly.
Well, Joel, always an education to talk with you.
Thank you so much for giving us so much of your time today.
Yeah, sorry for being so long-winded.
Hey, What Do You Think?00:01:04
No, no, it's very interesting.
And you've given me too many things to think about.
I tell you, we live in very strange days.
Thanks for being with us and helping guide us through it.
Yeah, sure.
You're welcome.
All right.
There's our friend Joel Pollack, Sr., editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, what do you think about those polls I showed you in CBC and CTV?
You know, anyone can be a pollster, I guess, just, you know, these days with online or automatic phone call surveys.
And I don't begrudge startups.
I mean, we're a startup here, but the absolute baloney of John Corbett being a crazy conservative derangement syndrome guy and the CBC just faking it.
You know, I guess anyone can make a mistake, but only the left is so self-righteous and has fuck check.
No, no, no.
Heal yourself first, fellas, before checking the facts of others.