Ezra Levant’s lawsuit targets 12 figures—including University of Alberta professor Nancy Lavelle and former NDP MLA Jessica Littlewood—for orchestrating a "deplatforming" campaign against his book signings, costing him $20K in damages while falsely labeling him a Nazi despite his Jewish heritage. The case stems from Alberta’s Election Commission’s unresolved legal battles, where removed commissioner Lauren Gibson’s partisan tactics clashed with free speech advocates like Sheila Gunreed. Levant contrasts this with the U.S. impeachment inquiry, where witnesses like Marie Yovanovich lack direct evidence but serve Democratic narratives, while Republicans’ exculpatory testimony is suppressed. Buttigieg’s Iowa lead, though strong, falters amid Black community backlash over his "Frederick Douglass plan" and South Bend’s economic struggles, raising doubts about his 2020 viability. The episode argues that deplatforming and partisan witness manipulation threaten democratic discourse, exposing deeper threats to open debate beyond isolated controversies. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight I'm back in Alberta for a Wexit forum and also to take on some bad guys.
It's November 19th 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 don'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.
Don't worry, I'm not hidden in some forest.
Well, it's a little bit of a forest.
I'm in Edmonton, Alberta.
Tonight, we have a forum.
We're calling it a Wexit debate, but it's more of a panel than a debate about the future of Alberta within Canada.
What is that future?
Is it as a province?
Is it to build the firewall, as Stephen Harper and others used to say, to take back rights within the existing constitution, much like Quebec has done and Jason Kenney pledges to do?
Is it to do something within parliament, like send a Alberta version of the Block Québécois to Ottawa?
But really, how's that much different from what the Conservative Party is today, relegated so much as it is to the West?
Is it to become an independent country?
Is it to become some sort of affiliate with the United States, perhaps not an official state, but maybe a territory or even something like, oh, I don't know, Guam is with some trade relations.
We're going to have a panel.
I don't think anyone on the panel is full tilt one way or the other.
It's going to be great.
We've got Professor Barry Cooper from the University of Calgary, Lauren Gunter, and of course, Kian Bexti and Sheila Gunreed from our Alberta contingent.
I'll be emceeing.
So that's why I'm in Alberta tonight in Emmett.
And we'll be doing it again in Calgary tomorrow.
We'll be live streaming the whole thing on YouTube if you can't make it and are curious.
And I sent a note to my fellow panelists and I said, The Rebel, I mean, our heart's in the West.
I'm originally a Westerner.
I used to be the publisher of the Western Standard magazine.
My heart's there.
But look, I've been in Toronto now for pretty much 10 years and my family's put down roots.
And that's just me personally.
The Rebel has many viewers in Ontario, around the country, even in the United States and around the world.
I mean, for example, our work on the Tommy Robinson matter has ensured that we have a global audience.
So we are more than just a Western rights news organization.
But that said, I think we're sympathetic to it, not just because we have a geographical connection, but because we have an emotional and psychological and ideological connection to the hardest working, most entrepreneurial part of the country that's being treated rapaciously by Justin Trudeau and the Block Québécois.
So I think the way the Rebel is going to position ourselves with regards to Wexit is we're going to be sympathetic to the underlying claims and we will provide a fair reportage of them, unlike most of the rest of the media.
We will be a house of debate where people can come and have a conversation without being attacked immediately, without being doxxed, as the kids say, without being destroyed or de-platformed as the CBC or most Toronto-based media would do.
So that's what's going on tonight.
And I encourage you to tune in on YouTube.
We'll be streaming it live.
Deplatforming and Legal Battles00:14:06
And this broadcast will actually happen after we do it.
So you can find it on our YouTube page, on our website also, after you see this.
But there's another reason I'm here, or at least something else I'm doing while I'm in town.
As soon as I'm done this, I'm going down to the courthouse in Edmonton, where the Alberta government under Jason Kenney is fighting against other conservative groups who were wrongfully abused by Lauren Gibson, the newly defenestrated election commissioner.
Just yesterday, we learned that Lauren Gibson, the man who kept sending those private investigators and police to hound Sheila Gunread over her book, Stop Notley.
Lauren Gibson, who took us to court.
Actually, he didn't even take us to court.
I wish he took us to court.
He just pronounced us guilty for putting up some billboards.
And then when we appealed, he, I mean, he's just a bizarre partisan, emotional man.
I call him emotional because look at this letter he sent to Sheila after investigating her for six months.
He said, you're fine to go, you're free to go, but you should do well to govern yourself accordingly.
He says that you should be lucky that we can only apply the law as it's written.
Well, yeah, that's what the law is.
It's what is written, not what some, you know, little Napoleon wishes it were.
What a bizarre man.
I'm so glad that he's gone.
And I'm so unsurprised that the mainstream media is treating him like some sort of hero, him like some sort of victim, like some sort of civil rights casualty, rather than a destroyer of civil rights, including free speech, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of association.
I should tell you that even though Lauren Gibson is gone, our legal matters that he set in motion remain because the condemnation of us, the reprimand of us is on the books, and we are still appealing that in the courts.
And we're also challenging the constitutionality of the underlying law.
And here's what's so crazy about it.
Lauren Gibson, the great abuser of the law, the abuser of his office, he's gone now.
But Jason Kenney's government is proceeding on his path.
They are blocking our constitutional challenge to the law.
Doug Schweitzer, the left-wing attorney general, is sending his lawyers to join the Election Commission's lawyers to fight against us.
And they're opposing our review of their bizarre reprimand of us.
So Gibson is gone, but the people who take over, whoever those bureaucrats are, they work for Jason Kenney now and they're continuing their fight against us.
I find the whole thing very strange.
You can learn more about that fight at savesheila.com.
But the actual thing I'm going to the court today for, I'm going to see, there's a court battle involving Lauren Gibson in the court today.
But I'm also going to meet up with our lawyers because I want to let you know that as promised, we have decided to fight back against deplatforming.
And you know what that is, right?
That's when you rent a theater in Calgary and Edmonton to have a book launch.
You sign a contract, you pay the money, and the theater owner cancels on you because he is bullied by a leftist mob.
That mob is very brazen and very bold.
They're, I don't know, maybe they're emboldened because they feel like they're anonymous or they're at home on their computer, on their cell phone.
So they tweet a threat and they never think that they'll be, you know, come back to them.
Well, today it is, my friends.
Without further ado, let me show you a video.
It's about 10 minutes long that I'm going to release to the world tomorrow.
So this is a sneak peek of our fight back.
I'll tell you how it ends.
We have sued a dozen people who induced the breach of contract.
We are starting the fight back against deplatforming.
Here, here is the video that I recorded.
Special sneak preview to you, our Es Levanto viewers.
This will go up on our YouTube page tomorrow.
After this video, I'll run an interview I recorded yesterday with my friend Joel Pollack about the impeachment circus in Washington, D.C.
And I'll have more for you tomorrow from Calgary.
So I'll say goodbye now.
Next is the deplatforming video.
And finally, Joel Pollack.
Here you go.
I filed a lawsuit in Edmonton this week that might be of interest to you if you want to fight back against the new left-wing tactic called deplatforming.
You know what deplatforming is, right?
It's when leftists who disagree with you get you canceled when they bully someone like a university or a public library into canceling a speech from someone they don't like.
It's happening more and more.
Even the mayor of Toronto tried to bully the Toronto Public Library into canceling a speech by a women's rights activist.
The library has its own policy with respect to when people should and should not be able to rent rooms on their premises.
They have taken the decision in this case that this particular person should be able to give their talk in a library building.
I don't think it's appropriate for politicians to substitute their judgment for actually making these decisions because we have a duly appointed library board and we have library management who oversee a written policy in this regard.
I simply indicated I was disappointed at that decision.
My office asked the library to reconsider the decision.
It's happening a lot and it happened to me last month.
I rented theaters to have book signings for my new best-selling political book called The Labranos.
I love those theaters.
I've gone to them for years.
I've done rebel news events there before as you can see in these tweets from a couple years back.
We had sold out events.
The staff said they were great.
Everything was fine.
I love those places.
So I rented those same theaters again in Calgary and Edmonton.
But this time, a group of bullies swarmed the theater owner and threatened him with dire consequences if he didn't breach his contract with us.
I tried to give him courage.
I talked to him on the phone.
I gave him a pep talk.
I hired private security at my own expense.
I made sure there were plenty of police there too, but the owner caved into the mob.
When it came to the day of the events, he locked the doors on us and the staff hid inside with the lights off.
It was pitiful.
So I had to give a speech outside the theaters and it was cold, so we walked to a nearby pub in each city to finish the book signing.
By the way, in each city, only a single protester actually showed up.
But look, I'm not going to be a victim here.
I just refuse to be.
I did nothing wrong.
They did something wrong.
We don't ban books.
We don't do the equivalent of a book burning.
That's what canceling a book signing is like, really.
We don't do that in Canada, especially when I had a contract with the owner.
I paid him in full in advance.
He actually hasn't even refunded that money yet.
So I sued.
I just filed a lawsuit against the theater owner for breach of contract.
Now, that's pretty ordinary, but I did something that I don't think has ever been done before that I know of, and that is I sued all the people who bullied the theater owner into breaching the contract.
You can see some of their names here.
And some of the people, we don't know their names yet.
We've put them down for now as John Doe.
But others we do know.
Nancy Lavelle, who is a professor at the University of Alberta.
Jessica Littlewood, who used to be an NDP, MLA.
Jim Story.
He's an activist at a left-wing pressure group called Progress Alberta.
And other names too.
We'll find out more names through the discovery process of the lawsuit.
We'll get copies of the emails that pressured the theaters to cancel.
We'll add those names to the lawsuit too.
We're suing these people for inducing the breach of contract.
They knew we had a contract with the theater.
They helped cause the breach of the contract, and we suffered losses.
We lost thousands of dollars because of it.
That's against the law, not just for the theater owner, but for those who bullied him.
That's what's new here.
We're not letting the mob go.
We've identified members of the mob, and we're suing them.
Inducing breach of contract isn't a new kind of a lawsuit.
It's often used, for example, if some talented entertainer has an exclusive contract with one record company, and another record label tries to get them to break that contract and switch over to them.
Usually it's a commercial dispute.
As far as I know, this is the first time this law has been used against people who induced the breach of contract just for censorship and bullying reasons.
I'd like to invite you to read the whole lawsuit.
It's written in pretty plain English.
You don't need to be a lawyer to understand it.
In addition to breach of contract, there are some other things we're suing for, including defamation, because they said atrocious things about us, false things, including, believe it or not, that I'm a Nazi, even though I'm Jewish.
We're using other grounds too, including conspiracy and unlawful interference.
The breach of contract cost us about $20,000 in direct costs when they didn't let us in the theater.
So we're suing the theater owner and all these deplatformers for that money and for defamation.
Sorry, you just can't publicly call me a Nazi.
It's not true.
By the way, learn some history.
It was the Nazis who were the book burners.
We're also asking the court for aggravated damages.
If you have time, I really recommend you read this part of the lawsuit.
You can see the whole lawsuit at stopdeplatforming.com.
This lawsuit was written by our great free speech law firm in Edmonton.
See, this wasn't some commercial dispute like the two record labels fighting over an entertainer.
The purpose here was censorship to infringe on our country's political freedom, freedom of the press, the right to have a debate during an election campaign, the right to have a free exchange of ideas.
I think that's actually worse than just a quarrel over money.
These deplatformers were interfering with the building blocks of our liberal democracy and in the middle of an election no less.
Sorry, that stops now.
I want my money back for the theater rental and for all the other money we wasted trying to fix this problem, but it's not about $20,000 for those costs or the other damages we're seeking.
That's not what this is about.
This is about letting the world know you can't do this anymore.
Not to me, not to anyone.
I truly hope that anyone and everyone who is unlawfully deplatformed sues not just the guy who rips up their contract, but the bullies who pressed that guy to do it.
The theater owner told me the threats against him were so bad he was literally losing sleep over it.
Don't you think someone has to tell those bullies they're wrong?
I really can't believe we have a former politician and a professor on the list of people who just don't get it.
But hopefully this court case will remind them of the importance of debate.
Let me close on a sentimental note.
You know, when I was growing up, especially when I was a student in university, people who disagreed with me, well, they ignored me, or they debated me, or they had their own events to rebut me.
I remember university in the 90s being that way.
I loved it.
We all debated and heckled and argued, but we were actually sort of friends.
But this whole deplatforming cancel culture, that's new.
And it's unhealthy for the whole society.
It's bullying, obviously, and it's unfair.
But it actually stops us from talking to each other as a country.
I mean, it's unlikely that hardcore left-wingers and right-wingers would suddenly change their minds by attending a debate with the other side.
But at least it would remind us all that we're all citizens together.
We're all trying to resolve our differences peacefully and hopefully through an exchange of ideas.
That's what university was like for me.
The debating enforced some sort of mutual civility.
You know, the concept of a public square.
I don't know if you know this, but my debating partner back in University of Calgary was actually Nahid Nanshi, who's now the left-wing Muslim mayor of Calgary.
And I was a right-wing Jew and we were debating partners.
Can you believe that?
That's what it used to be like before deplatforming.
Not anymore.
That's the worst part of cancel culture.
We don't even engage with each other anymore.
We don't even try to convince our neighbors.
Instead of friends arguing over politics for hours, we just unfriend people.
That's cancel culture.
I don't like it.
So we filed the lawsuit against these bullies.
It's probably going to cost us a lot more to sue than anything we might win at trial.
Just to research the law here and put together this statement of claim cost us $4,700 already.
That's our first bill.
I've been through enough of these to know that a trial where we're suing a dozen defendants is going to take at least a week in court.
And that and all the preparation, it's probably going to be $100,000 to get through it.
Obviously, we're not doing this to make money.
We're doing it to stop deplatforming in Canada.
Against us, against anyone, against you, maybe.
If you want to read this lawsuit for yourself, go to stopdeplatforming.com.
It's right on there.
And if you think it's a good idea and if you want to help, you can chip in right there on the page to help us cover our costs.
Oversight Hearing Concerns00:15:03
$10, $100, whatever you can.
I tell you, we need the help, and I'd be very grateful.
Thanks.
Go to stopdeplatforming.com.
I think that maybe we can help change the culture.
And here's my interview yesterday with Joe Pollack.
Madam Ambassador, as you see it here before us, very simply and directly, do you have any information regarding the President of the United States accepting any bribes?
No.
Do you have any information regarding any criminal activity that the President of the United States has been involved with at all?
No.
That is a video clip from the interminable impeachment proceedings that aren't actually impeachment proceedings, I don't think, against Donald Trump.
That's a woman who was the ambassador to Ukraine, appointed, if I'm not mistaken, by Barack Obama, a holdover.
Unlike Obama, Trump didn't fire every single Obama diplomat on his first day in office, something I think he probably regrets.
But like so many other witnesses at the so-called impeachment hearing, she doesn't actually have any first-hand information about any wrongdoing.
It seems to be that she just really, really disagreed with Trump's point of view.
Joining us now from the mean streets of Los Angeles, where we were actually joining him while he's driving, stay safe, my friend, is Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large of Breitpart.com.
Well, thanks for letting us grab you while you're in an LA commute.
Obviously, I didn't watch a lot of this impeachment, but I think it's because I just didn't feel like there was anything there.
It was just all trading talking points.
I don't think there was any witnesses who actually witnessed anything.
Nobody has witnessed anything at all.
And in fact, the fact that Ivanovich testified that she had no evidence to offer on bribery, no evidence of any other crime should have ended the hearing right there.
Because according to the U.S. Constitution, you can only impeach the president for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
So if the president hasn't done anything illegal, hasn't taken a bribe, and he hasn't done something else completely grotesque.
There's no reason to have an impeachment inquiry.
The way that the ambassador lost her job might seem unfortunate, and she is a sympathetic person in that sense.
But it also doesn't belong in an impeachment hearing.
That belongs in an oversight hearing.
So they're subjecting the country to this entire boring, as you put it, detail-intensive ordeal for no reason.
Now, that's not to say there was nothing of value in her hearing.
It was very interesting to learn that she had been briefed by the Obama administration when they appointed her ambassador about the fact that Hunter Biden, son of then Vice President Joe Biden, was on a corporate board in Ukraine, the board of a gas company called Burisma.
She was briefed about it in case anybody in the Senate asked her about it at her confirmation hearing.
Now, as it happens, nobody asked her about it.
Nobody really even knew about it until last year when Peter Schweitzer, my colleague at Breitbart, wrote the book, basically, about how the Bidens had enriched themselves through government service.
But this was important enough for the Obama administration to try to head off any congressional inquiries that they briefed her on what she should say.
And what they told her to say, she testified last week, was that they should refer all their inquiries to the vice president's office.
Well, how convenient.
If they have a question about whether the vice president should be dealing with Ukraine while his son is on the board of a Ukrainian company, they should just ask the vice president about that.
That's not a proper response.
I mean, but basically, we know that there were queries to the vice president's office.
George Kent testified also last week.
He's a bureaucrat in the State Department, that he also had raised the issue with the Vice President's office.
They told him Vice President Biden is busy dealing with family emergency.
His other son, Bo Biden, who was a great patriot, served his country and so forth, he was dying of a terrible brain cancer, and everybody's sympathetic toward that, but it never was brought up again.
So queries about burisma and conflict of interest with Joe Biden, which were clear as day to people who understood what was going on, were never addressed, never resolved.
And we now know that the Obama administration took extra steps to fend off any inquiries about that conflict of interest.
So we did learn that from her.
The media don't understand the details.
Nobody has read all of the transcripts.
I have read or skimmed everything they've released, but I can tell you there are probably about 10 of us who've done it.
And while there are very good staffers and so forth in Congress to assist the members of Congress on both sides, I can tell you the journalists aren't doing it.
I mean, I can just tell by the questions they're asking, the fact that they seem completely ignorant about some of the details of other testimony.
We're handling this solely on the basis of the Democrat talking points.
Adam Schiff and the Democrats have sole possession of these transcripts.
They don't allow Republicans to view them except one by one in the presence of a Democratic staffer so that they can't copy them and email them around or whatever.
So they have to go in and look at a physical copy before they're released.
Meanwhile, the Democrats and their staff have these transcripts and they're able to pull out the quotes they think are best.
They put it in a nice little package, almost like a legal brief, and they release it to the media at the same time as a two or three hundred page transcript themselves.
Nobody in the media is going to read the transcript.
They read what the Democrats call key excerpt of the transcript.
Of course, they leave out a lot of key information.
This week, for example, we're going to hear from a guy named Tim Morrison, who was a head honcho of sorts at the National Security Council in the area of Ukraine and European affairs.
And he actually said Trump did nothing wrong.
He was not concerned about anything that the Trump administration had done that could be illegal or whatever.
They leave that out of their key excerpt.
They put all this other stuff about Giuliani and a computer server and all this nonsense means nothing.
They leave out the key excerpt that the senior guy in the National Security Council on this issue and in this subject area said he was never concerned that Trump had done anything wrong.
He was not even concerned that Trump had done anything political.
He didn't interpret anything that happened in that way.
They leave that out of their excerpt.
And Republicans take several days to catch up because Republicans have to read these transcripts slowly and carefully, and they have to do it after the Democrats have already released their summaries to the media.
So the media just repeat the Democratic talking points, and everybody debates those because nobody's had time to read the entire thing yet.
And that's where we are with this whole thing.
So, you know, we're dealing with a very difficult situation.
And Yovanovich is a sympathetic figure.
She is a long-serving career civil servant.
She comes across well.
It's interesting, though, that she professes ignorant about anything that Democrats might have done wrong and professes concern about anything the Trump administration does that she doesn't like.
There's definitely a bias there.
She calls herself apolitical.
I don't think anyone can believe that of her or any of these other witnesses who are coming out.
I think that they are part of this inquiry for a reason.
I think that they could resist this if they wanted to.
The fact that they're not doing it, even though they're being subpoenaed, I think they could resist those subpoenas.
I think this is an unlawful and unconstitutional inquiry.
And anyway, we'll see where it goes.
It's going to be an interesting week because many of the witnesses are going to have more exculpatory information for the president that the public hasn't seen and the media won't comment on because the media only comment on the talking points.
But you're going to see some people start to draw these points out.
If you watch the hearings, you're going to see some of these witnesses testify about things that actually helped the president decay.
So it's going to be interesting to watch.
Well, I got two questions for you.
The first is a legal question, I suppose.
It seems pretty clear to me that there's nothing here that will actually result in the president being removed, which is the fantasy of the Democrats in denial, those who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the 2016 election.
They're just so desperate for some miracle, some deus ex machina, as it would be called in theatrical terms.
They're so desperate for that.
I don't think that's going to happen because there's nothing there.
But look, we're less than a year away to the elections anyways.
I don't even think hostile Democrats in normal parts of the country would prefer to have Trump removed through the extreme mechanisms contemplated here.
Surely they would say, well, let's just vote them out.
Like, I'm wondering.
Well, it's one and the same for them.
For them, they want Trump to go into the reelection campaign with this specter of impeachment, with this dark cloud hanging over his head.
Got it.
They also want to tarnish him as an impeached president, as if he were illegitimate from the beginning.
He never should have been elected.
They want to satisfy themselves, and they feel it's going to mobilize their base, and it might.
It's also going to mobilize the Republican base in conservative districts.
The real question are these swing districts, mostly suburban districts, where Democrats are currently representing areas that voted for Trump in 2016.
And in those districts, the Democrats are doing very poorly on impeachment.
And Nancy Pelosi is a very astute politician, but she climbed aboard this train and she cannot get off.
And it's become a big problem for her.
Republicans just today, in fact, went up with new advertising in these districts.
They're spending $7 million on new ads targeting Democrats who voted to authorize the impeachment inquiry.
So I think you're going to see some negative consequences for some of those Democrats.
That's going to affect the process as it goes forward.
Now, in Louisiana and Virginia, two states that I think should be pretty Trump-friendly in state elections, some of Trump's hopes did not come true.
Trump was rooting for the governor in both states.
And if I'm not mistaken, it was a Democrat in both states, and the Democrats took over the House and the Senate on the state level in Virginia.
You correct me if I'm wrong on my facts here, Joel.
That has me worried as a Trump supporter that in places like Virginia and Louisiana, one year out, Trump is having a setback.
Should I be alarmed?
I don't think so.
Well, I think one should always be vigilant.
But Virginia is a lost cause, hasn't voted Republican in a very long time.
It's deeply affected by Trump's attack on the federal bureaucracy.
A lot of people who work in northern Virginia work for federal bureaucracy.
They work for the federal government.
They work for the CIA.
They work for the FBI.
And there are also a lot of changes in Virginia that are demographic in nature, a lot of immigration.
That's making it a blue state, basically.
So once upon a time, we thought of Virginia as conservative no longer.
Louisiana, not a problem for Trump.
The opinion polls show Trump with a massive approval rating.
The issue really there is the question of which candidate was going to be better.
You had the Democratic incumbent versus a Republican who had gone very negative in the primary.
And so some Republicans stayed home because they didn't like him.
And this Democrat, by the way, is pro-life, pro-Second Amendment.
So he's a conservative Democrat, one of the only pro-life Democrats left in the party.
And I think that's actually a signal to Democrats that their presidential candidates are far left and too far left to be elected.
If they want to win, they need more governors like Bell Edward in Louisiana and fewer like Andrew Cuomo in New York.
Well, listen, I appreciate you giving us such thoughtful commentary as you're driving the streets of L.A.
And I say I want you to be safe.
If you had an accent because you were talking to us, I know your hand's free, so that's great.
But let me read to you something I saw today on my new favorite satirical website.
It's called the Babylon Bee.
It's a slightly conservative, slightly Christian version of the onion.
It's just, it's a ridiculous, absurdist site.
But look at this tweet.
It says, in genius move, Trump supports impeachment, forcing Democrats to oppose.
Now, obviously, that's a fake story.
But I got to say, the reason it's funny is because it's so true.
Whatever Trump's for, they're against.
Whatever he's against, they're for.
Well, there's something to that.
There's something to that because once the president is impeached, if he is impeached, he has to have a trial in the Senate, or he may have a trial in the Senate.
But the Senate has said they're going to take up the trial.
And Mitch McConnell said today that the trial is going to run well into 2020.
So what Republicans who control the Senate can do is they can extend the procedure of the Senate impeachment trial.
That means that senators who are running for president, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are going to have to stay in Washington because they are the jurors, in a sense, in the Senate impeachment trial.
They have to take a second oath, and they are going to have to sit there quietly while this trial unfolds rather than going to Iowa, going to New Hampshire, going to South Carolina, going to Nevada.
So he's going to remove at least two of the three leading presidential candidates from the campaign trail.
So, what the Babylon Bee said might actually come true that once Democrats do the math and look at the calendar, they might realize this is not a very good idea if they want to win the White House in 2020.
Isn't that funny?
Listen, you've been very generous with your time, although I guess you're trapped in the car.
I want to throw one more thing at you since we're talking about light-hearted matters like the Babylon Bee.
I see some news about Pete, and I think I'm pronouncing right, Buttigeg, is that how you say his last name?
The mayor.
Just call him Mayor Pete.
Mayor Pete, yeah, I'm sorry, I can't.
I see the name, but I don't hear it pronounced a lot up here in Canada.
And I see a poll in Iowa that surprised me, if I'm not mistaken, he's now polling first.
And I see these awfully cringy cheerleaders for Mayor Pete.
I just want to show our viewers a clip of what I mean.
Okay, put aside that slightly cringe-worthy cheer, Joel.
Does Mayor Pete, the mayor of a smallish city, does he actually have a chance of winning and beating powerhouses like Joel Biden and Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and other so-called first-tier candidates?
The way to understand this is that Pete Buttigieg right now is leading the second tier of candidates in national polls.
Pete Buttigieg's Rise?00:02:40
Right now, it's a three-way race between Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders.
And Pete Buttigieg, in the high single-digit, is leading the second wave.
Now, he's also doing very well in Iowa.
That's because he has poured everything into Iowa, all his volunteers, all his money.
He's got offices in New Hampshire and other places as well, but he's focusing on Iowa.
He's trying to repeat Barack Obama's 2008 strategy, which is to shock the field in Iowa and then hope that that snowballs into higher polls elsewhere.
The problem he has is he has a very difficult relationship with the black community.
He polls very poorly among African Americans, partly because he's openly gay and the African American community tends to be more socially conservative than other Democrats.
But the other problem is he has tension in his hometown, South Bend, that he theoretically governed.
His tension there between his administration and the black community over police behavior in black communities there.
There's also a lot of economic problems in South Bend.
And this week or last week, he touted black support for what he calls the Frederick Douglass plan.
Frederick Douglass is a Republican, but also a very famous freed slave and abolitionist.
And he's touting his Frederick Douglass plan for Black America.
Very good, very good.
The only problem is that he faked the support of several people who woke up to discover that even though they are committed, for example, to Bernie Sanders, they now are listed as supporters of Pete Buttigieg's Frederick Douglass plan.
And something like 40% of the people on the list actually are white and not African American.
And he used a stock photo in some sort of publicity email about the Frederick Douglass plan, a stock photo from Kenya, not of black Americans, but of black Africans.
And he's coming in for a lot of criticism there.
So he looks a little bit out of touch with the black community.
Joe Biden is trousing the field in South Carolina, where the black vote is strongest in the early primary state.
So we'll see.
Not impossible, not impossible, but he's got a long way to go.
Yeah, the mayor of a city of 100,000.
I mean, I've heard of South Bend, but I've never been there.
I don't know.
It seems like a long shot.
It seems crazy, but maybe you're right.
He's the tallest short guy is maybe the way to describe it.
Well, listen, Joel, it's a pleasure to catch up with you.
I think we should do this more often.
As long as you promise me that you're driving safely, first of all, I think it's sort of cool to have your sunglasses on and having you driving around.
I mean, Jerry Seinfeld does that driving in cars with comedians thing.
And of course, you know, it's why not?
As long as you're watching the road, maybe this is the way for us to do it so we're not interrupting the rest of your work.
Joel's Drive Segment00:00:40
All right.
Thanks, my friend.
Great to see you.
Take care.
Okay, there we have it.
Joel Pollock, Sr., editor at large at Brightbar.com.
We caught him as he was driving the mean streets of Los Angeles.
Stay with us.
or Head on the Rebels.
Well, that's the show for today.
Please go to stopdeplatforming.com if you want to read our lawsuit.
I'm pretty proud of the lawsuit.
I think it's the first time it's ever been tried.
And we'll see you tomorrow.
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There are still some tickets left, but not many.
The room only holds 500 and will probably sell out.