Carson King, a 24-year-old Iowa man, raised $1.4M for charity but faced backlash after the Des Moines Register exposed a deleted racist tweet from his 16th year, prompting Anheuser-Busch to cut ties. Hosts question why reporter Aaron Calvin—with a history of offensive social media posts—wasn’t scrutinized similarly. The episode ties this to Trump’s impeachment, where Democrats, led by AOC and Tlaib, push for removal despite weak Senate support, comparing it to Clinton’s acquittal over political offenses. A declassified transcript reveals Trump’s Ukraine call lacked sinister intent, yet Democrats proceed, possibly delaying major revelations until October 21. Both parties may prioritize election strategy over accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
I tell you a story today that will get your blood boiling, I think.
It's about Carson King.
Who's he?
He's just some 24-year-old kid.
Asked for some beer money on TV.
When it came in, he said, you know, I'm going to give this to charity.
Within a few days, $1.4 million came in.
That's the good news.
The bad news will make you sick.
That's today's story.
Hey, before I get out of the way, can you do me a favor?
Please become a premium subscriber.
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You get the video version of the podcast.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, a man raises a million dollars for children with cancer, and the local newspaper digs up an embarrassing tweet he wrote when he was 16.
Oh, and it gets worse.
It's September 25th, 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 to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
You know, I'm still mad about that turkey story in southern Alberta.
You know, the 160 animal rights extremists do a farm invasion robbery of a Hutterite turkey farm endangered all the animals, of course, trespassed, of course.
It was a farm invasion, but all those families live there.
So it was a home invasion, too.
And they stole five animals, and they were there for hours while the police did nothing.
That's the worst part.
But then it got even worse, I guess.
The police let them all go.
And Alberta's justice minister came to town to have a town hall with lots of media in tow to talk about how much he cares about rural crime.
But it's been almost a month and he's laid no criminal charges.
I know why this makes me very mad.
I've been thinking about it for weeks.
Because I could tell everyone was picking on this farm specifically because it was a Christian Hutterite farm.
As in, the animal rights extremists knew they wouldn't get a shotgun blast or a fist in the face because they're pacifist Christians who live the creed and turn the other cheek.
And the cops knew that too.
So they didn't bother doing their job because, you know, that might require some work and effort.
So everyone took advantage of the Hutterites.
The cops too, by refusing to enforce the law in a way that they'd never do with any other farmer.
And now, Doug Schweitzer, the Red Tory, who's always been hostile to Christians, now he's taking advantage of the Hutterites too.
No charges laid against the criminals, but he'll pose with the Hutterites as some human backdrop for his press opportunities.
That's why I'm mad about that.
Not because I particularly care about five stolen turkeys, but because I can see the injustice here is deeper.
And all the people who are supposed to give a damn don't.
I'm so mad about that.
Cops Avoiding Duty00:14:37
You tell me.
Should I just let it go?
I mean, if no one else cares, is it stupid for me to care?
Sheila Gunn Reed cares, of course.
She went down there to talk to the farmers.
Well, I saw another story today that makes me even madder.
And I didn't wake up on the wrong side of the bed today or anything.
I didn't get up looking to be mad, no way.
So there's this young man in Iowa, surely one of the best states in the United States.
And this young guy, he's 24 years old.
His name is Carson King.
What a great Iowa name.
Anyways, he holds up this funny sign on TV at a football game in Iowa.
Bush Light Supply Needs Replenishing.
Venmo.
And then his account.
It's like PayPal.
It's a way for people to send you money on the internet.
So he holds his sign up and it gets on national TV.
And people think it's pretty funny.
So strangers actually start chipping in to give him some beer money.
Iowa, good people, funny, love their beer.
Well, this is very exciting for Bush beer, Anheuser-Busch.
They love this viral moment.
Everyone's getting this guy beer money.
So they jump on board and they send this tweet.
They say, hey, Carson, we said we'd send you a year's worth of Bush Light.
But first, we had to make sure the cans were fit for a king.
Let us know where to send the truck.
Iowa legend, and you saw there was a photo of him on the can.
Anyway, this is hilarious.
This was all a couple days ago, by the way.
And Iowans being Iowans, here's what Carson King does with all his beer money.
Let me quote CNN because this story went national.
He said, I didn't think I would make anything.
It all started as a joke, he said.
After speaking with his family, he decided that minus the cost of one case of Bush Light, he'd give the rest of the money to the University of Iowa Stead Family Children's Hospital.
As word spread of his plans to donate the money, more people decided to contribute.
Bush Beer and Venmo even caught wind of his plans and raised the stakes by pledging to match his contribution.
By Sunday morning, the contributions, including Bush Beer, and Venmo's matches, had reached $1 million and were continuing to rise.
How good are you feeling right now?
How good is Carson King feeling?
He got his free beer and then he did a good thing.
He didn't even have to.
How good is Anheuser-Busch feeling?
And how about those kids at the children's hospital and their families?
I mean, be honest now.
Would you have the personal character to give up a million bucks to charity when you literally asked for it for beer money?
And you were getting it for beer money.
You give it to charity instead.
Give this guy respect.
Here's what he wrote.
He tweeted.
He said, we just reached a million in total contributions.
Bush, Beer, and Venmo, let's go.
We're not done yet.
Children's Hospital, what do you think for the kids?
And the Children's Hospital wrote this back to him.
They said, we can't think.
Our minds are blown by all of this.
Thank you to everyone who helped reach this milestone.
We're so grateful.
What a feel-good story.
Well, let me take you to some breaking news, okay?
Seriously, this was called breaking news on TV in Iowa, like as if North Korea launched a nuclear missile.
Breaking news.
Let me show you the breaking news from Iowa.
Breaking news into the KCCI newsroom in just the past hour.
Anheuser-Busch says it will now no longer have any further association with the Altoona man who has raised more than $1 million for the University of Iowa Children's Hospital.
KCCI's Laura Terrell is just back from a news conference where Carson King apologized for using offensive language on social media when he was in high school.
Laura?
Yes, King reached out to KCCI to talk about what he calls a racially offensive post he made eight years ago.
We don't know the content of that post because it's been deleted.
King says he doesn't want it to affect his fundraising effort for the hospital.
I am embarrassed and stunned to reflect on what I thought was funny when I was a 16-year-old kid.
And I want to sincerely apologize.
An apology from Carson King.
The 24-year-old called a press conference Tuesday night after a racially insensitive social media post he made eight years ago recently surfaced.
It was brought to my attention by a reporter for the Des Moines Register.
And once he pointed it out and I went back and looked at it, I was really upset with myself.
King says he deleted the post immediately.
King became somewhat famous 10 days ago after his beer sign went viral.
Instead of using the money for Bush line, he pledged to donate it all to the University of Iowa, Stead Family Children's Hospital.
I don't want, you know, what I did when I was 16 to take away from the fact that, you know, we're over $1.14 million for the Children's Hospital.
Yeah, this just came in the day.
This regular guy from Altoona, suddenly a hero in the public eye, now says he fears mistakes from his past.
We'll change that.
I'm worried about it.
I really hope people focus on the positivity that all this has brought.
Obviously, you know, I've made mistakes in my past.
You know, everyone has.
King says all of the 1.4 million and counting will still go to the hospital.
Now, here is the full statement from Anheuser-Busch they sent to KCCI in just the past hour.
Carson King had multiple social media posts that do not align with our values as a brand or as a company, and we will have no further association with him.
We are honoring our commitment by donating more than $350,000 to the University of Iowa hospitals and clinics.
So he's 24, Carson King, and eight years ago, when he was a high schooler, what's that, grade 10?
He made some dumb jokes.
And so he's humiliated now.
But did you hear the language in that breaking news report?
Some dumb joke that a dumb teenager told recently surfaced?
It just surfaced.
Look at that passive language.
Surfaced.
No, of course, it didn't surface.
It was mined.
It was hunted.
It was trolled.
It was creeped.
Carson King was investigated for making bad jokes in high school.
Someone did deep opposition research on him.
More than was done to vet Justin Trudeau in the 2015 Canadian election, I might add.
Trudeau went full racist in blackface, not when he was 16, though, when he was 29.
And a teacher in school, not a high school student himself.
When he was in his 20s in college, he also put on a black face and a wig, and he made ape gestures.
Pretty sure that's comparing black people to apes.
He did this in his teens.
He did this in his 20s.
We know he did it as late as 29.
Pretty sure it didn't stop there.
We didn't know about Trudeau until a week ago, but Carson King raises, what was that final figure according to the report?
1.4 million bucks for charity.
And every tweet he ever tweeted when he was 16, was it grade 10?
Was dug up.
Who would dig that up?
And who would report it?
Well, kudos to Carson King himself, I guess, for apologizing.
I think he was almost tearful there.
I can't remember every dumb joke I told when I was 16.
I'm just glad there wasn't Twitter back then or some weird creep who would dig it up.
That's the thing here.
Why was this TV station treating it like war was being declared?
Breaking news.
Why did they hide how the tweet surfaced?
And why did Anheuser-Busch react in such a cowardly way, so smug and self-righteous, though?
Why?
Well, the Des Moines Register, the local newspaper, they dug up the tweet.
That's the media party for you.
Total in curiosity about anything that matters, but obsessed with getting a good guy who raised money for charity.
Here's an article in the Des Moines Register.
Register editor.
Here's how we reported on Carson King's tweets.
Some of the toughest decisions in journalism are about what to publish or not.
People around the nation have been captivated by the heartwarming story of Carson King, the 24-year-old Iowa one whose handmade game day sign asking for beer money prompted hundreds of dollars in donations.
And then when he decided to donate the money to Stead Family Children's Hospital, hundreds of thousands of dollars poured in.
On Monday evening, register reporter Aaron Calvin was assigned to interview King for a profile.
On Tuesday, as he worked to write the story, he did a get this, get this, get this, get this.
He did a routine background check on King that included a review of publicly visible social media posts.
A standard part of a reporter's work on a profile.
Calvin found two racist jokes that King had posted on Twitter in 2012.
Calvin asked King about them and he expressed deep regret.
Is it indeed a routine background check to creep through a 24-year-old man's teenage tweets?
Is that really routine for a profile story on a beer drinker?
Is that a markground check?
What does that mean to do a background check?
Were they hiring this guy to work in a bank or something?
I know a little bit about Twitter.
I tweet more than the average guy.
These tweets, two jokes Carson King wrote almost a decade ago.
They were actively searched for, as in the reporter started typing in keywords into a search, every swear, every epithet he could find into a search engine to find them.
This wasn't a routine background check.
That's what police do when they pull you over.
They check for outstanding warrants or unpaid tickets.
That's what a routine background check is.
Searching a teenager's jokes from almost a decade ago, looking for specific mean words.
That's not routine.
That's just gross.
Anything to destroy a good man.
Here's how this self-serving editor ended her excusology in the Des Moines Register.
Eventually, register editors decided we would include the information, but at the bottom of the story, we thought we should be transparent about what we had found, but not highlighted at the top of the story or as a separate story.
It was planned as a few paragraphs towards the bottom of the profile.
Hi, guys.
Really?
What a disgusting, disgraceful group of people the Des Moines Register are.
A hero, shamed.
$1.4 million.
And that fundraiser obviously has been cut short now.
How many millions more would have come in were it not for this bizarre smear?
Oh, but my friends, the story has only started.
Who is that reporter who did a routine background check by typing in every dirty word he could think of in a search engine going back almost a decade?
Well, it's this guy, this creep here, Aaron Calvin.
Look at him.
Now, you can't judge someone by their physiognomy.
How someone's face looks doesn't tell you about their character.
I don't know, maybe except in this case here, because the reporter doing the routine background check to name and shame and blame a 24-year-old man who just donated 1.4 million.
Look at that picture.
Blow it up.
Make that full screen.
Yeah, that guy.
This was the reporter, the one who just killed a $1.4 million cancer charity for kids, who bravely spoke truth to power.
Well, looky here, this reporter here.
Well, I guess when he was hired, the Des Moines Register didn't do a routine background check on him, did they?
On Aaron Calvin, I mean, the reporter.
Now, I'm not going to say the N-word, but boy, Aaron Calvin sure does.
As a grown man, as a grown-up, as a media professional, as the guy who took down Carson King, he sure has a foul mouth on him.
Look at this.
Look at this one.
Too many of the, I'm not even going to say the N-word there.
And he says, don't pardon my French.
Yeah, it's not French, you racist sexist.
Here's another.
So I'm not going to pronounce that word.
I'll just let you read it.
So let's catch up here.
We got racism, check.
We got sexism, check.
We got anti-police profanity check.
Oh, and homophobia.
I just got hit on by Torrey Amos' makeup guy.
Never talked to strange gay men.
And then he just got really weird.
Pedophilia.
I want to grow up and read sex scenes to high schoolers.
Sorry, if that's not pedophilia, what's this then?
What's this one?
If you think that's out of context, look at this next one here.
Can I be a guest instructor at your theater camp teaching the kids how to abuse substances and turn tricks?
What is this about?
Who the hell is this?
And of course, of course.
He's an anti-Christian bigot calling anyone evangelical or racist.
So that's the media hero.
That's the great investigative reporter at the Des Moines Register who was just doing a happy profile on a good news story and he brought down Carson King for a dumb joke he made back when he was 16 in grade 10.
Justin Trudeau goes full blackface as an adult again and again and nothing.
A 16-year-old joke is exhumed to shame a 24-year-old hero.
That's unjust.
But the monstrous bigot who did this routine background check, yeah, he's grosser than anything I've seen in a long time.
Quick question for the Des Moines Register and for that TV station that had their breaking news flash.
Will they do the same story on this bigot, Aaron Calvin?
Oh, and to the hypocrites at Anheuser-Busch.
Will they now cut off their advertising with the Des Moines Register too?
A toxic swamp that harbors racist, sexist, homophobic, and pro-pedophile journalism?
Yeah, I'm mad.
Impeachment: A Statement or Strategy?00:15:34
Stay with us for more.
For you, do you personally think impeachment should be considered?
I think it should.
Is we begin impeachment proceedings now.
And that we've got to impeach him and get rid of him.
My sole focus right now is to make sure that he's not the president next term.
My so focused.
We're going to go in there.
We're going to impeach the motherfucker.
We're going to launch an Article III impeachment.
In the question of impeachment, it's about time.
Madler is, I hope he's not following the rules.
Congress to take the steps towards impeachment.
We're going to have to prosecute this.
We're going to have to do it.
We're going to have to impeach him.
Impeachment is still on the table.
Absolutely.
It's always on the table.
We cannot accept a second term for Donald Trump.
If we don't impeach this president, he will get re-elected.
It's time to stop this nonsense.
They think they're going to win.
Did you see the one man?
He said it's the only way we're going to beat him in 2020.
they have to do this the only way that well that's a compliment i guess But think of what he said.
It's the only way they're going to beat me.
And actually, it's working the other way because now we have our best poll numbers that we've ever had.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
Well, that is a video tweeted out by Donald Trump showing the mania in the Democrat Party to impeach him, as that one Democrat said.
They can't beat him, so maybe they can stop him this way.
Is it really happening?
The Mueller inquiry turned out to be a big nothing.
Are they damning the torpedoes anyways?
Well, I think one fellow who knows the story more than most is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Joel, great to see you again.
I know you've been traveling around the country following the Democrats.
You're back for a minute in Breitbart HQ for a bit at least.
That's right.
That's right.
And they're following me now.
They're going to start coming to California trying to drum up some votes because this is a very important state.
We are voting earlier than usual in the primary process next year.
So this is the fifth state to vote as opposed to one of the last states.
And so Democrats are going to be here.
We're going to have all the political ads on TV pretty soon.
And we get to have just as much fun as our friends in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Well, let me ask you a question about that before we get back to the impeachment story.
It seems to me that California Democratic politics, especially Nancy Pelosi, who's in San Francisco, the most left-wing city in America, and a lot of the other California political leaders are so radical left that by making California go earlier, you're making the Democrats, you're rewarding any craziness as opposed to more normal or calm or middle America places like New Hampshire and Iowa, where Democrats have to try and keep it together at least for a few weeks.
Am I wrong on that?
Well, I don't think you're wrong.
I'm not sure that's the dynamic simply because I think the Democratic electorate, even in Iowa and New Hampshire, is quite left-wing.
South Carolina, less so.
And I think that's one of the reasons you see Biden doing better there.
Not that he's moderate.
He himself rejects the idea that he's moderate.
But the African-American community is more conservative at the moment than the liberal elite white community, which is driving a lot of the far left-wing politics inside the Democratic Party.
So ironically, perhaps, South Carolina is more conservative politically.
It has an electorate on the Democratic side that's 60% African-American.
They essentially are now the moderate core of the early primary electorate.
What's happening in California is a little muddled because unlike Republicans who have a winner-takes-all system for most of these states, Democrats have a proportional representation system.
So a candidate can lose California but still come away with a lot of delegates if they do well enough to qualify.
I think they have to hit a 15% threshold.
As long as you're above that, you still win a lot of delegates.
So they don't have to dominate here.
They just have to do well.
Whereas before Ted Cruz lost every county in Iowa, sorry, not Iowa, Indiana, before he lost every delegate race in Indiana, where they all went to Trump, they were looking at California as the battle royale that was going to happen to decide the future of the Republican nomination.
That didn't have to happen in the end because Trump defeated Cruz in Indiana.
But Democrats may be playing a longer game here.
Right now, the frontrunner is no longer Joe Biden.
It's not yet Elizabeth Warren.
It's really in flux, depending on which poll you look at.
Some polls say Biden's still in the lead.
Some have Warren in the lead.
And Sanders is in second place in some of these polls.
There's also room, I think, for Kamala Harris or another candidate to creep back in.
So we are seeing a very interesting situation unfold.
And I've been saying this now for a few weeks.
You could see the early primary states split several different ways.
Elizabeth Warren looks like she's going to surge in Iowa.
There may be one or two others who do well there.
New Hampshire is probably going to be a three-way race.
And Bernie Sanders, who won in 2016, may win there again.
South Carolina is Biden's firewall.
So far, so good.
Although there is some movement in second place, we'll see if Warren can improve.
And then Nevada, which actually goes third, I believe, for Democrats, even though it's often overlooked, is also wide open.
And Kamala Harris may have an opportunity to get back in there because, of course, Nevada borders California.
So a lot of money and volunteers can be brought over from California to Nevada.
So it's really a mess.
And of course, they're all in favor of impeaching Donald Trump in one way or another, except for Tulsi Gabbard, who right now you could say she's sort of in 11th or 12th place, not a top-tier candidate, but she managed to get herself back on the debate stage in October.
So we are seeing her mount a little bit of a comeback.
And she has said what I think many Americans believe, which is that impeachment is divisive and unnecessary.
And she is also talking like a winner by saying she believes that the right way to get rid of Donald Trump is to defeat him and she can defeat him.
But the other Democratic candidates are talking, and you'll pardon the expression, like losers.
They are talking like people who cannot win unless Donald Trump is impeached.
That is the subliminal message, you could say, that they're indicating.
They're basically voting no confidence in themselves by supporting this impeachment so close to an election.
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, voters will have their say in, what, 14 months or something.
I have to do the exact math.
It reminds me of Brexit.
I mean, there's a vote, there's a vote, and then there's all the shenanigans and the attempt to undo it.
I think it looks bad on Democrats to try to replace a president through trickery and scheming rather than at the ballot box.
I mean, I'm, as Democrats go, I'm sympathetic to Tulsi Gabbard anyways.
I mean, obviously, I'm not a Democrat supporter, but I like her style, and I like the fact that she's being a grown-up about that.
Let me refer to your article in Reitbart.
The headline is, Impeachment marks triumph of AOC, Alexandria Cuz Cortez, and the squad over Nancy Pelosi.
Now, what do you mean by that?
Why is it a victory for the squad?
Well, the squad came into office promising to impeach the president.
The first impeachment resolution was offered by Rashida Talib in this Congress, and she, of course, is one of the four members of the squad.
She was quickly joined by Elon Omar and by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's been tweeting in favor of impeachment for a while.
And she and Nancy Pelosi fought a lot over the summer.
They buried the hatchet after a meeting in July.
And one of the contentious issues at that meeting was AOC's habit of tweeting against the Democratic Party leadership and calling them weak and ineffectual and that sort of thing.
So she agreed essentially to stop doing that.
But she started doing it again this weekend after the Ukraine story came out.
And more members started using that story as a reason to go public with their support for impeachment, nearing the 218 votes that Pelosi would need to actually carry a motion of impeachment on the House floor.
I don't think they're there yet, but they're getting closer.
So AOC tweeted against Pelosi indirectly without mentioning her by name, but basically saying that the fact that they had not impeached the president was an indictment of their leadership.
So I think what Pelosi realized was that either she was going to move ahead on impeachment or she was going to lose her speakership.
It was either her or Donald Trump.
And I think she chose, obviously, to save herself, although whether she can last is really anybody's guess.
She has lost control of her caucus on this issue and other important issues.
The terms under which the Democratic Party now operates in the House of Representatives are being set by AOC and the squad.
That's an analysis you haven't heard many people talk about because they're focused on the minor details of what Trump said to the president of Ukraine, which really doesn't matter at all.
But essentially, a power shift has happened.
Pelosi holds the gavel, but not the power.
You know, I remember it wasn't that long ago where Pelosi was asked about AOC, and she sort of sniffed and said, oh, yeah, there's four or five of them here.
Let me show you a quick clip of that.
Take a look.
You have these wings, AOC, and her group on one side.
She was dismissive.
She was like an old hand laughing at the morning lorries there, but it looks like she was overcome by them.
If she's now obeying them, that didn't last long.
Yeah, and the other thing that's interesting is when you look at how Pelosi has tried to keep impeachment at bay for so long, where she kept saying over and over again, we're going to wait until the facts emerge.
We're going to wait until Robert Mueller finishes his investigation and all of that.
That took two years.
And it took less than 24 hours for her to flip on this Ukraine thing.
Or to put it another way, you wait for two years for the Mueller report, and then you can't wait 24 hours for Trump to produce the transcript of the Ukraine conversation.
What that tells you is Pelosi is under duress.
She's no longer controlling the timing.
She's no longer controlling what decisions are made.
She's still trying to hang in there with this thing called an impeachment process or.
Inquiry, I think.
Impeachment.
And what is that?
I've never heard of an impeachment inquiry.
Well, they're making it up.
They're making it up.
You know, when they impeached Bill Clinton, the Chief Justice Rehnquist had to decide how he was going to preside over the trial of the president in the Senate.
Nobody had any real record of any such trial happening.
We know that they impeached Andrew Johnson and he survived by one vote back in the 1860s, but we didn't have very good records of what that trial looked like or visually what it involved.
So Rehnquist decided to put three gold stripes on either side of his robes just as a little flourish.
And he just made it up as he went along.
And that's sort of what Democrats are doing.
They're making it up as they go along.
There is an established procedure since we have impeached judges before successfully and we've impeached two presidents, although unsuccessfully in terms of their removal from office.
But the process would seem to indicate the House has to vote on impeachment first or has to vote to launch some kind of inquiry.
I think Nancy Pelosi as the effective leader of the entire House of Representatives, even though she only represents one party, she is the Speaker of the House.
She basically can make this up as she goes along.
She can innovate.
And if she can't innovate, she can just pass a new set of rules by a majority vote.
I mean, it doesn't really matter.
So what they're trying to do here is to have it both ways, to tell the base that they have impeached the president or they're starting to impeach the president and to mollify the moderates, such as they are, very few of them.
I think there's 31 representatives out of the 235 Democrats who come from districts that Trump actually won.
So they're trying to mollify those people by saying, well, we haven't really impeached him yet.
We're just sort of on the way there.
So they're trying to have it both ways.
But as Jerry Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has been saying for weeks before this Ukraine thing came up, that there is no legal difference between impeachment inquiry, impeachment investigation.
It's all the same thing from a legal perspective.
I don't know why he was insisting on that, but it turns out that argument actually helps Republicans because they can now say Pelosi is impeaching the president and she can't back away from it.
She is now tied to it.
It's very hard to see anyway politically how she would back out of it now, but the facts are not in her favor.
The release of the transcript is bad for Pelosi and good for Trump.
I'm going to get to that Ukraine thing in a minute because you've referred to it a few times.
I've read that transcript myself and I don't even understand why it's controversial.
But a quick thing, I think a lot of Canadians want to confirm this, and I bet a lot of Americans do.
Based on that little montage video that we started this segment with, I think a lot of people think when you impeach a president, he's removed.
But that's just a way of saying, we don't like you.
We think you've done some really bad things.
Now the Senate has to have a trial, whether or not to kick you out.
So I think simply impeaching the president is like sending him a scolding letter, but he's not going to be actually removed from office.
Did I get that right?
So impeachment is like a statement.
You know, it's a little more than that.
Look, it's more than a resolution of disapproval.
Impeachment is sort of like the political equivalent of what in the criminal courts would be an indictment.
Impeaching the president effectively is indicting him.
He can't be indicted by a common criminal court while he's president.
He can afterwards, but not while he's president.
That task falls to the House of Representatives, which indicts the president for a limited set of actions known as high crimes and misdemeanors.
They're not defined, but the Constitution basically says, we're not going to allow you to get rid of the president over minutiae.
We're not going to allow this for small things.
This is really a very weighty process.
It's a very heavy responsibility, a very powerful and grave exercise of legislative authority.
So what we're going to do is limit it to high crimes and misdemeanors.
So the House of Representatives can impeach the president.
It then goes to the Senate.
The Senate acts essentially as the jury, and it has to vote by two-thirds majority, 67 votes, since we have 100 senators now.
It has to vote to convict the president, to remove him from office.
That doesn't amount to a criminal conviction, but the political equivalent really is removal from office.
And so he doesn't necessarily go to jail, but if the Senate decides to remove him, he's out.
Impeachment: High Crimes and Misdemeanors00:07:47
Now, that's never happened to a president in the history of the United States.
The one time it might have happened had it gone forward was to Richard Nixon.
And rather than face that prospect of even being impeached, he just resigned.
So he resigned to avoid being the second president impeached.
That ignoble title fell to Bill Clinton, who understood that Republicans would impeach him.
The question there wasn't whether Bill Clinton had committed a crime.
The question was whether the crime itself amounted to a high crime.
The crimes included perjury and obstruction of justice, tampering with witnesses, and so forth.
Republicans argued that was a high enough crime because perjury is fundamental.
Telling the truth under oath is a fundamental part of our judicial system and so forth.
But most voters thought, yeah, it's not really enough.
That's why Clinton understood he had political support to survive the trial in the Senate.
And Democrats at the time were scathing about Republicans putting the country through this divisive impeachment process when they knew that there was not going to be a conviction and it was all about sex in the end anyway.
And why do this?
Now, of course, those same Democrats are marshaling this impeachment for non-crimes through the House of Representatives, basically arguing that although they don't have evidence, they need to start an impeachment inquiry so they can get evidence they can later use in an impeachment.
Oh, Mike.
First, I want to ask you about the Ukraine memo in 30 seconds, but just tell me.
There is no chance in hell that Trump would be convicted in the Senate.
I mean, if anything, his base would be revved up.
Every Republican, with maybe a few bizarre exceptions.
I think Trump would hold every Republican, maybe save one or two.
If he was impeached in the House, he would never be thrown out by the Senate.
Am I right on that?
Mitt Romney will vote to remove the president for any reason.
Maybe one or two others will as well.
But that's not good enough.
You need 20 Republicans out of the 53 to defect to the Democrats to convict the president.
That is not going to happen on these charges.
It might happen if they impeached him for bribery, if he had been found taking bribes, if he had lied to the country deliberately and malevolently about something very significant, like a war or, I don't know, a nuclear deal, something like that.
If he had done something very serious, I think those 20 votes would not be hard to find.
In this case, they will struggle maybe even to convince Mitt Romney.
I mean, Mitt Romney hates the president, so maybe out of spite he would vote to convict him.
But even Mitt Romney might have trouble with this one now that I think about it, because there's nothing in this transcript at all.
Well, let's talk about it just for one minute.
I read it this morning.
It's a fairly brief phone call.
I don't think that phone call was even 10 minutes.
It was between Trump and the new president of Ukraine.
And, you know, the Ukrainian president was just showering Trump with love.
I mean, a lot of flattery.
They bashed Angela Merkel a bit, saying Angela Merkel talks about supporting Ukraine, but doesn't actually support it.
Trump says, we support you more than anyone.
The Ukrainian says, yeah, sure.
Then they talked about Rudy Giuliani would be in touch with some questions about a possible past bribe might be the wrong word, but it relates to this.
Here's Joe Biden talking about how he demanded Ukraine fire a prosecutor that was closing in on Joe Biden's son's company.
And here, just let Joe Biden tell it.
Take a look at this.
I remember going over, convincing our team, our brothers, to convincing us that we should be providing for loan guarantees.
And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kyiv, and I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee.
And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor, and they didn't.
So they said, they were walking out to press conference.
I said, no, I said, I'm not going to, we're not going to give you the billion dollars.
They said, you have no authority.
You're not the president.
The president said, I said, call him.
I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting a billion dollars.
I said, you're not getting the billion.
I'm going to be leaving here.
I think it was, what, six hours?
I looked.
I said, I'm leaving in six hours.
If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money.
Well, son of a bitch.
Got fired.
And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
So if I read the transcript right, Trump was saying, can you help us look into what happened years ago?
There was no bribing in the call going forward.
It was help us clean up the swamp going backwards.
Did I read the transcript right, Joel?
No, you have to read it with a menacing voice.
And you have to twirl your mustache as you read it.
That's how this is meant to be read.
We have to stage a dramatic reading of the transcript.
No, you're absolutely right.
I mean, this is basically chit chat.
And the first person to bring up corruption is actually the Ukrainian president who says that he borrowed his idea of draining the swamp from Donald Trump.
And they're trying to drain the swamp in Ukraine.
And Trump talks about a few other things.
And then he says, oh, yeah, by the way, we've just finished this Robert Mueller investigation, and it was a total disaster.
Nothing came of it.
By the way, some of it started.
We're trying to get to the bottom of how it started in the first place.
And could you tell us what you can find out about that?
And the Ukrainian president says, okay, yeah, sure, no problem.
And then Trump says, oh, yeah.
And there was this prosecutor that got fired.
Yeah, Joe Biden's son has something to do with it.
Can you look into that?
And I'll have Attorney General Barr call you and Rudy Giuliani.
And he says, yeah, sure, no problem.
We're happy to help.
We want to be friendly with you.
And that's it.
What the left and the media here are trying to say is that because Trump mentioned military aid, as you said, earlier in the call in the context of a completely different part of the discussion talking about the EU and Russia and Ukraine and that whole conflict, they're trying to say that Trump dropped a hint earlier in the conversation, well, we gave you a lot of aid, don't we?
And then later said, you know, you can do me a little favor.
They're trying to say that there was an implied threat.
You have to be brain dead to believe that.
But you know what?
Let me be a little bit more polite about it.
It's not that they're brain dead.
It's just that they've been persuaded to look at the situation that way.
We're about here in the States at some point today to hear from the Ukrainian president himself, so he'll tell us what he thought.
But this is really something you have to stretch to find anything sinister in.
There's nothing here.
It's just nothing here.
And Democrats will regret impeaching the president over this.
I read it today.
I was sort of excited to read a declassified phone transcript.
And I left thinking, is that all there is?
And holy moly, if you're betting an impeachment on that, there ain't nothing there.
Well, listen, Joel, it's very interesting.
I remember we spoke a couple months ago, and you and I both thought Kamala Harris of California was the one to watch.
She certainly had a rough go over it.
Let me ask you one last question before I set you free and thanks for being so generous with your time.
If you had to, I appreciate you talking about impeachment, but let's just go back for 30 seconds to the Democratic presidential primaries.
If you had to guess now, and I know that's unfair to put you on the spot, but if you said, who do you think might make it through this process in first place, who would you bet on today?
I'd still, I'm keeping my money on Kamala Harris.
Really?
Long way to go.
And she can make a couple of changes, and she can be there when Biden starts to fade.
Most Hated Man in Canada00:05:01
Warren may stay at the top.
If she does, I think Democrats are in trouble.
I think enough of them will realize that, and Kamala Harris might get one more crack at it.
So I'll leave my money on that particular space.
All right.
Well, listen, always an education to catch up with you.
You've been following this like almost no one else.
I appreciate that.
I recommend to our viewers to follow you on Breitbart.com.
And it's great to see you.
Thanks again, my friend.
Thank you.
Take care.
All right.
There you have it.
Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Stay with us.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about polls showing that Trudeau is the most hated man in Canada.
Jan writes, let's hope come October 21 that Trudeau is the most hated man in Canada.
Well, the thing is, you can be the most hated man in Canada, but you can still win under our multi-party first-pass-the-post system.
I mean, I already alluded to that when I took you through the polls.
You can be despised.
I mean, Trudeau can get theoretically 10% of the vote in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, even much of BC, much of Ontario.
As long as he has enough votes in enough ridings, I mean, if you've got three or four, or in some cases, maybe even five viable candidates, you could win an entire riding with as few as 25% of the vote in that riding.
So Justin Trudeau could win an election, theoretically, with as few as 25% of the vote.
I'm not calling for a change to the first-pass-the-post system particularly.
I'm just saying it's possible for someone that everyone hates to win.
Robert writes, the contrast between Trump and our hapless prime minister could not be more stark.
Take the Howdy Modi Love Fest held by Trump and Modi before a huge crowd of adoring Americans of Indian descent as an example of Trump's success in foreign relations.
Meanwhile, the boy Blunder is persona non-gretta in India after his Griswold-style family vacation.
Canada is not back under Trudeau.
It is law.
As I said to Prem yesterday, I can't think of one single world leader who would speak so lavishly about Justin Trudeau.
Not one.
Not even in Cuba, the country that Trudeau has so abased himself to win.
They, of course, attacked our diplomats with those sonic weapons.
China, Trudeau said it was his favorite country.
They have taken two hostages.
I mean, there's not a single country in the world, maybe Iran.
But I think that, like China, they so despise and disrespect Trudeau, they wouldn't have a kind word to say about him.
It's very disappointing.
James writes, the liberal base is 30%, which is where it is now, down from 38% that got Trudeau and Harper, his majority government.
Scheer only needs 3% more.
Trudeau needs at least 8%, and I don't see it happening.
Well, what's the math?
I think it is 26 more days to the election, if I'm counting correctly.
That's a lifetime in the era of 24-7 news and Twitter and instant cycles of news.
It's not like the olden days where things took a day or two days or days to ricochet.
I think both the conservatives and the liberals are holding back their biggest bombshells about the other a little bit later.
I think it's already apparent that Trudeau will absolutely survive this blackface scandal because he's whipped his entire party to give him a pass.
Every visible minority was trotted out and told to praise Trudeau.
We saw that, I don't even caught this in the Global Mail today.
There was a candidate for the liberals in Quebec named Eva Nassif, actually an Arab woman from Lebanon originally.
You would think she would be an ultra high value candidate from a PR multiculturalism point of view, a woman candidate, Arab candidate, visible minority candidate.
From all, I frankly never heard of her before, but just skimming her social media, she looked like she was a very hardworking MP.
I know nothing about her.
But in the Global Mail today, in an enormous story, she says, because she wouldn't tweet her support for Trudeau as a feminist, and because someone saw her hugging Jody Wilson-Raybold, she was banned from running as a liberal.
Get that.
She didn't praise Trudeau as enough of a feminist.
And she dared to hug Wilson-Raybold, so she was fired as a candidate.
And that's what they surely did to every visible minority in the party, too.
Say that Justin Trudeau is a great respecter of visible minorities despite his blackface, or you'll be fired like Eva Nassif also.
Just incredible.
Well, folks, that's our stories for today.
Until tomorrow.
On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.