Ezra Levant’s stopdeplatforming.com launches lawsuits against bullies—like NDP’s Jessica Littlewood and Progress Alberta’s Rachel Notley—who pressured Edmonton theater owner Mike Brarr to cancel a book event, citing 1853’s Lumley v. Guy precedent. The NBA and ESPN face backlash for suppressing Hong Kong criticism under China’s pressure, while Democrats push tax-exempt revocations for religious institutions opposing same-sex marriage and expand judicial control. Levant warns Canada’s private-sector censorship could worsen, comparing it to UK’s stricter measures, and vows to sue Rebel News’s deplatformers using company funds. The fight aims to expose systemic free speech erosion ahead of the 2020 U.S. election. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I, with the passage of a few days' time, think about and describe and explain my plan to fight against deplatforming.
I think I've got the idea.
I think I've got the idea.
It's a legal idea.
And it's to sue the bullies who bullied the theater owner to deplatform us.
There's an old tort called Inducement to Breach a Contract.
I'll explain it in this.
I'm not going to get too legalistic.
Don't worry.
I won't be dropping a lot of fancy pants in law.
I'll read a little explanation of a case that's very interesting, where this law came from, about 150 years ago.
And I'll tell you my plans to apply the law today.
Anyways, I hope you like it.
Can I encourage you to become a premium subscriber of The Rebel?
Just go to premium.rebelnews.com, $8 a month.
You get all the video versions of these podcasts, plus Sheila Gunread Show, David Menzies' show, and you help us fight the good fight.
all right here's the podcast tonight i'm officially launching my new project stop d platforming.com It's time to fight back for free speech.
It's October 14th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
Deplatforming and Legal Battles00:13:05
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Last week started with a great win for media freedom.
Justin Trudeau's hand-picked Election Debates Commission, in collusion with the government-funded parliamentary press gallery, had rejected the accreditation requests of two rebel journalists, Kian Becky and David Menzies, and our friend Andrew Lawton from True North.
They rejected us at the last possible moment on the Friday, and of course the debate was on Monday.
So we went to court on Monday morning to seek an emergency injunction.
Trudeau sent five government lawyers to oppose our emergency application.
But Miracle of Miracles, we won.
Justice Russell Zinn issued a court order directing Trudeau's staff to accredit the three journalists.
And boy, did they ever do a great job.
You could see the politicians of every party hadn't faced such tough questions on the campaign trail in a long time.
But the meanest reaction was from rival journalists, especially from Trudeau, CBC State Broadcaster.
They hated everything about Keen and David and Andrew being there.
They hated the fact that conservative-leaning journalists even exist, that they were allowed into this debate, that they were allowed to ask questions, and that every network in the country that was running the debates live actually broadcast the questions.
Boy, those rival journalists were steaming mad now.
I don't care if they're mad at us.
Frankly, we're frequently mad at them.
It's your civil right to be mad at journalists or politicians.
I recommend it, in fact.
And you can ignore journalists you don't like, or you can challenge them or rebut them or do a better job than them, whatever.
Well, not quite, because you can't quite ignore the CBC stuff to pay for it out of your taxes, I guess.
Now, the problem wasn't that our rivals have a rivalry with us.
It's that without the court order, we wouldn't have even been allowed into the process, not even allowed into the building.
As I showed you last week, Trudeau's commission accredited foreigners, including from the state broadcaster of the OPEC dictatorship, Al Jazeera.
So they let anyone in except us.
They didn't want to even let us share a national platform with them.
That word platform, a platform is what it sounds like.
It could be a stage, for example.
It could also be a website.
Facebook, Twitter, those are called platforms.
The difference between a platform and a publisher is that a platform is just a neutral canvas upon which anyone can paint anything.
It's like a bulletin board.
You can attack a notice to it.
There's really no editor.
A publisher, as opposed to a platform, a publisher creates or edits or curates content.
takes a point of view, chooses, makes decisions about what's good and what's bad.
So a newspaper is a publisher.
A payphone is a platform.
It doesn't determine what you can say or not into the phone.
It's neutral.
That's sort of obvious, but deplatforming is the tactic of the new authoritarian left to ban you from even once neutral places where you used to have the right to go.
You can't really expect a local newspaper to run your letter to the editor if they don't want to.
I mean, they might have a journalistic or legal reason why they should, but at the end of the day, it's a private publication that gets to choose what they put in it.
By contrast, you can assume that you're allowed to say whatever you like when you pick up a phone at a phone booth.
But deplatforming is the radical idea that no, you can't.
Now nothing is neutral.
Nothing is public.
Everything can be blocked or banned if you don't think correctly.
It's radical in itself, and it's corrosive, and then it's a substitute for the normal way.
We have disagreed with each other in the past.
No need to debate anyone on a platform like before.
Now just remove the platform from them and they're gone.
I note that there was an all-candidates debate recently in the election, but the PPC candidate was banned from participating because the mosque that was hosting the debate said the party was beyond the pale, beyond even debating.
What's the purpose of a debate if not to debate, though?
Why bother having a debate if you've already decided without a debate by ruling one party out?
Now I note that the PPC candidate in question is Muslim himself, our friend Saleem Mansoor.
That's deplatforming.
It's un-Canadian, by the way.
I'm not saying every single debate forum has to have every single candidate on it.
Sometimes you have 20 people running for mayor, for example, but you can see the trend.
And now that the leaders' debates are over, I'm certain that we will go right back to being deplatformed by our fellow journalists and by all the parties.
I should point out it was at an Andrew Scheer event, not a liberal event, that David Menzies was handcuffed.
I see the gray area with the mosque form.
I mean, it was their own mosque, I guess.
I don't see the gray area with a national debate run by the government.
But the deplatforming that happened to me on Thursday at Edmonton's Princess Theater was the clearest of all cases.
There wasn't any wiggle room there, no gray area there.
I had a contract with the theater.
It was a done deal.
I had paid the full fee in advance.
The analogy here isn't even a bulletin board or some public park.
It was a contract for money between me and the theater owner.
We had done it before with great success.
A couple of years ago, I know the owner.
He liked doing business with us.
So we had a contract.
That's not us just hopping up in a town square on a fruit box and yapping.
That's a contract.
And yet he breached the contract.
I don't propose to rehearse how it all went down.
I told some of the story last week on YouTube.
But basically the owner, who himself is an immigrant to Canada from India, his name is Mike Brarr.
He told me he was starting to get threats and pressure from NDP activists in Edmonton, and not just from nobodies.
The former NDP MLA, Jessica Littlewood, was pressuring the theater to cancel us and said no one should rent to us.
There's an activist from Progress Alberta, Rachel Notley's pressure group, doing the same thing.
These are official people with high stations in public life.
There's a professor that was doing the same thing.
There was a hairdresser.
A whole whack of people from every walk of life were pressuring this poor businessman.
I talked with him on the phone, and he said he was getting so many hostile phone calls.
He couldn't sleep at night.
He was so terrified, worried, scared.
So he canceled them.
And by canceled, I mean, he breached his contract to me.
He kept the doors locked.
I told him he didn't need to worry.
We hired a private security team to make sure no ruffians came.
And no ruffians did come.
There was all those really tough anti-fun losers who were really butch online.
None of them bothered to show up.
Just one crank known around Edmonton as Rick Shaw Dave, really the village idiot.
200 supporters came and one kook.
There literally was nothing to be afraid of.
And even if there was, I had worked with police and they had a big presence right there.
So I wasn't just deplatformed as in denied a platform in the first place.
I mean, I respect Mike Brarar's right to have said to me in the first place, we don't want to rent to you to begin with.
I think I would respect that.
At least I'm not sure if it violates my civil rights in some way.
I'd have to think about it more.
But I guess had he said that at the beginning, at least I wouldn't have spent time and money advertising and promoting that venue and buying a plane ticket there and getting all my friends to show up there.
Had he just said no in the first place, but he didn't say no.
He said yes.
And I paid him a lot of money.
And we even had a discussion about freedom of speech and he agreed to protect mine.
But he didn't.
He breached his contract to me.
So I have a legal remedy against him.
I can sue him for any damages.
But I can also sue the people who pressured him to break his contract.
I found this summary of the law on the website of a Canadian law firm called Waws and Lundell out of BC.
It's sort of a, you know, law for beginners kind of publication.
Let me quote it to you, okay?
I think it's very good.
Although the tort of inducing breach of contract is rooted in medieval law of master and servant, the modern version stems from the 1853 House of Lords case, Lumley versus Guy.
In Lumley, the plaintiff had a contract with an opera singer, Ms. Wagner, to sing exclusively at his theater.
The defendant, who wanted to showcase Ms. Wagner's talents at his own theater and for his own benefit, persuaded Ms. Wagner to break her contract with the plaintiff and sing exclusively for him.
The plaintiff took action against the defendant, and although the defendant was not a party to the contract, he was found liable.
That's what inducing a breach of contract is usually about.
Someone tries to steal someone away.
A professional athlete, a top executive, a brilliant scientist, a record label, stealing a musician away from a rival record label.
But it absolutely would apply to my case too, even though it's not like the bullies who bullied Mike Brar got any economic benefit out of it.
They didn't steal the theater away for their own show, for example.
They were just being malicious.
In my mind, that actually makes it worse.
They were just being purely destructive.
It's not like they were even trying to do something better than me.
They were just trying to destroy my event by bullying my business partner, Mr. Brar.
That's what he was.
That's what the theater was.
So I met with our Edmonton lawyers, and we came up with a plan.
We're just going to sue everyone, everyone who was dumb enough to reveal themselves as a bully, bullying Mike Brar to breach the contract.
So those who were the most cowardly, who made anonymous threats to Mike Brarr, the Scarum, I'll probably never catch them, but Jessica Littlewood, Professor Lavelle, all the other people who worked for Notley, you bet I got their names because they're under some weird impression that they can harm businesses like ours and like Mike Brar's just because they're more noble in their minds, but they're not more noble.
It's not noble to stop a book launch.
That's like a form of book burning, right?
It's really gross.
And it did dawn on me that Mike Brar is a minority immigrant.
I'm Jewish and my book is being metaphorically burned.
I think that's not a good look on the NDP.
If a judge would be appalled by one opera company stealing a singer from another opera company for profit, I can only imagine that a judge would be appalled by someone wrecking a book launch just out of censorship and spite.
That's so contrary to the public interest, it hardly needs to be argued.
But that is my plan.
Ironically, the fact that I had a platform and it was taken away is precisely what gives me the legal standing to sue all of these harassers for the damages they cause.
And I plan to sue every single one because I truly believe it's just a small number of bullies who have never been stood up to before, ever.
I doubt there are 50 people in all of Edmonton, a city of a million, who behave this way.
50 people are enough, though, to make a city of a million unfree, at least when it comes to books or political events.
That's a kind of tyranny.
I'm not about to be tyrannized or bullied.
They need to be taught what they did was wrong and that they can't do it with impunity.
I believe that by suing these people, 10, 20, 50 of them, whatever, they'll get a real education about right and wrong that they never got from their mama.
I believe they won't be so quick to deplatform anyone again, certainly not me.
And I believe that it will serve as a larger deterrent to this awful authoritarian practice of deplatforming.
I don't think this approach could work, say, for Salim Mansour and that mosque because he didn't have a contract with them that was breached.
But it would sure work with someone who tried to have a conference and had a contract, but bullies had that conference canceled.
Well, not if they just tried, if the conference was actually canceled.
So I'm excited about this.
It was a bad thing that was done to me, but it's a great way to fight back by using the law.
It's a teachable moment, and it's a moment of counter-revolution.
For a decade, we've seen the speedy infringement of our freedom of speech.
I think this is a way to fight back.
I'm setting up a website at stopdeplatforming.com.
It's just very basic for now.
But over the weeks and months ahead, you'll see more.
And it's where we'll post all of our news about the lawsuit.
And of course, we'll post the lawsuit itself.
And it won't surprise you to hear, we need your help to pay for this.
I don't think we'll win much in the lawsuit in terms of damages.
It'll surely cost us many times that in terms of legal fees.
But this isn't about money.
It's about stopping the bullies one at a time or 50 at a time and standing up for platforms for everyone, even people with whom we disagree.
If you can help chip in, please do at stopdeplatforming.com.
And if you hear of anyone else who has a contract with a restaurant or a bar or a theater or a convention center, and that contract was breached because bullies bullied a venue owner, let me know.
I'd love to see lawsuits like this everywhere.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, things are exciting up here in Canada.
We're less than two weeks away to the federal election.
I have credible sources, friends with access to party polling who say it could go a liberal win.
Some people say it will go a conservative win.
Some people say it'll be a coalition.
I have no idea how it's going to end up, but we're not the only people in the world with politics.
Our friends in the United States do because, of course, their 2020 election campaign is in full tilt.
President Trump went to Minnesota, home of, amongst others, Ilhan Omar, for a big old rally, huge turnout.
But it so often happens when the local mayor and constabulary are Democrats, well, they let antifarioters have their way.
Check out this shocking footage.
I don't see a cop in sight here.
Just wrecking stuff, burning stuff, assaulting people.
This is not just condoned.
This is positively the street teams.
There's a hammer and sickle there.
Yeah, that's what it was like in Minnesota.
Joining us now to talk about the excitement in Minnesota, but also what's going on in Congress with the impeachment drive is our friend Joel Pollack, Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart.com.
Joe, great to see you.
Great to see you, too.
You know, I remember when Donald Trump had a few election rallies.
I think he had a big one in Chicago.
I'm thinking back to the year 2016, if I'm remembering my cities right.
And the whole place devolved into a massive riot.
Same thing went to California.
When the Democrats control the police, they like riots, don't they?
Well, there are some more interesting details.
Your memory is pretty good.
What happened in Chicago was that left-wing protesters crashed the venue for the rally and infiltrated the stadium where it was supposed to happen.
And so the rally had to be called off because of poor security by local police.
And they blamed Trump.
The local authorities blamed Trump, saying it was his fault that all these rioters had shown up.
And to their great discredit, some of his Republican rivals also said that Trump had caused this.
It was really a turning point because I think there are some conservatives who were on the fence about Trump and might have preferred Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, who saw that Trump's rivals were basically trashing free speech and said, you know what, they've had it with these other conservative rivals.
They're sticking with Trump.
It was really an important watershed moment in the internal debate among conservatives in the United States.
A couple months later, Trump came to California before the California primary, which was supposed to be the scene of the final battle between Trump and Ted Cruz, although Ted Cruz lost Indiana a week or two before, which meant that he left the race.
So California was not as competitive as it ought to have been or could have been.
But Trump came to California anyway, and he had a large rally in San Jose, and I was there, actually.
I covered the rally.
And the police decided not to hang around the venue itself.
They set up a perimeter around the venue.
What they allowed to happen by doing so was they allowed rioters, anti-Trump rioters, to harass and attack, physically attack Trump supporters as they were leaving the venue.
I personally witnessed the anti-Trump rioters burning an American flag and shouting radical slogans and things like that.
Other people standing at other parts of the complex witnessed Trump supporters being hit with bottles, being chased.
People in the parking lot were chased.
Their cars were attacked.
Some of this happened in full view of the media.
There was a woman in a Trump football jersey who was pelted with eggs in front of television cameras.
And so this was something the mainstream media couldn't ignore because they were filming it.
And the mayor, Sam Licardo, who's a bit of a failure because San Jose has a massive pension problem and he couldn't even manage a flood.
One of the rivers near his city basically overflowed its banks a few months later and caused toxic flooding in the city.
And he did not provide adequate warning to residents.
So he's not a very good mayor, although being a Democrat, he got elected anyway.
But Mayor Sam Licardo blamed Trump for the riot instead of taking responsibility for the poor deployment of his police force, which had been told to stand back from the rioters.
So we are now back in that space.
Minneapolis is run by a guy named Jacob Fry, who's a first-term left-wing mayor.
And he declared Thursday love Trump's hate day.
He opposed Trump having a rally in Minneapolis.
And initially, the Target Center, which is the venue Trump was going to have the rally in, they wanted to charge Trump more than half a million dollars for additional security.
Trump pointed out that Obama had never had to have that kind of security when he was president, and eventually they backed down.
But what happened after the rally, the rally itself was very peaceful, and law enforcement responded very quickly to protesters in the arena and that sort of thing.
But what happened afterwards was several hundred Antifa protesters descended and began attacking Trump supporters, almost exactly like San Jose.
They would surround one or two people and assault them, attack them, push them, steal their hats, throw objects at them.
When they had several dozen hats, they put them in a pile and they burned them.
They also removed police barricades as riot police basically stood by.
Then riot police used chemical irritants to try to disperse the crowd.
Eventually, it did disperse.
But the mayor didn't protect the people of his city.
And judging from reports on social media, if the weather had been a little better because it was raining, apparently, more chaos would have ensued because you would have had more rioters.
Judges and the First Amendment00:07:27
That's just unacceptable.
And it's unfortunate that it happened, but also a sign of how little the left cares for free speech.
While that was going on, Beto O'Rourke at an LGBTQ forum hosted by CNN here in Los Angeles was talking about how he wanted to remove the tax-exempt status of religious organizations and institutions that didn't allow same-sex marriage, basically declaring war on every church, mosque, and synagogue and temple in this country.
Because once you remove their tax-exempt status, people can't contribute to those religious institutions without getting the tax write-off for doing so, which is part of the system we have here, which means that you're effectively going to be bankrupting a lot of these churches and synagogues and so forth.
So Beto O'Rourke and the Democrats are now attacking the First Amendment, not just in terms of freedom of speech, but also in terms of freedom of religion.
And Joe Biden is complaining that the New York Times and other outlets are publishing anti-Biden op-eds, like the one from Breitbart's own Peter Schweitzer, who's the initial reporter who did the digging on Biden's Ukrainian connections.
They're mad that the New York Times published an op-ed by Schweitzer, which didn't just attack Biden, also attacked Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for his wife's ties to Chinese business interests.
And Schweitzer basically said, we have a corrupt system in Washington that both parties take advantage of, and we need to do something about that.
Biden objected to that, saying the New York Times was siding against him and shouldn't print this sort of thing.
So they're now attacking the First Amendment right to press freedom as well.
So Democrats basically are coming for whatever freedoms you have.
Well, you know, that's at least you have the First Amendment to defend yourself with until it's gone.
Here in Canada, we lack it.
And it's funny because just in recent days, we've had book events deplatformed.
We had the Federal Debate Commission try and ban us.
We had a federal court order us in.
So hold the line in the first ditch there, Joel, because it's easier to fight in the first ditch than in the last ditch.
If your First Amendment is gone, you will lose most of these fights as we have up here.
Well, many of us believe we have a First Amendment because we have a Second Amendment.
I mean, that's very important to the American way of thinking about freedom.
Because you have an armed citizenry, there's a limit to what the government can do.
Now, if Beto O'Rourke tries to close the churches down by going after their tax-exempt status unless they perform same-sex marriages, he'll run into opposition in the courts.
But there are a lot of judges Obama put on there, and there are a lot of judges that a future Democratic will put on there who will not see the First Amendment the same way.
Right now, in fact, the Supreme Court is considering whether the term sex in the law banning discrimination on the basis of sex also applies to transgender people.
If you are a male and decide to be a female, are you now protected by sexual discrimination laws that were passed to protect women from discrimination?
And the court is trying to figure that out.
If you can allow the courts to do that, well, perhaps Beethoven O'Rourke has a point.
Perhaps you can't discriminate against same-sex couples at the altar in your church or at your synagogue or in your mosque or whatever.
So we don't know where this is going.
And it's a reminder to Americans of how important this next election is because really everything is on the table.
Yeah, that's amazing.
And Trump, for his flaws, a counterweight is his tremendous strength with the help of the Senate in approving and affirm, what's the phrase, affirming and voting for so many judges who are truly conservative in nature.
Would you agree with me that Trump has not only affirmed a great number of judges, but they are ideologically strong?
Well, it's a really interesting story, and I'll give you the short version of it.
Democrats grew frustrated with Republican opposition in the Senate to some of their radical judges.
So they changed the rules of the Senate so that you only needed a simple majority to confirm federal judges.
They did not expect to lose the 2016 elections.
When they did, and you suddenly had a Republican president, the Republicans said, thank you very much.
We are now going to take advantage of that rule change that you implemented, and we're going to pass as many judges as we possibly can.
And that's what Trump has done.
I think he's now confirmed over 180 federal judges.
So he's really remaking the federal judiciary.
Now Democrats, in response, are talking about packing the courts.
They want to change the structure of the courts because there are too many judges who have views with which Democrats disagree.
What are those views?
Well, the list of judges that was prepared for Trump by a conservative organization called the Federalist Society includes people who commit to interpret the Constitution and the law as written.
They're not going to say you can't have liberal laws, but they are going to say you have to pass them through the legislature.
You can't just create those laws from the bench.
And that's essentially the commitment that conservative judges are making.
And those are the judges Trump is appointing.
So it's not that Trump is ruling out same-sex marriage or any of this stuff.
He's just saying if you want to do that, you've got to do it through the legislature and not through the courts.
And the left doesn't like that because they fear the public is not on their side and they want to put as many elite lawyers on the bench as possible because they tend to have left-wing opinions.
So that's why Trump has succeeded.
And that federalist society is really interesting.
I've been a member of the Federalist Society and Trump basically did a deal with them, you know, the consummate dealmaker.
He basically said in 2016 in the primary when there was some conservative misgiving about Trump, he said, look, I'll do a deal with you.
Conservatives, I know you know that I'm a former Democrat and I've had liberal social views.
You know what?
I'm going to give you, essentially, control over my list of judges.
You guys come up with the list and I will nominate people from your list.
And he has followed through on that deal, which is one of the reasons that conservatives are so happy with President Trump.
He has made that deal, kept that deal, and Democrats are now trying to replicate it on their side by coming up with lists of liberal judges who would be appointed to the courts in the event a Democrat wins and the Democrats take control of the Senate.
So that's the story of how we got to where we are.
But the Democrats, including major presidential candidates like Pete Rutijej and others, they're saying they want to expand the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to as many as 15, and they want to allow those judges to choose their own replacements.
They want to take the choice of judicial appointments away from the legislature and give it to the courts themselves, which is how judges are chosen in some countries.
And it has resulted in runaway power for the courts unchecked by the Democratic majority.
So that's what Democrats want to do, and they hope it will create a liberal or left-wing, really, not liberal, left-wing judiciary.
And, you know, we'll see.
It's all coming down to 2020.
Wow.
Wow.
I got one last question for you.
I've learned so much from what you've just said here.
And in Canada, we don't vet our judges in public.
It's all secretive.
It's very undemocratic.
And in Canada, we have a misplaced submission and subservience to our judges.
In America, judges, everyone knows judges have a political nature, so they bring to it a political accountability, a political scrutiny.
In Canada, our judges are even more political than yours, but there's this aura around them that they are high priests who cannot be questioned.
NBA, China, and Free Speech00:07:29
I think it's a great flaw, not just in our Constitution, but in our media culture.
That's a branch of government, the judiciary, but we don't hold it to any account.
And that's, I think, a weakness of Canada.
I want to shift back to the riots for a moment, if I may, because I have a theory about anti-black bloc and why George Soros, in the days and weeks after Trump's win in 2016, publicly committed tens, I think it was even over $100 million to street activism.
And I think it's this.
To associate the word Trump with controversy, chaos, and danger.
If you support Trump, not only will you personally be at risk if you wear a red Make America Great Again hat, if you go to a Trump rally, not only will you personally be at risk, but wherever Trump goes, there's a riot, there's someone being punched, there's some car burning, that it's to create a sense of crisis in general, but crisis and controversy attached to Trump itself.
And that is a psychological, a mass psychology tactic from the left.
That's my theory.
Maybe that's obvious.
Well, it's not even a theory.
You're 100% correct.
And in fact, it predates the 2016 election, or it happened during the election.
It predates election day.
But that's specifically what the Democrats did.
And James O'Keefe, the conservative filmmaker, exposed it because he got several high-level Democratic operatives on tape saying that that was their goal.
They would infiltrate activists into Trump rallies and other rallies, not just Trump, other Republican events, and they would instigate fights.
And they would have someone there to record on video.
Then they'd make sure the video made its way to the mainstream media.
And the idea was to create a sense, in their words, of anarchy around anything happening with Trump and the Republicans.
So that when people thought of Trump, they thought of instability, danger, chaos, exactly as you said.
That was the plan.
They have a term for it.
They called it bird-dogging.
And that's what they did.
And that's what they continue to do.
The problem for them is that all the Trump supporters are onto what they're doing.
And Trump is also very good at setting the stage.
When you've got a president who can command the audience, he does, he's very good at setting things up.
And he set it up in Minneapolis very, very well as a battle over free speech.
You're either going to let us have free speech.
We can come together and express ourselves, or you're not.
And it's clear that even though Minneapolis reluctantly agreed to allow this rally to happen, they did not protect the people who attended it.
And they allowed these thugs to attack them.
Now people may be reluctant to go to future political rallies.
I can tell you one thing, though.
People who know about what happened are going to be more inclined to go to the polls and vote for Donald Trump because people sense that if this sort of thing is allowed to take place without any sort of repercussions politically, then it's going to continue and become worse.
And we're going to live in a society based on fear.
The other thing that's making that clear to people is the NBA, you know, the National Basketball Association.
Congratulations again to the Toronto Raptors.
But, you know, we've got the NBA over in China right now and they're shutting down American journalists who want to ask questions of the basketball players about the crackdown on their free speech rights by China.
China is not allowing any sort of criticism of their policies in Hong Kong.
And an NBA general manager for the Houston Rockets made a comment about Hong Kong while he was traveling with the team in Asia.
And he was immediately rebuked by another NBA official, and they've wrestled with it.
And the Chinese basically said, we're not going to air any more preseason games.
And China is basically trying to shut the NBA down in China, even though it's very popular there.
And it's exposed the degree to which the NBA was in cahoots with the Chinese regime in suppressing freedom of speech, but not just the NBA.
ESPN, the big sports network here, they've been suppressing discussion about this.
And a whole bunch of other American companies have been curtailing free speech activities because of the demands of the Chinese government.
So Americans are waking up to what Donald Trump has forced everyone to see, which is that doing business with China comes at a major cost to our own freedoms.
And so people are aware that this is at stake very much in the 2020 election.
Wow.
I tell you, we didn't even have time to talk about impeachment, but I'm so glad we focus on free speech.
That's something that's important to us up here.
I also travel to the United Kingdom from time to time.
I'm interested in a former journalist of ours named Tommy Robinson.
I see that the UK is further down the road of censorship than Canada is, and Canada is further down the road of censorship to the United States.
And so just as I use the UK as a cautionary tale, a warning for Canada, I encourage you, Joel, to look at what's happening in Canada from our crackdown on social media to our crackdown on Islamophobia to the deplatforming and shrinking of the bandwidth of political diversity.
Look at us as a cautionary tale, because if you don't dig in your heels, it will get worse.
And I hope you don't let it get worse down there.
Well, you know, with us, we have a new challenge.
It's not the government suppressing freedom of speech yet, anyway.
It's really the private sector, large companies, social media giants, and the NBA.
I mean, who thought of them that way?
But they're always quick to criticize Trump and quick to side with social justice and all that stuff.
But when it comes to China, they're quiet in general.
And so we're starting to realize that.
You know, that's a good point.
And that's something we've learned, too.
The governments like to, if anything, contract out their censorship to the social media companies.
And you're right, the NBA, that's just pure crony capitalism.
They'd rather cut a deal with rich Beijing than uphold the system of freedom that gave them their economic growth in America.
Joel, thanks for your time today.
Keep up the fight down there.
Look forward to keeping in touch with you as the U.S. 2020 race unfolds.
Thank you so much.
All right, there you have it.
Joel Pollack, the senior editor-at-large at breitbart.com.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Hello, great to see you again.
Thank you for joining us on this Canadian Thanksgiving.
I know I've talked a little bit on YouTube about deplatforming, but I thought I'd do a proper show on it.
Look, we started Rebel News to actually do news, do journalism, reporting commentary, some activism, sure.
We didn't start it to get into a bunch of litigation.
But our enemies have brought that to us.
They call themselves our enemies.
They don't want to debate with us.
We're not their counterparts.
They want to silence us and deplatform us.
But I believe in the form of an inducement to breach contract lawsuit, I believe I can push back and root out the problem and maybe stop this trend.
I'm willing to bet on it.
I'm going to put the money of our company into suing the people who caused us to be deplatformed.
I do need your help.
If you can go to stopdeplatforming.com, I'd appreciate it.