Massachusetts lawmaker Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa proposes banning the word "bitch" in public discourse, with violations reportable by witnesses—sparking outrage from free-speech advocate Ezra Levant, who calls it unenforceable and hypocritical while defending his past use of "slut" to critique Pierre Trudeau’s alleged misogyny. Levant and Matthew Johnson revive The Western Standard (2004–2019) as an online platform, pushing for a "strong and free Western Canada," including sovereignty or independence, amid claims of Toronto media bias. With $10/month memberships, they fund independent journalism, rejecting censorship while warning that Alberta’s separation could provoke federal retaliation, underscoring the tension between regional autonomy and national control. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I take a short break from politics and talk about a strange bill introduced in the legislature of Massachusetts to ban a word.
Just one word, weirdly.
What do you think the word is?
I'll tell you in a second.
Hey, in the meantime, can you consider becoming a premium subscriber?
Go to premium.rebelnews.com.
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All right.
Without any further ado, here's the show about the word so bad they want to ban it in Boston.
Tonight, it's mean to be mean, but should government ban meanness?
One politician thinks so.
It's October 23rd, 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 publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I saw this story out of Massachusetts, and I'm going to talk about it because maybe we need a very short break from the Canadian election.
Oh, we will keep talking about the Canadian election and its reverberations, but I thought this was an interesting story.
And although it's American, I think the principle is universal across the Anglosphere.
Look at this.
Bill to ban the B word heard at the statehouse.
Which B word?
Bill?
Ban?
Bully?
No, no, the word bitch.
I'm not sure why the Boston Herald is suddenly so shy about using that word.
This Google search shows they've published the word nearly 400 times.
Sorry if that word is hard on your ears.
It's not a swear, by the way.
It can definitely be offensive.
Here's Webster's dictionary on the subject.
They say there are four different meanings of the word.
The first one is the female of the dog or some other carnivorous mammals.
So it's just a technical term, a scientific term.
That's what Webster says.
The second one is the offensive term, a malicious, spiteful, or overbearing woman.
The third is a generic term that Webster doesn't even call offensive, something that is extremely difficult, objectionable, or unpleasant.
And then they give an example.
Aspirin overdoses are a bitch to treat.
Pamela Grimm.
So they're quoting a female author using the term in that neutral way.
The fourth is how I usually use the word, if I use it, to complain.
Informal complaint.
My biggest bitch with all of CBS golf is that there's no personalization.
Chuck Howard.
Now, there are other uses of this word, obviously, and I don't propose to go into all of them because that's not really my point other than to say the obvious.
The word can be used in a great many ways, including in an endearing way by women to take ownership of the positive aspects of the word, I think.
That's words for you.
Context is a lot.
We can all agree that the N word is racist, but it's also ubiquitous in rap music sung by black musicians.
So are you really going to ban it?
And who gets to decide that?
This goofy guy?
That's the guy who introduced the bill.
Let's look at the story a little bit.
A bill to outlaw the B word, the term for a female dog that is commonly used to slander women, is being slammed on both ends of the political spectrum as a case of government overreach and censorship.
While I detest the use of the B word and the N-word and the word fag, etc., I love the Constitution more and question the constitutionality of bills like this, said Arlene Isaacson, co-chairwoman of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus.
The concern is specifically about the right to free speech, including speech that I hate.
Well, that's pretty encouraging, isn't it?
Not only that the first quote in this news story is in defense of free speech, but that it's from a woman and a gay woman, no less.
That's very encouraging to me.
Here's more from the story.
It's a very, very slippery slope, and at the end of the slippery slope is the anti-Webster's, the dictionary of words we can never use, conservative political consultant Chip Jones told the Herald, we continually replace the right and responsibility of people to defend themselves from physical and emotional harm with government intervention.
When we replace an individual's right or responsibility to defend themselves, we weaken people in society.
That's pretty smart.
I mean, seriously, you will never be able to ban words in real life.
I'm sorry.
Maybe instead of pretending that you can, how about equipping people with the skills to cope with real life and either ignore idiots or learn how to respond?
Here's the Massachusetts legislature homepage for this bill.
It really is a bill I checked.
It's called an act regarding the use of offensive words, except for they have words in plural.
It's just one word they're banning.
The operative section of the bill is so short, it's just two sentences long.
I'll read the whole thing to you.
A person who uses the word bitch directed at another person to accost, annoy, degrade, or demean the other person shall be considered to be a disorderly person in violation of this section and shall be subject to the penalties provided in subsections A and B.
A violation of this subsection may be reported by the person to whom the offensive language was directed at or by any witness to such incident.
That's it.
That's the whole proposed law.
I just read the whole thing to you.
Now, I showed you an example a moment ago of how it's possible for the word bitch to be used positively, just like it's possible for gay people or black people or other minorities to take a pejorative word and take ownership of it and to use it on themselves to take the power away.
Language is complicated that way, isn't it?
You could have two women who are best friends and they could greet each other by using the word bitch.
You really could.
It's an inside joke.
It's a form of compliment, whatever.
I don't need to explain this.
No one needs to explain how they talk.
But if this law were to pass, and I don't think it will, simply accosting someone, that was the word they used, with the word bitch is now against the law.
And look at the second sentence in the law.
If you are called the word bitch, you can report the crime, says the law, but so can anyone else who just sees or hears it.
Seriously, two friends or two enemies or two kids or two people, free citizens in America, no less, home of the First Amendment, could use the word bitch.
And anyone who hears that can become a police informant and get them charged.
That's the plain meaning of the bill.
I read it to you.
It's just two sentences long.
I read you the whole thing.
Is that the worst word in the world, by the way?
I can think of other sexist words that are far worse.
Frankly, I spend some time in the UK and they use the C word over there so casually, it would make your hair stand up like a porcupine.
Why isn't this legislator, Dan Hunt, seeking to ban that word?
Not that I want him to, of course, but what a weird, weird choice to ban just one word, even though the law says it'll ban word z.
Like I say, like Webster's dictionary says, the word bitch has inoffensive meanings and has offensive meanings, both.
I guess it's like the word dick, which can be a nickname for someone named Richard.
It can also mean a detective.
It could also mean an idiot.
Or a mean idiot.
Pretty much the female, the male version of the word bitch, I guess.
And of course, it's slang for male generalists too.
I'm not trying to tell you every dirty word I know.
I'm just making the point.
Why is this weird censor, Dan Hunt, being such a dick about things?
And why only about one word that he really, really doesn't like?
Is this some form of weird virtue signaling to prove what a male feminist he is?
That's my hunch.
He'll abide any other derogatory word.
Any racist words, homophobic words, even anti-male slurs, there are some.
But the one thing you just can't say around him is the word bitch, or he'll call the police even if he has to do it personally.
Hey, can I call Dan Hunt a bitch?
Maybe in the sense of whining and complaining, right?
It doesn't have the sexist connotation then, does it?
I remember back at Sun News when I did a video about Justin Trudeau kissing another man's bride on her wedding day.
He was a stranger to them.
He just encountered them and he literally went up to the bride and kissed her in the place of the groom.
How super gross was that?
I talked a bit on that show at Sun News about how Pierre Trudeau set such a terrible example for Justin, how Pierre endlessly cheated on Margaret Trudeau and then how she cheated on him back.
I can't remember if I reported back then about how Pierre Trudeau would beat Margaret Trudeau physically so badly that she'd have a black eye the next morning.
All of this was reported at the time, by the way.
None of this is secret.
None of this is news, really.
And I suggested that Justin Trudeau had grown up with such a terrible experience, terrible role models about how men and women, husbands and wives, are supposed to act towards each other.
Maybe that's why Trudeau today is a groper who puts his hands on any woman he wants to because Pierre Trudeau taught him he could.
He's just weird, really, like his dad.
Because you're very handsome.
Thank you, Justin.
I think because.
Yeah, he's just a weird guy.
Now, Trudeau, senior, Pierre Trudeau, it was really macho to cheat on his wife, Margaret.
And weirdly, Margaret Trudeau herself used that exact word in newspaper stories about how Pierre Trudeau would beat her, but then be really macho afterwards.
She said that.
That's so gross.
That's the home Justin Trudeau grew up in, that it's macho to beat a woman.
And if you're part of that macho culture, you might call Pierre Trudeau a stud, S-T-U-D.
He's a stud.
He slept with any woman he wanted to, and he put those little ladies in their place, punched them if he had to.
That was Pierre Trudeau.
But in my Sun News video, I flipped the script because if you're a woman who sleeps around, you get called a different name, don't you?
So I decided to use that word to describe Pierre Trudeau, not Margaret Trudeau, but Pierre Trudeau.
I call Pierre Trudeau a slightly different word than stud.
Still a four-letter word that starts with S, but I called him, instead of S-T-U-D, I'd called him S-L-U-T.
Called him a slut, which is a very odd thing to call a man, but why not?
Would it not be sexist to only use that word against women, which I have never done, actually?
And holy cow, did Justin Trudeau blow his top when I called Pierre Trudeau a slut?
He complained to Brian Mulroney, I'm not kidding, who called the boss of Sun News who was ordered to apologize to Justin Trudeau.
Of course, I didn't apologize to Trudeau.
The TV station ran something on the screen that's their right to do so.
But you see my point?
But that was Justin Trudeau just being nervous about the issue of his treatment of women being discussed politically.
Now he's prime minister.
I'm sure he still calls up the heads of TV stations, but now he might call up police too if he likes.
In fact, part of his new election platform is censorship of social media.
Social media companies now only have 24 hours to ban something when he complains, when his platform becomes enacted.
So yeah, this back to Massachusetts, this buffoonish bully in Boston wants to ban a B word.
That's a lot of B's, eh?
The buffoonish bully in Boston wants to ban the B word.
It sounds like a Dr. Seuss book.
But it's virtue signaling on his part, I think.
It's hypocritical for sure.
It's weird.
It's unenforceable, I think.
But it shows the mentality of leftists.
They want to lock you up.
They want people to literally call the cops on you for using words they don't like, even if everyone else is fine or fine enough with them.
I don't think I've ever called someone a bitch on TV before.
And the only person I've ever called a slut, actually, in my whole life is Pierre Trudeau.
And I obviously stand by that.
It's true.
But even if you don't like any of these mean words, even if you don't like the t-shirts, and really I don't.
I think they're sort of gross.
If I saw someone wearing that shirt and my kids were around, I'd say, what are you doing wearing that around kids?
Well, I think we still have to push back and defend free speech, even rude speech.
Maybe especially we have to defend rude speech.
Because if we don't draw the line there, if we don't defend rude speech today, and we give that up, well, they'll come for the polite speech tomorrow.
Defend Rude Speech00:04:00
Oh, by the way, I've set up a little website, danhuntisabitch.com.
Seriously, click on it.
Danhuntisabitch.com.
Sorry.
I guess I should report myself to police now, right?
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, until about a dozen years ago, I was the publisher of a magazine called the Western Standard, and I really enjoyed it.
I didn't know at the time that that was like getting into the horse and buggy business right before the Model T was invented.
We were born in, I think, 2004, just as the internet was coming in to slaughter every print magazine there was.
We had a website, but it was before websites could properly be monetized.
Anyways, it was a labor of love.
We published 83 of these things, including two of my favorite editions.
One was the original Libranos, where we had a poster we sent to all our subscribers across the country.
And another was when we published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.
Of course, that led to a human rights complaint, the ripple effects of which continue to this day.
But alas, the Western Standard folded, but it is being revived.
When we shut down the magazine, one of our executives, Matthew Johnson, bought all the rights, and he, along with our next guest, have revived the publication as a website-only project.
And our guest today is part of the team giving new life to that old byline, that old masthead, rather, our friend.
Derek Fildebrandt, who joins us now via Skype from Calgary.
Derek, good to see you again.
Great to see you, Ezra.
Well, you know what?
I have such fond memories of the Western Standard.
I worked there for four years.
I was the publisher of it.
It's been dormant for more than a decade.
Tell me about your plans to revive it, along with Matthew Johnston, one of our original executives.
Well, I'm really excited.
I'm stepping into very big shoes here.
I remember the Western Standard was, well, I was in university, and it was a bright light in otherwise very dark place of the modern Marxist campus.
I was at Carleton University at the time, which was amongst the worst of them.
And I remember I'd skip a few meals a month and eat ramen noodles or something just so I could afford my Western Standard subscription.
Remember, I would always flip straight to the back, read some Mark Stein first, and then beginning from the cover with you.
It was such a great publication, and it was a badly needed voice, independent voice for the West.
And I was very sad when it went under.
I think you still owe me a nine-month subscription left, but I heard that from a few people today that they still have some.
So we're really excited to be relaunching the Western Standard, trying to step into the very big shoes that you and others left when it unfortunately closed.
We launched today our website's WesternStandardOnline.com.
And we're online with opinion, news.
We're doing our first video and podcasts today as well.
And our hope is actually to get to a quarterly print edition sometime in the new year.
So right now, we're just building a team.
We've got some great writers and contributors for us right now.
We're hoping to very quickly grow that team.
Well, that's great to hear.
You know, just looking at a couple of these editions I have here, this is from literally 13 years ago, but some of the issues are the same.
Believing in Sovereign Western Canada00:02:46
Why so many people hate Toronto?
Canada's united professors.
Al Jazeera's all-star Canadians, eco-terror strikes.
Will the West survive?
These are all questions that haven't been answered in 13 years.
Tell me, I mean, your timing is interesting because, of course, the West just had an enormous setback.
Justin Trudeau managed to cling to power.
The Federal Conservatives actually lost ground in Quebec, barely made a dent in Ontario.
It's not much more than what Preston Manning and Stockwell Day did more than a dozen years ago.
And I think the West is on the back foot.
This time, the oil patch is being destroyed by the Liberals, the NDP, the Greens, and the bloc in a way we haven't seen before.
Do you guys have an editorial mission that goes to Western Canada as opposed to in reaction to that?
I mean, we're based here in Toronto.
We consider ourselves pro-Western, but the Western Standard suggests that you are about the West for the West.
What are you going to do in regards to Trudeau's war on the West?
Yeah, very good question.
Well, the Western Standard in its time, I believe you ran it out of Calgary when the original Western Standard was in publication.
We're run out of Calgary again.
Our editorial direction is fighting for a strong and free Western Canada.
And people have different feelings about what that looks like.
I believe in a sovereign Western Canada.
Western Canada, I suppose, could be defined differently depending on what provinces you're putting in that category.
But we're taking a strong editorial position for a sovereign Western Canada.
And sovereignty can mean a new deal for Alberta, Saskatchewan, and other Western provinces within Confederation, which I really hope is the best possible outcome we can achieve.
But I really don't believe that reform is particularly likely.
The Conservative Party of Canada is not particularly that much stronger in seat count than the old Reform Party was, but it doesn't have that strong Western voice that Reform or the Alliance had.
My hope is that Alberta and Saskatchewan and others can put forward concrete real demands for constitutional reform within Canada.
But failing that, if we cannot fix this country, which I believe deserves to be fixed, so I love Canada.
I'm born a Canadian.
I wish to die a Canadian.
But if it can't be fixed, I do believe independence needs to be on the agenda.
So the Western Standard is going to be a platform for us to debate the Western question in a thoughtful and meaningful fashion.
Membership Matters00:03:56
We've got writers from different perspectives.
We've got, I don't think, any status quo federalists, but we've certainly got people in the reform camp about how we can try to fix Confederation and people in the independence camp who think that it's just beyond repair and it's time to go.
And of course, some people in between those two positions.
So we've already got some pieces on Western Standard Online right now.
Really trying to give a platform to the debate that Westerners are already having, but is not being heard out with sufficient volume in the mainstream corporate press.
Let me ask you one last question because I was just flipping through these old issues.
And I was reminded that I want a copy of the Muhammad edition.
That's right.
I'm reminded that the back page, the inside back page ad of all our issues was bought by Air Canada.
That was the most expensive page in the whole magazine.
Air Canada bought it, and there was no such thing a dozen years ago as deplatforming.
It just wasn't a thing.
And we had all sorts of ads, you know, even by banks.
Here's another airline called Harmony Airline.
I mean, it was just leafing through these old editions.
I have a lot of sentimental nostalgia.
But the most amazing thing to me is brands that today would be so afraid to be associated with anything Western, conservative, troublemake.
Back then, it wasn't even a thing.
How are you guys going to make money?
What's the business model?
Is it a donations model?
Is it a membership model?
Because I don't know if it's even possible to do an advertising model these days.
Well, you're certainly right in that deplatforming is a phenomenon quite disconnected from the way it was even just a decade ago, where a lot of major companies are just terrified of being associated with anything vaguely controversial on the right.
We're beginning today, now that we're launched and up and going, we're going to begin to look for some advertisers ourselves.
We'll see how much luck we get.
But I'm optimistic that we can at least make a dent there.
But we're going to rely primarily on memberships.
And we've already started to have a flood of memberships today.
We don't have a paywall.
Everything is open.
There's no paywall whatsoever on the Western Standard website.
But we're asking people to become members at $10 a month.
On the membership section of the website, you can see a stamp that says certified 100% media bailout free, something I know the Rebel is also certified for.
And we're asking people to consider becoming voluntary members to support what we're doing.
There's a lot of content on the internet, but if you want good content, it's going to cost some money.
And so we're asking people to become members at $10 a month to support the work we're doing.
We still have the exact same mission statement as the old Western Standard, the independent voice of the new West.
That hasn't changed.
It's a mission we're continuing.
I looked at that and I thought about doing something new and I thought, no, it hasn't changed.
So we're asking people to become members and consider supporting the work that we do.
All right.
Well, I tell you, I'll be keeping an eye peeled because not only for historical reasons, I'm curious what will be done with the brand, but of course, the Western voice is more important than ever.
I am a Westerner at heart, and we have great reporters in Alberta, Kian Bexty in Calgary and Sheila Gunread in Emonton.
But we are headquartered in Toronto, and we don't just focus on the West, so it'll be interesting to take a look and see how you fellas do it.
Good luck out there.
Well, let me know if you have any good cartoon ideas.
Everybody Voted: The West's Future00:05:08
Sorry, go ahead.
Let me know if you have any good cartoon ideas for us.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, that certainly got us some attention.
Not all of it.
Welcome.
But yeah, that was one of our key moments.
Well, thank you, Derek.
And the website, again, for folks who want to check it out, is WesternstandardOnline.com.
Is that right, Derek?
You got it.
All right.
Well, keep in touch, and it's good to have another voice out there that's not controlled by Justin Trudeau.
So we wish you the best of luck.
Well, thank you very much, Ezra.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, my pleasure.
Well, there you have it.
Derek Fildebrandt, along with former Western Standard executive Matthew Johnston, has revived the masthead, the brand.
And we wish them the best.
Stay with us.
more ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my show yesterday about the results of the election and Western alienation.
Dawn Wright, I'm horrified at the suggestion that Alberta should join the U.S. in any way.
The corruption and decline is accelerating.
Why would we jump on a sinking ship?
Western Canada is more than capable of standing on our own two feet on our own values.
We do not need to join the U.S.
We will negotiate our future on our terms.
Don, you make some very good points there.
And there's so many different ways that Alberta could have a future.
It could try to renegotiate things within Confederation.
Quebec certainly has, haven't they?
Not just customs, but constitutional things.
Quebec controls its own immigration in a way that other provinces don't.
Quebec has its own pension plan.
There's so many things Quebec does within Confederation that Alberta could do.
Alberta could be independent.
It could go for a sovereignty association.
It could still be part of the Commonwealth and have the Queen, or it could join the United States either as a state or as a territory.
I think there's probably about a half dozen ways it could move forward.
And the benefit of Alberta starting to go down that road is if you're aiming for independence, maybe you'll get a lot of concessions within Confederation that'll make people say, okay, we may as well stick around.
That's what happened at Quebec.
Or maybe Albertans will say, hey, this isn't as bad as all the skeptics warned.
Let's just do it.
Let's be like Singapore.
Let's be like Hong Kong, except for neither Singapore nor Hong Kong is sitting on 200 billion barrels of oil.
Liz writes, I think the rest of Canada will be surprised at what the West could accomplish, as well as how well it could protect itself if left to its own devices.
That's true.
But Alberta has only not even 5 million people in it.
And when you've got that much wealth, it becomes a plaything for more powerful people.
It goes without saying that if Alberta started to go down this road, all the media would immediately turn against it because the Calgary Herald, the Calgary Sun, the Empton Journal, the Empton Sun, CTV, Global, CBC, all the radio, of course, radio stations, they're all owned in Toronto by a half dozen companies maybe.
So they would absolutely destroy anyone who suggested Alberta leaves.
It wouldn't be like the media that's in love with the Bloch Ibécois.
You would also see foreign environmental groups just go care as if they're not right now.
They would just absolutely come in.
You would see, I mean, why wouldn't you see $100 million worth of political meddling?
Every single year, Alberta ships, what, $15 billion more to Ottawa and then it gets back.
It's a tremendous rate of return to spend $100 million to preserve that.
So it would be a hell of a fight.
Tim writes, I'm astonished that it took so long for the West to wake up.
We have far more in common with the U.S. border states than we ever had with Central Canada.
There's a lot of truth there.
I mean, Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, even British Columbia, Washington State.
There's a lot more commonality there.
I mean, if you've ever been to Vancouver and never been to Seattle, they're almost sister cities.
Winnipeg and Chicago, I think, thought they might be Saskatchewan.
And I don't know.
I mean, you can only go so far with those analogies.
But certainly right at the border, they're very similar.
But more to the point, I don't think Montana hates Alberta.
I don't think Idaho hates Alberta.
But it's pretty clear that a lot of liberals, especially in Quebec and Ontario, do.
Not everybody.
Not everybody.
I remind you, a third of people in Ontario voted conservative.
And not everyone who voted liberal hates the West.
But hating the West is clearly the political currency of the day, of the year, of the generation.
I mean, I'm sorry, you can't deny it.
Well, folks, that's the show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, you at home.