Gavin McInnes and Ezra Levant expose how leftist mobs—backed by groups like Antifa and the SPLC—silence conservatives, from McInnes’ deplatforming after a 2023 Manhattan speech mocking Japan’s 1960s political violence to his nine-year prison threat for defending himself against Antifa attackers. Levant contrasts 2006’s free-speech solidarity over Mohammed cartoons with today’s media hostility, driven by university-educated activists enforcing ideological conformity. McInnes calls out conservative capitulation (e.g., Hannity’s retreat) while praising Dave Chappelle’s Netflix defiance as a cultural tipping point. Their fight for FreeSpeech.tv underscores the battle against corporate and institutional censorship, proving resistance demands relentless defiance. [Automatically generated summary]
It's September 2nd, 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 published it.
is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Well, one of my favorite guys is Gavin McInnes.
So funny, but not just funny for funny sake.
He makes a point, and because he uses humor, he has a much wider audience than boring blah, blah, blahers that just talk about policy.
And he was a big hit with the Rebel for years.
At the end of his tenure with us, he had hundreds of videos, many of which had more than 1 million views.
Now, he was such a success, and we're so proud of that, that he was hired away from us.
It happens sometimes.
We simply couldn't compete with the financial offer made to him by CRTV, an American-based, paywalled conservative site.
He went down there, and he was doing shows.
They're a little different than the shows for us.
No swearing allowed down there.
But then suddenly, he was let go from CR-TV and a series of deplatformings happened to our friend Gavin.
He was pushed out of social media and he was, at least there was an attempt to marginalize him.
I'm in New York today to meet up with my old friend to catch up and talk about this phenomenon of leftists who no longer want to debate.
They don't even want to joke.
They want to silence, censor, and deplatform.
And Gavin joined us on.
Great to see you again, my friend.
Good to see you.
Well, thanks for your time.
I don't want to tell you how to do your job, but in the intro, you said so funny, and then there was nothing after that.
Like, you mean so funny that you forgot to laugh?
Like, usually so funny is followed by.
Gavin is, I laughed and laughed until I stopped.
So funny that I laughed and laughed until I stopped.
Yeah, that's fine.
That's right in editing, I guess.
You really helped build the Rebel in a number of ways.
I want to tell you that.
I think you know that.
You helped us reach beyond guys like me who came up through politics.
You made me famous, unfortunately, which I don't like.
Weren't you famous before?
I mean, you started to start.
I was never recognized before Rebel.
Well, I mean, you did hundreds of videos, and you were the star of all the videos, so I guess you became famous.
No.
Yeah, I did hundreds of videos for you, you mean?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, before that, I did some comedy sketches.
I get recognized maybe once a week.
After the Rebel videos blew up, I am stopped by millennials, mostly white millennial men, five times a day.
And they all want a selfie, which is infuriating, because what are you doing with that selfie?
Like, we're not friends.
It's a moment that they can use as a news peg to tell their friends.
I saw Gavin looking at it.
It's so like with the Aboriginals where they thought I was going to steal your soul.
They're trying to steal my soul.
They want to remember the moment, and they want to- Stupid moment.
We're not having a moment.
They're proud of you.
They're turning me into Larry David.
They're proud of bumping in you.
They want to brag about it.
It's a way of slapping into your momentum.
I pose like this and they put their arm around me.
I can feel their arms shaking.
You've made me into like Celine Dion.
You know what?
99.9% of people would love to have that place of esteem and fame.
Oh, it sucks.
It's so pedantic.
It's so tedious.
They say the same thing every time.
Hey, I just watched one of your videos.
Yeah, I figured.
I saw the count number.
It's pretty high.
Well, that's what pays your bills and to a lesser degree, my best.
Yeah, this is where we differ.
Because you will tolerate, you suffer fools gladly.
I don't want them around me.
I don't like fans.
When they're gone, you'll miss them.
Yeah, you're probably right.
It's like cat calling.
It's really irritating, and then the day it stops, you're like, hello!
Yeah, it's like, what are these?
Chopped liver!
It's like, you know, when you're young, you hate being ID'd, ask for ID'd at a bar or a liquor store.
And when you're only saying, no, no, I know.
No, let me show you my ID.
No, no, no.
I know.
I was going to a bar once with these two younger girls that were working for me.
And he asked for ID, and I go, well, I suppose you're going to.
And he goes, not you, you old as hell.
Well, listen, I mean, I want to tell you, and you probably know, and one of the fun things about YouTube, fun's the wrong word, but interesting, is that YouTube and Google know so much about everyone who's watching.
It's actually terrifying.
So as a video producer, we know on any individual video you do, how many people watch it, their age, their gender, their nationality, how many minutes they watch.
Like it's actually amazing and terrifying.
And you mentioned the young males.
You made our audience younger because you use humor and pop culture references.
And your power was that you use that humor in those pop culture references to push ideas that you didn't say, hello, I'm conservative.
I'm going to say something conservative now.
You just told a story or made a joke or did a sketch.
And people said, yeah, he's got a point there.
And they didn't even know it was called conservative.
Yeah, I think it's important to be honest.
And the key to honesty is you have to be brave enough to keep things interrogative and not know.
And the big problem with Fox News and a lot of right-wing and left-wing pundits is this is me.
Like I'm the jock.
So this is the jock perspective.
I'm the nerd.
So this is the nerd perspective.
I think it's important to treat truth like a scientist and go, here's what I've accrued as a hypothesis from the data.
But if you got something else, that's fine.
Like I remember as a young man, I used to think that Israel should go back to the borders of 1967.
And an Israeli said to me, what are you talking about?
People spilled blood for where the borders are today, in all borders.
People don't just rescind borders like it's nothing.
It's not a magical line in the sand that's irrelevant.
And I was like, you're right, I never thought of that.
I think you're not a real man unless you change your mind about something consequential once a year.
And I remember being at Fox News once and this black engineer, camera guy, we were walking together to get to Hannity or something.
And he said, yo, man, I got to say, I don't agree with a lot of your views, but I respect that you speak your mind.
And I said to him, what views?
Like, I don't have views.
I have what I believe to be true based on this.
Well, you have views.
Like what?
Well, you have views about masculine and feminine.
Yeah, but if you can disprove it, if you can prove that women are good at sports, I'll eat my hat.
If you can prove there's more than two genders and trans people aren't mentally ill-gays, I'm all ears.
You know, it was exciting for us because it was, you were speaking, I mean, profanity, it didn't bother me.
We had a little warning in the beginning.
Some of our older viewers, some of our more...
A lot of motherfuckers are complete cunts about profanity, though.
They will fuck your head in.
Like, they'll fuck it.
And my point about that is, that's the power of YouTube, is you don't have to, I mean, I remember when we started The Rebel, one of the things we were rebelling against were the rules of censorship.
And I was forced to apologize in Canada by something called the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.
Let me tell you a quick swearing story.
There's this company called Chiquita Banana.
It used to be called the United Fruit Company.
And it was a terrible company.
If you care about local democracy, workers' rights, it was the only company that had its own CIA code name, UniFruits.
And that's where the phrase banana republic came from.
Because Unifruit would come in, bribe every politician, bribe the cops, shoot.
Like, they literally were so powerful that they destroyed democracies and the rule of law.
That's where the phrase was.
They were fascists.
Banana.
They were.
And they had a working rapport with the CIA.
That's where we got the word Banana Republic.
Anyways, this company is now called Chiquita.
And one day they dared to defame the oil sense from Alberta where I'm originally from.
And they said, oh, it's unethical.
We're never going to use unethical oil from the oil sense.
And I thought, you're the Banana Republic corrupt unifruit company, and you're criticizing.
And by the way, Chiquita just paid a huge fine in the United States for financing terrorists in Colombia.
So it's not even ancient history.
Some of the worst terrorists you got outside of ISIS.
Yeah, and I don't even understand why they would.
So I was doing this rant at the Sun News Network about Chiquita Banana, and I was talking about some vice president who was Spanish, and I ended by saying, cinga tumadre, which is a swear in Spanish.
What does chinga mean?
Fuck your mother?
That's exactly what that means.
In Spanish.
Which is fine if you're saying it to your dad.
And there was a hearing at the Broadcast Standards Council, and I was convicted of being mean, not even of swearing.
It wasn't the swearing that bothered them.
It was I was mean to the vice president of the Chiquita Banana Company, and I was compelled to read a statement on air.
Now, the Sun News Network was pretty cool with it.
I read it, and then I mocked it, and I undid it, and I put, like, I physically did say the words in the apology, but I attacked it 10 times.
And in fact, the head of the Broadcast Standards Council called up the head of the Sun and said, if you guys don't want to be part of this process, just let us know.
You have to comply.
Anyhow, so part of the Rebel was rebelling against that regulation.
You say you have to comply.
Is this the actual Canadian legal system?
There's so many fake kangaroo courts in Canada.
Like, what would be the ramifications?
Would you go to jail?
I mean, to get technical, there's the broadcast regulator called the CRTC.
Yep.
And they said to the industry, we'll regulate you, or you can choose your own judges and have the Broadcast Standards Council, and you should do that.
So basically, the head of Global News called us up and said, if you don't want to be part of this Broadcast Standards Council, we'll send you to the real CRTC court.
You just let us know.
So it's terrible.
Oh, it's a terrible mess.
So that was one of the things we were rebelling against.
That was a very long story to say.
The fact that you swore, we put a little warning in the front of it, and it never bothered me because people could just click over it or click away from it.
But I think that irreverence and the fact that you took on sacred cows, I mean, you lived up to the name Rebel, and I think you really helped build it.
And I don't know if I ever told you that.
Maybe you always knew.
But you helped build the Rebel up and give us a shit with me?
No, I'm just telling you.
Proud Boys and the Fight Needed00:06:04
Okay.
This is professional.
It's totally professional.
Nothing sexual.
I'm taken.
I'm taking.
I am too.
So when you were hiding.
So you were hired.
And we had to talk about this.
And I tried to outbid a Nevada billionaire named Carrie Katz who hired you away, but I just couldn't.
There was no way we could outspend.
That's pretty close, though.
And I clearly should have gone with you because I was fired, what, a year after?
Well, and you were fired for being you.
Yeah, I think that they had a horrible experience.
This must just my theory.
They had a horrible experience with Mark Stein.
He sued them.
They became very risk averse.
And my life changed drastically on October 12th last year.
What happened October 12th?
I did a speech at the Manhattan Republican Club.
I've done speeches there before.
It's basically the only place I can do stand-up comedy.
Because as a Trump guy, you can't go to comedy clubs in New York.
And I mean that literally.
I cannot walk into a comedy club.
I'll be asked to leave.
There's a bar right down the street here called Strange Love where I cannot get a beer.
We should go there after.
I love tormenting them.
I put all their Yelp reviews full of people saying, Proud Boys official bar, and a great place for a MAGA guy to get a beer.
We've totally ruined their business.
That's funny.
But we should take selfies in there.
Oh, that's funny.
But so I just did my normal thing.
And, you know, the left is so fragile now that it's just fun to trigger them with this or say free helicopter rides for commies, which is a reference to Pinochet that makes them apoplectic.
So I read about four months before I had read that Otoya Yamaguchi was this 18-year-old student who assassinated the head of the Japan Socialist Party with the katana.
And he later killed himself in prison.
And I read that Japanese conservatives have these ceremonies for Otoya every year, which is clearly just to fuck with people, right?
And I thought, that'd be funny if we did that here.
And the fact that he's Japanese would screw up people's heads with the racist thing.
So we reenacted the assassination of this socialist.
Ryan played the Japanese guy.
He's half Japanese, doesn't know any Japanese.
So he's just like, and when you look it up on YouTube, it's in slow motion.
So I was like, with like a plastic katana.
And I had the almondized glasses.
You're not allowed to call them whatever.
And I had this, I bought a Japanese school uniform.
It took like four months to be shipped.
And it was like, and he's like, and then I did a talk that was pure comedy.
Oh my God.
It was like the comedy set in Tel Aviv.
And the funny thing about the left these days is all you have to do is talk about their beliefs.
And it's a comedy set.
Yeah.
So you're like, let me get this straight.
Cops are hunting black people for sport, just like on a hillside.
I got one.
Like you just say their beliefs and everyone's laughing their heads off.
And the audience, by the way, was gay, Jewish, black, white, old, young.
It was one of the most diverse groups you'd ever see in New York.
New York's very segregated.
Outside, everyone was screaming and yelling, Nazi, and they beat the sh, Antifa beat the crap out of this journalist, Paul Miller.
And three Antifa were arrested: Kai Russo, Caleb Perkins, Finn Bar Sloanum.
They got away with it, scot-free.
But the consequential thing about October 12th was it was right before the midterms.
And Chadwick Moore had just started this hashtag called Jobs Not Mobs.
And the left was getting known as Unhinged.
So they desperately needed right-wing violence to obfuscate that narrative.
And they needed a fight that night.
They needed Proud Boys to get into a fight.
And actually, one of the guys said, Look, we know they're looking for a photo op.
Let's bring pillows tonight.
So if there's a fight, they'll have us pillow fighting Antifa.
And they brought pillows.
But the night ended.
Pillows stayed at the Manhattan Club.
And the mob was there.
The Antifa were arrested.
The Antifa were sent away.
They circled the block, ambushed Proud Boys.
Proud Boys happily beat them up.
And they just got found guilty a year later now, almost for too happily beating them up, for defending themselves with too much enthusiasm.
And they're facing nine years in prison.
The three Antifa, it was three of 10, by the way, the three Antifa who were arrested for beating mercilessly a journalist and taking his equipment got away scot-free.
Probation, no criminal record, no media attention, nothing.
The guys who defended themselves, nine years in prison.
And anyway, since that day, there was this huge onslaught that de Blasio, the attorney general, the governor, Cuomo, they all said, hate is not welcome here.
The narrative became, I started a hate group that roams the streets and just beats up Muslims and gays and trannies.
They postered my kids' school.
They vandalized my car.
They left notes in my door.
They've planned a vigil in front of my house that I managed to sabotage.
I mean, I was banned from bars.
I could tell you a million stories about the past year.
And I noticed the common thread was, oh, I was banned from PayPal, Instagram.
My face, my actual face is banned from Instagram.
Post a picture of a picture of myself that I use a lot with a fake mug shot.
Post that picture on Instagram, it'll be taken down.
Or if you say on Facebook, I don't know, Proud Boys, they don't seem that racist to me.
Aren't there a lot of black guys in the club?
That will get taken down.
So what was the rationale or excuse or rule that was cited by these social media companies for deplatforming you?
Literally nothing.
It's the Twitter thing said, your account has been permanently suspended because, colon, and a blank space.
And I looked at my past 20 tweets.
I think I made a YouTube video about my past 20 tweets.
Call Out Nazis?00:08:18
Totally benign.
Like fart jokes and stuff.
But sorry, to finish my previous point, I looked for a common thread and they all had this cited by the SPLC as a hate group.
The SPLC seemed to be the common bond, and that was like the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
So we raise a quarter of a million dollars, 7,000 people.
I think the 7,000 people is much more consequential than the quarter of a million.
So this is a crowdfund.
Crowdfund.
And it shows that 7,000 people have had enough of this hate group that randomly chooses their opponents and says, you're a hate group.
Hey, Family Research Council, you're a hate group.
Which essentially means, hey, psychos, go shoot up that place.
And they did.
Did you know that guy who shot up the Family Research Council, who, by the way, was tackled by a black security guard who was shot?
You know, he had a backpack full of Chick-fil-A sandwiches.
He had 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches he was going to smear in the face of the dead bodies that he killed.
That is a psycho.
And he wants to sue the SPLC.
Because he's like, I'm mentally ill.
I'm a nut.
And you convinced me that these guys were a hate group.
It's true.
I mean, you know, there's that thought experiment that it's an ethics question.
Would you kill baby Hitler if he could go back in time?
What if the time machine breaks?
You're like, trust me, he was going to become a mass murderer.
No, but whatever, dude.
I mean, a lot of people say yes, a lot of people say no.
But here's the thing.
The assumption is killing Hitler will save lives.
Do you kill a baby Hitler who is not yet a moral being?
That's the ethics test, but the premise is if you kill Hitler, you will save.
Correct.
So the premise is accepted.
The moral battle is, well, do you become a murderer for an innocent baby?
But my point is, everyone agrees in that thought experiment that you will save lives.
That's the reason it's a test.
If you tell 300 million plus Americans that someone is a Nazi, maybe 250 million will say, oh, that's hyperbole.
And maybe 20 million will say, it's hyperbole, but I'm going to use it because I believe in this ultra-partisan style of rhetorical combat.
But maybe one in a thousand people will believe you and say, correct.
That's an actual Nazi, and a Nazi is one thing, but a Hitler in the making.
I'll go further with this, Ezra.
They're aware of that.
They want us dead.
They are aware that this hyperbole puts our life in danger.
They know we're not Nazis, but they say it because they want us dead.
They're childless.
They don't have kids.
They don't value life.
It's all a big video game to them.
And they're sitting there trying to kill Ezra, trying to kill Gavin.
You know the Dayton, Ohio guy?
He's an Antifa supporter, Antifa member, who killed 10 people in Dayton, many of them black, by the way.
He called Faith Goldie a Nazi.
He retweeted a tweet that said Faith Goldie was a Nazi.
So here is someone who we now know is a murderer.
He wants to murder people and he thought Faith was a Nazi.
Whoever called Faith a Nazi put her life in danger.
And actually led to the deaths, probably, of those people he killed.
Propaganda kills people.
And the thing is, calling you a Nazi or Faith a Nazi is one thing.
But when you call the President of the United States a Nazi, see, now that's a different thing because whether you're crazy or not, you know that the President of the United States is a very powerful person.
So some guy on the street you call him a Nazi, well, I'll punch him.
But if the President of the United States himself is a Nazi, you must assassinate him.
If I believed that Donald Trump was Hitler, obviously I don't, if I truly believed that, would I not have a moral obligation to do anything I could, including risking my own life?
Exactly.
Well, they took that premise, which is a good premise.
You should punch a Nazi.
You should punch someone who is going to kill six million Jews.
You should punch a Nazis.
Let's punch Hitler, but even the Nazis, just someone, there were millions of Nazis who didn't actually themselves commit a murder.
It was just a little bit of a title.
Right, but you should punch them.
If it's 1943, you should punch a Nazi.
If you're in a 1943, I agree.
You know what I mean?
So they take a premise like we shouldn't have a World War III.
If we see the bubbling of the Fourth Reich and we're going to have another Nazi party, we should stop it.
That's true, and it's logical.
But they went, wow, that was effective.
People really hate Nazis.
Let me just take this paintbrush and just go Nazi over everything I don't like, anything that makes me uncomfortable, anything that challenges me, and now they're all bad.
Well, it's not, it went from punch a Nazi to anyone I punch is a Nazi to ex post facto justify why I punched them.
Why did he punch him?
Because if I punch you, you're a Nazi, and that's, I'm just going to use that.
It's just become a tool that liars use.
You know, in that court case with Proud Boys, there was a black conservative who was on the stand and he said, look, I think you got this all wrong.
These guys are patriots, they're multiracial, blah, blah, blah.
And the DA said to him, you know, Gavin McInnis?
Yeah, he started the group.
Yeah, I know.
Do you think it's funny that he called Obama a monkey?
And the guy goes, well, in that context, I don't find it very funny.
No, I never called Obama a monkey.
So this original premise, like stop racism, stop Nazis, has now just become this magic wand, this Harry Potter thing.
You can just aim at all your enemies and randomly make up stuff.
I think the original premise is correct.
Like Ron Coleman was saying, five years ago, Twitter was kind of an uncomfortable place to be.
There was Holocaust deniers and that tiny sliver of the right, which is the Pepe the Frog shit posters that have sort of, they're maybe less than 5% of everything right of center, but they can really pollute a conversation.
And I've seen this on internet.
Well, so then you blocked them a mutant.
You blocked them.
And that was good.
But then they went, they got kind of drunk with power.
And they went, wow, that was fun.
You're a Nazi, you're a Nazi, you're a Nazi.
There was this moment, a golden age of free speech on the internet.
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, you could do and say anything.
You could even make money off of it.
I think that's over.
And I think with that being over, it's not just in social media that's what you talked about.
I think journalists themselves, let me tell you another anecdote.
In 2006, I published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.
Yep.
That's when I fell in love with you.
Because you had that awesome quote where the government said, what was your impetus?
What were you thinking publishing those cartoons?
And you said, if we were friends and we were in a bar, I would tell you honestly.
But you're the government.
It's none of your business what I was thinking.
Well, thank you for reminding me of that.
And that's the right approach.
I mean, when the government says, how dare you think that?
Or why are you thinking that way?
You can't indulge them.
But let me say that in 2006, 700, 8, when my case was going through, the vast majority of journalists supported me.
I know that not just anecdotally, from the 100 interviews I did, 99 of them were positive.
But a pollster called Compass did a survey of working journalists, like called hundreds.
And 70% of working journalists not only thought that I should do it, but that every media outlet should have published those cartoons.
So 70% of journalists said we all have to have that.
I'm Spartacus.
I'm Spartacus.
That was in 2008 that that survey was done.
Here we are, barely a decade later.
And I put it to you that at least 70% of working journalists would say, not only will I not publish those Danish cartoons, but no one else should either.
So it's correct.
It's a journalistic culture.
Journalists themselves no longer believe in journalism or reporting, let alone holding a debate with two sides.
They believe in outing, shaming, shutting up, deplatforming, narrowing the benches.
Free speech doesn't include hate speech as far as they're concerned.
That's what they say.
And as if suddenly adding an emotion to your conversation makes it illegal.
Radio Divides Campus00:05:11
I think what happened was this, when I went to university, I started in 88.
I was out in the early 90s.
And I knew when I was leaving Carleton University that education was about to be flushed down the toilet.
CKCU was the, started by Dan Aykroyd, by the way, was the local radio station.
And when I was there, there was like the punk hour and the country music hour and it was all divided by music.
As I was leaving, it was like Aboriginal talk and the Papua New Guinean hour and what do the Aztecs think of China?
And it was all multiculturalism.
And those people, the mid-90s students, have graduated and gotten jobs now and they're getting power.
They're in their 30s and they've infiltrated not just academia, but they've infiltrated journalism and they've infiltrated the court system.
So you will see a DA in New York City wearing a kafaya with a lip ring and using weird pronouns like she, they.
In fact, one of them just got the Antifa guy, Caleb Perkins, she got him out of jail for beating the crap out of a cop.
So I think what happened from 2008 in the past 10 years, the kids who were polluted in college in the mid-90s have finally accrued power and they are wreaking havoc on society.
Yeah, it's funny, I had forgotten until you just said it that when I was at the University of Calvary, I had a radio show and I was just as right-wing back then as I am now.
The idea that a right-wing pundit could have an hour a week on a campus radio show is unthinkable.
It's unthinkable.
Even people who hated conservatives back then, it was like almost an affectionate disdain, like Michael P. Keaton on the show Family Ties.
Right?
It was like, oh, great.
That guy loves Reagan.
What will he think of next?
That's exactly what it was like.
Today, if you love Trump, you want trans people to die.
And the answer, and debate, I'll never debate you.
Oh, I wouldn't give a Nazi a platform.
Yeah.
And it's funny, because I remember all the debates we had in university, the different parties, the different, and it was, and frankly, we all shared an office.
And we were, I didn't even think of it as being forced to get along.
We just did.
And so I'm not talking about ancient history.
Okay, that's 20 years ago, 25 years ago.
But that's not that long ago.
Now, you literally will get punched just for wearing a Trump hat.
Yeah, it just happened two days ago in Portland.
A guy got mobbed wearing a MAGA hat walking down the street.
That's what I'm trying to do with FreeSpeech.tv.
I'm trying to bring liberals and conservatives together.
Dude, it's a chore.
It's very expensive.
And once I finally get them, and I do it right over there, once I finally get them together, they disagree on the environment.
They disagree on Trump.
One side has no faith in them.
The other wants to give them a chance.
The rest is basic.
Some of the immigration, but when you get into the nuts and bolts, they don't really have, they just think it's mean that they're being detained, basically.
But they all agree that the prison system is out of control in America.
It needs to be fixed.
They are totally open to the idea that America's past has done serious damage to visible minorities.
It's amazing how much we have in common, but the media and politicians have a vested interest in polarizing us, and they're doing an excellent job.
And one of the ways they do it is by banning you, me, Tommy Robinson from social media, so they can conjure up this wild Nazi narrative, and you can't go, that's not true, I wasn't even there.
You know, the idea that we're all in our silos and we only, Republicans and conservatives only listen to Republicans and conservatives and liberals only live in the liberals, I don't believe that.
Because I'm a conservative guy.
I grew up in a very conservative city in Canada called Calgary.
All my friends were conservative all the time.
And yet I am as soaked in liberal narratives as anyone because I watch TV, I watch movies, I listen to the radio and pop songs.
If you check Twitter moments, you get a pretty good metric of the left.
Yeah, so there is no place for a conservative to hide from the other side.
But there are people who live their entire lives never having met a Christian conservative, a conservative of any sort, a blue-collar person.
And Charles Murray wrote a book called Coming Apart.
Great book.
It prophesies all of this, by the way.
Where he talked about, in some ways it's wonderful.
It talks about the mobility of America self-selecting, that there's certain high-income, high-IQ postal codes or zip codes where, you know, in Manhattan, in Hollywood, all these high achievers sort of agglomerate together.
They go to schools with each other.
They marry each other.
And it's a clique.
And it's a testament to mobility.
But those people live in a bubble.
And he has this amazing quiz, which I've shown several times.
You can take the quiz on the PBS website.
It asks questions, how thick is your bubble.
Governmental Tyranny Worries00:08:31
It asks you, when was the last time you have been on a factory floor?
Factory floor.
Did you see the Transformers movie?
Do you drink Budweiser?
All of these normal people.
Have you been to Applebee's or a chain like that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What does, I mean, they test it very important to be a chatterbox.
Have you ever worn a uniform at a, have you ever been in a parade other than a gay pride parade?
That's why I was talking to that guy downstairs who talked about Baltimore that you didn't want to talk to.
Every cab driver, I talk his ear off.
Every time I buy a pencil, I say, how's business?
I want to know people.
I love people.
And, you know, there's some great questions.
Have you ever come home from work and you're physically sore?
Right.
I mean, all these people who are labor activists, like the left in both Canada and the United States, it's not the labor left.
It's the campus left.
It's the professor and activist left.
They don't know about hard work.
They hate guys who work hard, hard hats, steal.
It's not just work.
Like when I was in a band and I was in Vice and I was single, I was so popular that I would come home and my genitals would be sore.
It was strenuous.
I got to come back, guys.
But I'm not going to say it.
Okay, so you were drummed out of CRTV for political correctness.
were just too hot.
They harassed every single.
So after the merger, it was in the news.
And this is your term, the swarm of bees just attacked every single employee, the accounts person, everyone's.
They'll call this the free market.
It's not.
It's a mob.
And the mob attacked so many employees that some of them went, really?
He's a Nazi?
And eventually that made it to the top brass and they said, this is too risky.
We've got to get out of here.
I think they regret it now.
In fact, I think they might want to buy free speech.tv, but that ship has sailed.
But once you're defined as a pariah in this mob era, even your allies can't help you.
You know, it's funny you say that because when I was a...
If Rebel rehired me during that time, you guys would have been harassed.
Your accounts person would have been, you know, tormented, terrorized.
What's funny is that when I was at the Sun News Network, I had a lot more of that kind of harassment because they were trying to drive a wedge between me and the company I worked for.
At the Rebel, we don't really get that harassment because who's the boss?
Who's the board of directors?
Who's the CEO who's going to step in and say, Ezra, enough.
We just can't handle it.
I mean, I suppose staff might leave if they felt overly harassed.
But in a way, being purely independent takes away a pressure point.
That's why big companies roll over so quickly, because there's so many pressure points.
Any company in retail can never advertise on a Fox or something like that.
They'll be smoking.
That's what I did.
We did a free speech rally in D.C., and I directed it at the right.
And I said, it was directed at Blaze, but it's also directed all these companies that fire someone the second they get an angry tweet or a phone call.
Because you're getting a phone call from Antifa, by the way.
You're not getting a phone call from Ezra Levant's wife.
And by the way, when they're threatening to boycott Chick-fil-A, they were never going there.
They were never going there.
So tell them to fuck off.
Hang up the phone.
Stop being such a pussy.
When they're boycotting Dick's sporting goods, they weren't going hunting and fishing to begin with.
Exactly.
Like, the right is so bad at fighting.
They're so apt to capitulate.
A good example, too, is like take Hannity, for example.
Remember when John Stewart was making fun of him for his, Hannity was worried about spring break.
He said it's dangerous.
It's not fun anymore.
Girls are getting raped.
Hannity was right.
And someone got murdered soon after.
He was warning everyone.
Jon Stewart's take was, look at Hannity, he hates partying.
And Fox News was worried about it.
They go, uh-oh, Jon Stewart's making fun of us.
This is really blowing up.
We're getting letters.
And they care about that controversy.
If Hannity made fun of Jon Stewart, the idea of Jon Stewart going, uh-oh, Fox News is really on my tail, like the left laughs off our outrage, but we poop our panties when we're in trouble.
And that's why I say at the end of my show, every episode I say, get fired, get in trouble, be brave, and never stop fighting.
Well, look, you're a Canadian originally, but you've been in the land of the First Amendment, and it's tough enough down here, but in Canada, we don't even have the First Amendment.
Can I interrupt you?
Yeah.
It's exactly the same.
Here in America, the First Amendment is actually good with the government.
If a case makes it to a judge, he will usually err on the side of free speech.
So the actual system itself is good.
That's meaningless because there's a swarm of bees down here, the mob.
So I still get fired.
My kids still get terrorized.
I get Facebook.
My car still gets vandalized.
I still get doxed.
So I still suffer all the consequences of the tyranny.
It's just not a governmental tyranny.
Now, in Canada, you have a governmental tyranny, if that's a word, governmental.
But at the end of the day, the Canadian and the American, they're both fired.
They're both unsafe at home.
They both have to have a shotgun.
We're both in danger.
Well, how's it going to end?
I mean, are we going to break through it?
I mean, earlier today, you and I were talking about a comedian named Dave Chappelle, who is a black comedian who you would think that would give him some politically correct, you know, bulletproof vest.
But holy moly, are they going after him, the liberal guardians of comedy, denouncing his Netflix show?
I've seen a few clips of it.
It looks pretty funny to me.
Dave Chappelle is Spartacus.
Is he going to be, well, is he going to lose his head?
He can afford it.
You can chop his head off and put it right there.
But I mean, will Netflix fire their star?
Will they take down his show?
Nope.
He's too big.
He's too effective.
The show is too popular.
And the beauty of Dave Chappelle is he did this genius special that took no prisoners, as comedy should.
And the quality is so fucking high.
If he had taken no prisoners and it was slightly half-assed, then it would be like a wounded animal at the edge of the flock and the wolves would prey on him.
He is the alpha at the head of the pack.
And he delivered a perfect comedy special that defended offensive content.
And I really think it's a ray of hope because politics is downstream from culture and youth culture is at the head of culture.
So he's the head of youth culture today.
And he said, screw it, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.
And he showed them how important it is that we stay offensive and we stay uncomfortable.
And that is a game changer.
This could be the tipping point.
Well, you certainly say that eloquently.
I'm not persuaded, but I'm glad you're hopeful.
This is my friend.
Way to take the zing out of my ending.
Listen, I've been around this censorship block a few too many times.
You know, it's exhausting and it's harrowing and it's hard on your marriage and it's hard on your kids' lives and all this stuff.
And of course, being fired sucks.
It's murdering your bank account.
But I remember talking to Tommy last time I was down there.
I stayed with him.
And he goes, you know, you get threatened, you're worried about getting killed and you're worried about all the threats.
And then eventually you reach a point where you realize, if I'm going to die, I'm going to die.
If I'm not going to die, I'm not going to die.
And it's sort of this cathartic release where you just go, fuck it, let's do this.
And I've reached that point.
Not that I'm in Tommy Robinson's League, but I've reached that point in my life where I go, let's go.
You want to go?
Let's do this.
Yeah.
Oh, they're so far gone there.
I think that's the only approach to have.
Well, Gavin, it's great to see you and good luck.
And tell me one more time the website of your new show.
Very simple, free speech.tv.
It's easy to remember and it describes what it is.
It's a good start.
I just subscribed today.
You convinced me in this video.
I'm a little disappointed.
It wasn't as easy.
I got to make the subscribe button.
It was pretty big.
It was pretty easy.
It took me a minute to figure it out.
Well, listen, great to see you in your natural habitat of New York City.
And I'll wrap up the show there.
Obviously, I don't have any letters with me today.
But from here in New York with my friend Gavin to you at home around the world.