Sasha Baron Cohen, known for offensive satirical characters like Ali G and Borat, now advocates Facebook censorship of "mean jokes," yet ignores China’s Uyghur persecution or Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide. Ezra Levant mocks his selective outrage and ties to the Anti-Defamation League, calling it hypocritical establishment posturing. Meanwhile, Canada’s Eco-Fiscal Commission pushes a $50-to-$210 carbon tax hike by 2033, despite U.S. inaction and industry exemptions—critics warn of economic chaos and political manipulation. Baron Cohen’s push for "truth" over free speech mirrors these elite power grabs, exposing a pattern where dissent is silenced while systemic abuses go unchecked. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey folks, today I go through a speech that Sasha Baron Cohen gave at a Democrats lobby group called the ADL.
I've got about 29 video clips in it, so I wish you could see it.
You'll hear it just fine on the podcast, but I want to invite you to become a Rebel Premium subscriber so you can see the video version.
Just go to premium.rebelnews.com.
It's eight bucks a month, that's no big deal.
Come on.
All right, here's the podcast.
Tonight, the world's dirtiest comedian comes out against mean jokes.
He wants them censored by Facebook.
It's November 28, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the 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 them is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I like Sasha Baron Cohen's jokes.
In fact, by coincidence, over the past few weeks, I've been showing you little clips from one of his movies called Talladega Nights, where he plays a gay French race car driver who competes in NASCAR against redneck race car drivers.
It's really funny.
Sasha Baron Cohen, he's made it big in America, but for years, he was just a phenomenon in his home country of the UK.
He played a bunch of characters, including a young black Muslim character called Ali G. Every possible racial stereotype.
Check this out, yo.
I is here with my main woman, Naomi Wolf.
She be well important feminist and has like written enough books about that kind of stuff.
Do you think that women should have equal rights in the workplace?
Yeah, do you?
Well, ain't there the problem that if they start getting them dead, then they're going to start asking for them at home.
I'm not sure if he was in blackface or brownface or whatever you'd say, but he pretended to be Muslim and he went full on with the stereotypes.
What's funny is that he came to America in character as Ali G and he did interviews with public figures and tried to trick them into going along with his ridiculous nature.
Trump was one of the public figures to immediately see through it and leave the interview.
Most, however, didn't.
Anyways, Cohen's big breakthrough in America was playing another character, another Muslim character actually, Borat, who came from Kazakhstan.
Same thing.
He came to America in character before people knew who he was, so no one was alert to his joke.
And half the jokes were just seeing how far he could go before Americans broke and stopped being polite to him.
It was actually a testament to how welcoming Americans were to some rude foreigner.
It wasn't a test of American rudeness.
It was American politeness on display.
I personally thought it was an extremely funny movie.
And even if you don't agree, even if you think it wasn't funny, it was obviously someone trying to be funny.
It was an attempt at humor.
Cohen is Jewish himself in real life, but Borat was an anti-Semitic character.
And he portrayed Kazakhstan that way.
Here's a scene called The Running of the Jew.
Now I'm sorry, I thought that was funny.
Now it was also racist, I guess, but it's funny.
Can I say that because I'm Jewish?
Now that was a produced segment in a big Hollywood movie, but in character, Borat went to a real country Western bar, and this was before people knew who he was, and he started singing a song, and halfway through the song, once he got the whole bar into it, he changed the lyrics to from throw transport down the well, which doesn't mean anything, to throw the Jew down the well.
Now again, I gotta tell you, I thought that was really, really funny.
Kazakhstan, by the way, doesn't think he's funny.
They said it genuinely hurt the country's reputation.
They said they're not an anti-Semitic country.
The Romanian town that Cohen filmed in, pretending it was Kazakhstan, they sued him too.
I'm not much for suing over jokes, and certainly Cohen wasn't.
He fought off all these lawsuits, of course.
And that's the thing.
I'm trying to show you a comedian who made people laugh by making racist and anti-Semitic jokes, anti-Muslim jokes, anti-gay jokes too, or just call them gay jokes, I guess.
I'm not sure if this is pro-gay or anti-gay.
How many years have you been straight?
I've been straight all my life.
What?
I've never had a homosexual relationship.
So what?
You've never had a walk on the brown side?
Never.
So if I were to give you a lap dance right here and now, you're telling me you wouldn't be turned on?
Absolutely not, because it's forbidden by the Word of God.
Okay, can I try?
No.
Are you scared that you'll be turned on?
No.
Now this is him, too.
He also made a movie called The Dictator, where he played a version of Saddam Hussein, really just a generic Muslim terrorist dictator.
My point is, he was an equal opportunity insulter.
If you don't like it, don't watch it.
A lot of people do watch.
A lot of people don't.
A lot of people pretend to be offended, but secretly watch and laugh.
It's like Howard Stern or even our old friend Gavin McInnes.
I mean, comedians making edgy jokes is really one of the definitions of comedy.
Often it's people making fun of their own race.
That's safer, I guess.
Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, a lot of black comedians drop the N-word non-stop.
I think it would be, well, it would be unfunny, maybe, if a white comedian did it.
I think so, because the meaning would be different, right?
But again, it's a matter of taste.
Usually people stick to making fun of themselves or their own kind.
Here's Sarah Silverman, a Jewish comedian, and this is years ago.
Forgive the grainy footage, it's a copy of a copy.
she is a Jewish comedian making fun, making jokes about the Holocaust.
She called me up and she's like, you know, Aunt Sarah, did you know that Hitler killed 60 million Jews?
And I corrected her and I said, you know, I think he's responsible for killing 6 million Jews.
And she said, oh yeah, 6 million.
I knew that.
But seriously, I mean, what's the difference?
The difference is 60 million is unforgivable, young lady.
My nana was a survivor of the Holocaust, or I'm sorry, alleged Holocaust.
And she had the tattoo, you know, the number, and thank God she was at one of the better concentration camps.
She had a vanity number.
It said, be dazzled, which is kind of fun.
I believe that if black people were in Germany during World War II, that the Holocaust would have never happened.
I do, you know.
Or not to Jews.
Sarah Silverman used to tell a lot of ethnic jokes, and not just about her own group.
She told ethnic jokes about other groups, and they didn't always like it so much.
Here she is on a TV panel with a Chinese activist, Chinese advocate, and she was defending this joke.
It's a joke about getting a jury duty notice, and you got to fill out this form and you send it in, and you're randomly selected, and I don't want to do jury duty.
No one does.
So I'm filling out the form, and my friend said, why don't you write something really inappropriate?
Like, I hate Chingx, you know?
And I'm thinking, yeah, but when you think about it, I don't want people to think that of me.
You know, I just want to get out of jury duty.
So I just filled out the form and I wrote, I love chinks.
Thank you.
That's the joke.
Now, I should tell you, it's hard to find Sarah Silverman's old edgy jokes online.
I think they've been purged.
Try Googling for them yourself.
You'll have difficulty.
I don't know if Google is hiding them out of some sort of censorship or if Silverman and her agents are burying them and knocking them down.
I think she's gotten very politically correct these days.
Preachy, lefty, not as funny.
But no one went as far and as hard as Sasha Baron Cohen.
No one.
Which is why I think it's so gross and so shocking and so unfunny to see him give a speech the other day at the Anti-Defamation League, which is a left-wing censorship group based in the United States.
Once upon a time, the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, fought against anti-Semitism in America.
But look, anti-Semitism in America is pretty much gone.
I don't know if it was ever that anti-Semitic to begin with.
America just isn't anti-Semitic anymore systematically at all.
Except for new Muslim immigrants, I think, who were bringing anti-Semitism with them from their old homelands, like Syria, Pakistan.
Real Borats, I guess, are coming to America.
But for some reason, the ADL doesn't seem to go after them.
They're pretty gentle with the squad.
And I think it's because the ADL is really just a Democratic Party front group now.
Their CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, is a former senior aide to Barack Obama.
So they're not really focused on fighting anti-Semitism.
They're more interested in fighting against Republicans or conservatives, which isn't where most anti-Semitism comes from these days in America.
But the ADL is very interested in censorship for that reason.
They want to shut down conservatives who are strong on the internet.
And so last week, Sasha Baron Cohen, king of the anti-Semitic jokes, king of the anti-Muslim jokes, of the anti-gay jokes, the anti-black jokes, he actually gave a speech at that censorship organization, the ADL, calling for censorship.
This guy.
That guy's calling for censorship of mean jokes.
I want to show you some clips from his speech.
It's really quite something.
Thank you, the Anti-Defamation League, for this recognition and your work in fighting racism, hate, and bigotry.
And to be clear, when I say racism, hate, and bigotry, I'm not referring to the names of Stephen Miller's labradoodles.
He's talking about an aide to Donald Trump named Stephen Miller.
So you can see what this is really about.
It's about fighting Republicans, not fighting anti-Semitism.
In fact, Stephen Miller himself is Jewish.
I realize that my presence here may also be unexpected for another reason.
At times, some critics have said my comedy risks reinforcing old stereotypes.
The truth is, I've been passionate about challenging bigotry and intolerance throughout my life.
As a teenager in England, I marched against the fascist National Front and to abolish apartheid.
As an undergraduate, I traveled around America and wrote my thesis about the civil rights movement with the help of the archives of the ADL.
And as a comedian, I've tried to use my characters to get people to let down their guard and reveal what they actually believe, including their own prejudice.
Okay, got it.
So that's what you were doing.
All right.
When you were portraying Kazakhstan as an anti-Semitic mob that had the running of the Jew, you were just being ironic or trying to teach us a lesson or something.
And look, I thought that was funny, but it's a very Trudeau thing to say.
Hey guys, when I was making the anti-Semitic jokes, it was really a moment for you to learn.
Yeah, no.
Now listen, I think Borat's hilarious.
I think Ali G's hilarious.
I think Bruno and his other characters that flopped were a little less funny.
I laughed guilty laughs at all of them though.
I mean, even Sarah Silverman's jokes are funny.
Something can be rude and also be funny.
Something can be racist and also be funny.
It's not nice to say, I know that, but Sasha Baron Cohen isn't nice.
He's a comedian.
It's different.
I think he should stay in that lane.
His job is to make us laugh.
Why Comedy Isn't Always Pure00:16:12
For him to revise history, revise his own history, and say that the whole thing was actually an ironic postmodern exercise in anti-racism.
Yeah, that's the biggest joke of all.
Now, I'm not going to claim that everything I've done has been for a higher purpose.
Yes, some of my comedy, okay, probably half my comedy, has been absolutely juvenile.
And the other half completely puerile.
But I admit there was nothing particularly enlightening about me as Borat from Kazakhstan, the first fake news journalist, running through a conference of mortgage brokers while I was completely naked.
Well, that's the thing.
No one cares what a comedian wrote as his thesis.
That's not why he's famous.
That's not why people are listening to him.
That's not why he's speaking at a $100 million year censorship lobby group.
It's because of Borat that he's there.
Not because of some college essay he wrote.
He's good at writing jokes, but I'm not sure if he's good at thinking about our foundational freedoms.
Listen to this.
It's as if the age of reason, the era of evidential argument, is ending.
And now knowledge is increasingly delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed.
Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march.
Hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities.
What does he mean scientific consensus is dismissed?
I can't imagine he means anything else other than global warming.
What else could he be referring to?
And is he saying that's how we should determine science by a vote, by a consensus, and that we have to obediently accept an official narrative?
We can't question it.
And what does he mean by murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities?
Are there anti-Muslim terrorist groups that are sweeping the world?
Is there like a Christian or a Jewish version of ISIS out there?
I haven't heard of any.
I do not dispute that there are occasional anti-Muslim hate crimes committed in the West even, but by far the rise of hate crimes across the West is against Jews.
And by far it is committed by, I'm sorry to say this, Muslim immigrants to the West.
The proportion of anti-Jewish hate crimes is very large, but in absolute numbers, the number of victims of actual murders and terrorism based on religion, I got to think that's Christians at the hands of Muslims in the Middle East, in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq.
ISIS practically exterminated Christians in Iraq.
There was a genocide there perpetrated by ISIS and continued by others to this day.
Why won't Bohr there acknowledge that?
The stereotype he used in Bohr and the Saddam Hussein general in the show The Dictator, those are actually quite real characters in real life.
The vast majority of people in countries like Egypt and Syria believe in anti-Semitism.
They actually are anti-Semitic.
Many governments in the Muslim world are officially anti-Semitic, proudly, lawfully anti-Semitic in their own countries.
Why won't Bohrat, who was brave enough to, you know, he wasn't brave enough to take on those people, he's brave enough to take on the West and Stephen Miller.
Why won't he say that about Muslim countries?
And what is his solution?
More jokes, more debates, more information?
No, he actually wants to silence the voices he doesn't like.
Now, what do all these dangerous trends have in common?
I'm just a comedian and an actor, I'm not a scholar, but one thing is pretty clear to me.
All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.
The greatest propaganda machine in history.
Let's think about it.
Facebook, YouTube, and Google, Twitter, and others.
They reach billions of people.
The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged.
Stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear.
Yeah, the same YouTube and Facebook and Twitter that make him famous, that make him a star, he wants that for himself, but not for his political enemies.
And suddenly the crudest man in showbiz is suddenly very concerned about baser instincts, but he actually doesn't want us as people to address our baser instincts.
He's not trying to lift us up.
He wants a handful of companies to be our nannies, our governesses, to put their hands over our ears or our mouths, so we won't hear things that inflame us.
He doesn't want us to be better.
He has no hope for us.
He just doesn't want to improve people.
His whole career was actually built on base instincts.
He doesn't plan to stop telling dirty jokes himself, I don't think.
He just wants those same internet tycoons to be the decision makers for you.
He's for censorship.
Not for him, mind you.
It's why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times.
It's why fake news outperforms real news because studies show that lies spread faster than truth.
And it's no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history, the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous.
Yeah, that Alex Jones, imagine someone saying that Jeffrey Epstein ran a child rape cartel with powerful political people like Prince Andrew.
That conspiracy theorist ought to be shut down.
Look, I don't agree with everything Alex Jones says.
Some of it is conspiracy theories.
Some of it is conspiracy fact, nothing like the conspiracy theory, the Russian collusion conspiracy theory that the New York Times and the Washington Post championed for two years that was finally debunked by a Democrat lawyer named Robert Mueller.
But imagine thinking that a conspiracy theory could actually be squelched by censorship.
I think it's sort of the opposite.
Censorship makes people more curious about what's being hidden from them.
And doesn't it actually prove Alex Jones right about an international cabal of elites telling you what you can and can't hear?
InfoWars is the name of Jones' channel.
How does anything in this speech by Sasha Baron Cohen actually counter his thesis?
Doesn't it prove Jones' motto?
There's a war on for your mind.
On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate.
Breitbart resembles the BBC.
The fictitious protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report.
And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner.
We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of basic facts upon which democracy depends.
Yeah, well, factually speaking, I think Breitbart is more accurate than the BBC.
The BBC is a state broadcaster.
It's a propaganda organ.
Breitbart is a contrary point of view.
I think he's suggesting we ban one and promote the other.
But who is he to decide which one?
Isn't the fact that many people seek alternative sources of information proof that the establishment isn't serving the people and isn't giving people all the news, all the information?
And his plan isn't to fix what many perceive as the bias of the establishment is, but rather to strengthen that bias and force people to consume biased news that they don't want.
When I, as the wannabe gangster Ali G, asked the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, what was it like to walk on the sun?
The joke worked because we, the audience, shared the same facts.
If you believe the moon landing was a hoax, the joke doesn't work.
When Borat got that bar in Arizona to agree that Jews control everybody's money and they never give it back, the joke worked because the audience shared the fact that the depiction of Jews as miserly is a conspiracy theory originating in the Middle Ages.
Well, actually, no, for people born and raised and educated in the West with Western liberal values, that's not sure.
But millions of migrants to the West from Muslim countries don't share those basic underlying set of facts to them.
Jews are evil.
They absolutely do control the world.
Do you recall that massive opinion poll of British Muslims conducted by the former head of the UK Human Rights Commission?
I found that this survey found that in fact British Muslims don't share liberal values.
They want to ban gay teachers.
They say they wouldn't tell police if someone they knew was going to join ISIS.
They believe violence is acceptable to defend the Prophet Muhammad's honor.
They believe Jews, in fact, do start all the wars and control all the political parties.
That's not a hunch or a guess.
That is an in-depth study of British Muslims.
I'm not focusing on Muslims in particular here, other than all the failings he's trying to foist and blame on Middle America.
They're not actually the failings of Middle America.
All the bigotry he's worried about.
It's not old stock Americans or Canadians.
His remedy, get tech companies to ban conservatives.
That's not a solution to the real source of the problem here.
He used to make jokes about Muslims.
Ali G. Borat, that dictator.
They were all Muslims, but he can't quite make himself say those things in his own straight man's voice out of character.
But when, thanks to social media, conspiracies take hold, it is easier for hate groups to recruit, easier for foreign intelligence agencies to interfere in our elections, and easier for a country like Myanmar to commit genocide against the Rohingya.
So he's still on the Russian collusion thing.
Of course, the ADL is a Democratic Party operation, but Myanmar and the Rohingya Muslims, it's odd to see Borat caring so much about Muslims all of a sudden.
Actually, the biggest persecutor of Muslims in the world, if you believe the media reports, is China.
Reports, including the Wall Street Journal, say China has big labor camps of Uyghur Muslims where they re-educate and punish Muslims.
I do believe that.
But that punishment, that brutality is not being done by Facebook or Twitter.
Those companies are actually banned in China.
Facebook and Twitter don't cause bigotry.
In fact, they can be used to counter bigotry, to debate, to report alternative news that the big news agencies won't do.
The reason I have a soft spot for Alex Jones is not that I agree with him on everything.
It's that he's a perpetual dissident.
Almost no matter what someone in the establishment says, Alex Jones and Infowars will say the opposite.
He's dead on with things like Epstein.
He's wrong, in my view, with his 9-11 conspiracy theories, for example.
I don't know about most of his ideas, because I don't spend a lot of time watching him, but I like the idea of a perpetual, high-energy, entertaining dissenter who will skewer the establishment 24-7 because they deserve it.
That's sort of what a comedian does, too.
And Alex Jones has a great sense of humor sometimes.
He jokes around.
I'm going to see if I can swivel the hip.
Full power.
I like that.
Yeah.
Let's do it again.
You know what I was doing?
Come on, let's do it rolling there.
I'm going to give you just a big one.
Yeah, why does Borat get to make jokes, but not Alex Jones or Gavin McKinnis?
Why can't we have someone skewer the establishment, even if they get it wrong much of the time or even most of the time?
Why do comedians like Sarah Silverman and Sasha Baron Cohen feel the need to bend the knee to big corporations and big government now?
Is it only now that they're rich and they care about getting richer rather than being funny?
It's actually quite shocking how easy it is to turn conspiracy thinking into violence.
In my last show, Who is America? I found an educated, normal guy who had held down a good job, but who on social media repeated many of the conspiracy theories that President Trump using Twitter has spread more than 1,700 times to his 67 million Twitter followers.
The president even tweeted that he was considering designating Antifa, who are anti-fascists who march against the far right, as a terror organization.
Whoa, is that what Antifa is?
You know what Antifa are.
They're these masked thugs who are violent, especially in America and Western Europe.
They attack people, students, the elderly, journalists, whomever, they're a gang.
Sasha Baron Cohen is pumping out disinformation himself here.
He's whitewashing a true hate group, Antifa.
And he's claiming that Trump is a liar?
Okay, fine, but he didn't particularize any of the lies.
Why bother?
He's speaking at a Democratic Party organization called the ADL.
They all just know Trump is a liar.
No need for proof.
And that would mean debating Trump, and that's harder than just trying to ban Trump from Facebook or impeach him, isn't it?
So, disguised as an Israeli anti-terrorism expert, Colonel Eran Murad.
Yala, let's go.
Disguised as him, I told my interviewee that at the women's march in San Francisco, Antifa were plotting to put hormones into babies' diapers in order to make them transgender.
And this man believed it.
Yeah, that's hilarious.
Who would ever believe the lie that left-wing extremists are trying to make kids transgender?
I mean, what a conspiracy theory, eh?
Yeah.
Next thing you're going to tell me that courts are ordering kids to take hormones to turn pre-pubescent boys into girls.
What are you crazy?
What a conspiracy theory.
And I'm talking about this today because I believe that our pluralistic democracies are on a precipice and then the next 12 months and the role of social media could be determined.
Now, British voters will go to the polls while online conspiracists promote the despicable theory of the great replacement, that white Christians are being deliberately replaced by Muslim immigrants.
Americans will vote for president while trolls and bots perpetuate the disgusting lie of a Hispanic invasion.
Look, massive illegal immigration isn't a conspiracy theory.
It is a fact.
In the United Kingdom, in Canada, in the United States, in Canada at least, Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, specifically ramped up Muslim immigration and specifically limited Christian refugees.
That is not a conspiracy theory.
Here's Trudeau announcing how disgusting Stephen Harper was to allow special access for Christian refugees from ISIS.
And to know that somewhere in the Prime Minister's office, staffers were pouring through their personal files to try and see whether these families or find out which families would be suitable for a photo op for the prime minister's re-election campaign?
That's disgusting.
Zuckerberg's Call for Censorship00:10:38
And Borat thinks that being a skeptic of the theory of man-made global warming is tantamount to being a Holocaust denier or something.
And after years of YouTube videos calling climate change a hoax, the United States is on track a year from now to formally withdraw from the Paris Accords.
A sewer of bigotry and vile conspiracy theories that threaten our democracy and to some degree our planet.
This can't possibly be what the creators of the internet had in mind.
Yeah, stick to telling jokes, okay?
You're sounding a bit too much like one of your jokes, that dictator character, telling people what to think about global warming or immigration policy, telling people you want to cut off their information choice in the run-up to an election.
That's not very British, that's not very American or Canadian, it's more of a Kazakhstan idea.
Cohen actually claims that Facebook, which bans conservatives already, is still too free speechy.
First, Zuckerberg tried to portray this whole issue as choices around free expression.
That is ludicrous.
This is not about limiting anyone's free speech.
This is about giving people, including some of the most reprehensible people on earth, the biggest platform in history to reach a third of the planet.
What?
So he's calling for censorship, for people to be banned.
But he objects to being called a censor, and his only rebuttal is to say, that's ludicrous.
Yeah, no.
You gave a whole speech in favor of censorship.
You want to force Facebook to de-platform people even more.
You're furious that they won't obey you.
You're a censor.
You're not even a censor because it's not your company.
You want to force other people to be a censor.
How low does that make you?
Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.
What?
That's just a rhyme.
That doesn't mean anything.
Freedom of speech means you have the freedom to say something.
Other people have the freedom to choose to listen to it.
You can't say, if you can't say anything other than to yourself, that's not actually free speech, big guy.
Who is this idiot?
He's making Borat look smart.
Second, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that new limits on what's posted on social media would be to pull back on free expression.
This is utter nonsense.
The First Amendment says that, and I quote, Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.
However, this does not apply to private businesses like Facebook.
We're not asking these companies to determine the boundaries of free speech across society.
We just want them to be responsible on their platforms.
This is the closest thing to an argument that Sasha Baron Cohen makes, that the First Amendment in the United States doesn't apply to private companies.
He's a Brit, I'm a Canadian, so neither of us are really experts in the First Amendment.
But in fact, the First Amendment does apply to many private companies, which is why, for example, you see moonies in public shopping centers or airports.
If a private company owns what's essentially a public square, the First Amendment can apply to them.
But the First Amendment is not the only law that applies.
So does human rights law, for example.
In fact, what Sasha Baron Cohen is really asking for is that internet companies, well, I think that they should be free to discriminate based on political beliefs.
If he got his way, what would stop internet companies from banning his political beliefs?
He's a bit of a coward.
He never mentions China in his speech, not once.
Like most people in Hollywood, he's too concerned about selling movie tickets there.
He'll never criticize them.
Like the NBA, maybe he'll get an endorsement there.
But what if, let's say, one of the world's largest tech companies, Huawei, a Chinese company which is building much of the world's 5G telecom networks, and they're set to do so in Canada too.
What if Huawei just, I don't know, decided to ban Uyghur Muslims in China from talking on their phones or the Rohingya Muslims in Burma that Sasha Baron Cohen suddenly cares so much about.
What if Huawei wanted to ban comedians that they don't like?
Or liberals or conservatives or more likely Hong Kong democracy activists?
Cohen is saying companies should be able to discriminate however they like because they're private companies.
Is that really a good thing for a Jewish comedian to argue for?
Now, third, Mark Zuckerberg seemed to equate regulation of companies like his to the actions of the most repressive societies.
Incredible.
This from one of the six people who decide what information so much of the world sees.
Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sundar Pichai at Google, at its parent company, Alphabet, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Brin's ex-sister-in-law, Susan Wojeckski at YouTube, and Jack Dorsey at Twitter.
The Silicon Six.
All billionaires, all Americans who care more about boosting their share price than about protecting democracy.
This, this is ideological imperialism.
Six unelected individuals in Silicon Valley imposing their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government and acting like they're a barn for the reach of law.
Cohen keeps putting the free speech arguments and then just saying, that's ridiculous, that's ludicrous, that's incredible, without actually refuting the free speech argument.
How could he?
His big movie ticket market, China, absolutely does throttle the internet, just like he's proposing for America and the UK.
So does North Korea.
Iran just shut down the entire internet this month to squelch an uprising.
Again, this guy just made the case that there are half a dozen powerful internet barons and that's dangerous, he's saying.
They have too much control, he's saying.
But then he wants to give them more power to censor enemies?
Pick a lane, buddy.
Our Zuckerberg and friends, are they a dangerous elite who can't be trusted?
Or do you actually want to trust them to decide every video, every joke said on the internet?
Sasha Baron Cohen's speech was so long and so wrong, I don't have the time to go through the whole thing.
But here's the ultimate proof that Sasha Baron Cohen is simply a man of the establishment now.
Not a word in his speech against Hollywood.
Not a word in his speech against China.
Because that's where his money comes from.
But take a look at this.
Now take the issue of political ads on which Facebook have been resolute.
Fortunately, Twitter finally banned them.
And Google, today I read, is making changes too.
But if you pay them, Facebook will run any political ad you want, even if it's a lie.
Who needs political ads?
Well, not the powerful, not the establishment, not someone who is already a president, a tyrant.
Vladimir Putin does not need political ads anymore.
He simply gives a speech and all the state broadcasters repeat it.
Political ads are for upstarts, for dissidents, for people who need to buy marketing because they're not already powerful.
Sasha Baron Cohen is very pleased that they have been silenced now.
He's for the established order.
He wasn't when he was starting out as an edgy comedian, but he's made it now, just like Sarah Silverman.
He's the establishment now, so like Silverman, he's shutting the door for anyone who follows him.
What a virtue signaler.
From the man who gave us the running of the Jews.
I haven't actually seen him fight injustice in real life, because that's hard, you know?
He really seems to have a bee in his bonnet about Myanmar and the Rohingya Muslims.
I'd be willing to bet he can't even find Myanmar on a map.
It's just some cool thing he heard about.
Get this.
Maybe it's time to tell Mark Zuckerberg and the CEOs of these companies, you already allowed one foreign power to interfere in our elections.
You already facilitated one genocide in Myanmar.
Do it again and you go to jail.
In the end, it all comes down to what kind of world we want.
Yeah, that's right.
Do you think you solve problems in Myanmar by taxing and regulating the internet?
Or by solving the problem in Myanmar?
There was no internet when the Rwanda massacres happened, when the Holocaust happened.
Cohen says Hitler would have used the internet.
Well, I'm sure he would have, just like he was literally published in the New York Times.
The problem isn't the medium.
The problem is the problem.
It's not the messenger.
Why doesn't Cohen actually do something for the Rohingya?
I'm just kidding.
He doesn't really care about them.
Let me close with Cohen's last line that shows you what this is really about.
If we make that our aim, if we prioritize truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference, and experts over ignoramuses, then maybe, just maybe, we can stop the greatest propaganda machine in history.
We can save democracy.
We can still have a place for free speech and free expression.
And most importantly, my jokes will still work.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, no, your jokes won't work under your proposed new rules, but that's fine.
You already got paid.
You're already a gazillionaire.
But your goals, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference, experts over ignoramuses, those are great goals.
But they're not greater than the fundamental freedom of speech.
Empathy over indifference?
Yeah, great.
It's something for you to work on in your own personal life as a man.
It's not for governments to tell citizens what to do.
Experts over ignoramuses?
Yeah.
Hey, good idea.
Trouble is each of us have a different idea of who an expert is.
I'm not going to rely on a comedian who wrote some paper in college once to teach me about freedom.
Sasha Baron Cohen attacked Trump over and over in his speech, but not China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, or places like that.
He mentions Muslims, but only as victims, never as terrorists or haters.
His speech isn't serious.
Carbon Tax Controversy00:15:00
It was delivered at a Democrat-controlled organization.
But even that wasn't what it was about.
Every one of the tech companies he blasted is overwhelmingly Democrat in its politics.
They're all based in San Francisco.
This speech wasn't about anything except one thing, about the dirtiest comedian of our era trying to whitewash himself.
Yeah, no.
That would be like Howard Stern suddenly saying he's a feminist now and he's really, really against the objectification of women.
No more joking about girls.
Sure, buddy.
Do yourself a favor.
just stick to being funny.
So the current carbon price is rising to $50 per ton by 2022.
We then continue it at $20 per ton per year up to 2030.
So gasoline becomes 40 cents more expensive by 2030 than it is today.
Well, that's Chris Rogan, the head of something called the Eco-Fiscal Commission.
Now, the thing about the word Eco-Fiscal Commission is it sounds pretty official, sort of like Federal Express, which was deliberately chosen to make it sound official like the Post Office.
No, Federal Express is just a private company.
The Eco-Fiscal Commission is a private lobby group with many liberal ties.
I must say, in all fairness, though, they had Preston Manning on their advisory board in its early years to sort of infiltrate the right.
That was when the right was toying with carbon taxes until Rob Ford and belatedly Andrew Scheer pulled the plug on that movement.
Well, the Eco-Fiscal Commission is back, as you can see, saying and waiting until after the election to say it.
Well, guess what, guys?
We might have to double, triple, maybe even quadruple the carbon tax.
And here to talk about it is one of our friends who's written a column about this.
I'm talking about Andrew Lawton with TNC News.
His article, the headline is, Liberal Connected Environmental Group wants to quadruple carbon tax.
Andrew, how you doing?
Hey, good to be with you, Ezra.
I'm well.
How about yourself?
Good.
It's nice to see you.
You are a real carbon tax expert.
You attended the court challenge in Ontario to the carbon tax.
And it doesn't surprise me that you're all over this.
First of all, did I accurately describe the Eco-Fiscal Commission?
Sounds very official, but it's basically a lobby group.
Would you say that's accurate?
Yes and no.
I think that it's accurate that this is a private group, but I don't think it's accurate to say that it doesn't have government influence because the Eco-Fiscal Commission reports have been heavily cited by governments.
And in fact, during the carbon tax trial in Ontario, it was not infrequently that the Eco-Fiscal Commission's findings were cited as evidence of government needing to do certain things.
So it seems like they have been granted the air of state legitimacy, even though that isn't what the organization actually deserves.
Huh, that's a very good point.
I think they are successful.
I mean, choosing that name, Eco-Fiscal Commission, I mean, everyone's heard of a commission.
Well, and sorry to interrupt, but the official name is Canada's Eco-Fiscal Commission.
So the branding of it is they're laying ownership of Canada, Canada's Eco-Fiscal Commission, to such an extent that anyone would assume they do have the backing of government.
Yeah, I mean, you know, a commissioner is often a public office.
You know, the commission, oh, here's the commissioner, whether it's an election commissioner or a police commissioner, a commissioner is almost like saying judge.
That would almost be like saying Canada's environmental judge.
I think that they're very tricky, and that's why they're effective.
As you say, they're cited in court.
Thank you for that information.
I didn't know that.
But now, I see in your article and I see reported elsewhere, the Eco-Fiscal Commission, we saw a little clip of them a moment ago.
They waited till after the election is over.
Now they're saying, okay, suckers, we got to jack up the carbon tax now.
Yeah, and it's quite unfortunate for many reasons.
I mean, economically, Canada can barely weather the carbon tax that's on the books now, which is supposed to go up to $50.
So it's not actually at its maximum level yet.
And what the Eco-Fiscal Commission is pushing for is an increase to a $210 a ton carbon tax in 11 years.
So that would be quadruple, well, more than quadrupling from its current level, but quadrupling from the maximum level, which isn't supposed to kick in for another two years, which is just such a monumental increase.
And we're already seeing declining fortunes in the oil and gas sector, mining, forestry.
We haven't yet seen the spin-off effects of this in adjacent industries like retail and shipping and even grocery, for example, and agriculture, where there has to be a payment of the carbon tax because these industries rely on shipping.
That impact isn't going to become apparent until down the road.
So you're right.
The fact that all of a sudden these groups are coming out of the woodwork saying, oh, you know, that carbon tax Canada has isn't going to be enough to meet the Paris Accord targets and the government's targets.
Well, this was presented to Canadians as being the silver bullet in the climate fight, that we need to put this price on greenhouse gas emissions, and this is going to get us to Paris.
And now all of these groups, including the International Monetary Fund, the Eco-Fiscal Commission, I believe Canada 2020 as well, even a report from the Canadian bureaucracy are saying that Justin Trudeau's carbon tax doesn't go far enough.
This was a way to get the foot in the door, and now all of these groups are going to give the government cover to increase the carbon tax.
Yeah.
You know, I remember when the Energy East pipeline was killed.
That was a $15 billion pipeline project would have created more jobs than there are unemployed people in Atlantic Canada.
It's just such a huge, huge project.
It was killed because the government changed the rules halfway.
They said you now have to take into account global warming emissions from the oil in the pipeline, not just the pipeline itself.
And Energy said, oh, this is ridiculous.
We're out of it.
And the reason I mentioned that, you might be saying, well, what's the connection?
Is they didn't bring in the same global warming analysis for imports from Saudi tankers.
So I'm sorry if I'm taking a while to make my point here, Andrew, but it's they decided to add this new restriction to Canadian oil pipelines.
We're now making you accountable for the GHG emissions of what's in the pipe.
But they were exempting Saudi and American oil imports that come from Saudi ships or American rail cars.
And here's my point as applicable here.
Imagine you're a farmer in Saskatchewan.
Imagine you're an automaker in Ontario.
And you've now got to pay $210 per puff of CO2 or whatever it works out to.
But our number one export market, our number one competitor, the United States, does not.
So a car made in Detroit or Ohio doesn't have to pay this.
Farmers in Nebraska don't have to pay this on their diesel fuel for their combines.
It's insane that we would do this to ourselves while America is going the opposite direction.
Donald Trump has formally served notice to withdraw America from the Paris global warming scheme.
This just seems like a pointless declaration of war against Canadian business.
Well, it is.
And I mean, we know that the government in the previous parliament had those two bills that were specifically targeting the oil and gas sector.
And I think that there's a lot of value in saying that any hope Justin Trudeau has at mending things with the West requires those bills to be repealed.
The problem with the carbon tax is that it just has the guise of targeting polluters and targeting big companies that are spewing toxic fumes and chemicals into the atmosphere.
But the reality is the carbon tax hit everyone.
It hits families, it hits small business, it hits anyone that needs to buy something that they didn't grow in their own backyard.
You know, you can't even buy your organic free-range kale without paying a carbon tax because that kale came from somewhere and it had to be shipped.
And unless we have a fleet of Tesla trucks, which it sounds like we're not heading anywhere close to with how that announcement went by Tesla last week, it's not possible to ship anything without greenhouse gas emissions or what the government is characterizing as greenhouse gas emissions.
So we're in a very dangerous territory here, Ezra, because there is this double standard, you're right, where it only seems to be domestic product that is harmed, which is at odds with the Canadian economy's needs, at odds with the Canadian consumers' needs, and at odds with environmental science.
And that's why this whole thing is such a mess.
And to go back to the Eco-Fiscal Commission, I know you took aim at the word commission.
I take aim at the word fiscal in a lot of sense, because this gives it the sense that there is fiscal legitimacy when in actuality, if you hear the comments being made by the Commission spokespeople, they're unabashedly desiring a carbon tax.
And we know that the math just doesn't add off on these economic.
Yeah.
I just, you know, we're so integrated with the United States that will continue with the ratification of the revised NAFTA.
I just don't even understand how, well, it's a group of professors and a group of lobbyists.
That's how it makes sense.
But here's the other thing.
You're talking about how this is going to be paid by everybody.
That's true.
At the end of the day, we'll all pay for it.
Some industries will be hit harder, agriculture, oil and gas.
But I am sure that there will be political exemptions for favored industries, especially in Quebec and probably in Ontario where there are least liberal MPs.
And I point out, for example, there was a recent approval of a massive cement factory in Quebec.
Cement is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.
Now, I'm not a carbon worrier.
I understand that carbon is the stuff of life.
It's plant food.
And I don't believe that we're in a crisis.
But for those who do, cement plants are some of the biggest emitters around next to maybe coal-fired power plants.
The new cement plant in Quebec was exempted from a carbon analysis in a way that a oil sands facility would not.
So I think, Andrew, that if you had the quadrupling of carbon taxes as this Eco Fiscal Commission wants, it would not hit everyone equally.
There would be huge exemptions in Quebec, because that's what Justin Trudeau cares about, and the greater Toronto area, because that's what Justin Trudeau cares about.
Well, it is an interesting point you raised, because we heard when the SNC Lavalin affair broke that when Justin Trudeau finally sort of figured out how he was going to defend himself, his line was that he's never going to apologize for standing up for jobs.
And we've seen time and time again that he cares a lot more about Quebec SNC Lavalin jobs than jobs of oil patch workers, jobs of Southern Ontario farmers, jobs of people in all these other areas.
So there very much is a double standard in which jobs the government decides it's going to go to the rails for.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you this.
It's obvious to me that this Canada's Eco Fiscal Commission is a stalking horse, that they're out there to try and move what's called the Overton window, which is what's the realm of the discussable.
It's insane to quadruple the carbon tax.
So this Chris Regan, this professor, this paid lobbyist, says the insane thing because he's not on the ballot.
He doesn't have to worry about turning off voters.
And then Justin Trudeau comes in and says, whoa, we're not that radical.
We'll just go halfway there.
So no, no, no.
Some people who happen to be my best friends say quadruple the carbon tax.
No, we'll just double it because we're reasonable.
That's what I think is going on here.
They're a stalking horse to move the Overton window to be the insane people so Trudeau can split the difference.
Yeah, death by a thousand compromises is how that looks to me.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I want to ask you one last question.
Do you think that this will happen before the next federal election?
I'm going to say that this minority government lasts two years.
That's my prediction.
Do you think that in the next two years, Justin Trudeau will jack up the carbon tax by double, triple, quadruple as proposed here?
I would say no.
And the reason why is because the government has built in a bit of cover here because the carbon tax as it is is not going to reach its full potential until I believe 2022.
So that gives the government some time.
If the election is before that cutoff period happens, the government doesn't need to do anything else.
But after that point, if the Liberals win again, all of a sudden, oh, you know what?
You know, the world's changed.
We need to do more.
Time to up things.
But I think that they're going to stick with the timeline they put forward.
My big fear is what happens after that.
Yeah, well, you're right.
If the Liberals were to win yet again, frankly, you couldn't blame them for saying, well, Canadians knew what they were getting.
I hope that doesn't happen.
Andrew, it's great to see you.
Of course, our viewers know you not just as a great journalist in your own right at TNC.news, but one of our co-plaintiffs in busting down the censorship of the English language, the Debates Commission in the last election.
So congratulations also on that great win.
Thank you.
All right.
There you have.
Take care, my friend.
You too.
There you have it.
Andrew Lawton from TNC.news.
Stay with us more ahead.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yet.
Yesterday, Richard writes, this turkey incident shows precedent.
We need to prosecute these anarchists and hurt them in the pocketbook.
Rcmp Has Much Answering To Do00:01:39
Well, yeah, not just the four low-level people who were charged.
There were 60 people involved.
And I'm not even interested in the college kids or whatever.
One of them was a minor.
How about the organizers?
How about the fundraisers?
Peter writes, I have dealt with the How to Rights for many years.
They are amazingly generous people.
I have the utmost respect for them.
Well, me too.
I don't actually know any How to Rights.
I mean, I know of them and I'm a fan from afar.
I think they were chosen precisely because they turned the other cheek, precisely because they're pacifists.
They were picked on because these eco-bullies knew they wouldn't fight back.
Bernard writes, I'm still very angry that there were only a few people charged by the RCMP.
Why no more arrests?
Why did the RCMP negotiate with these criminals to let them off and let them steal five turkeys?
Yeah, that's the worst part of it all.
It would be like if the RCMP arrived at a bank robbery and said, all right, guys, we're going to negotiate.
You want $100,000.
You want zero.
Let's split the difference of 50 grand and you can walk out of here scot-free.
Like, I know the stakes are higher, five turkeys versus 50 grand.
But are the principles not the same?
I'm very mad about how this thing is going, and I think the province of Alberta has a lot of answering to do for why they haven't put more charges.
And the RCMP has a lot of answering to do.
I met a cop, an RCMP officer at the courthouse yesterday, and he said, oh, I follow you.
Yeah, I bet he does.
I wish he would follow the eco-radicals as closely as he follows my Twitter account.
That's our news for today, until tomorrow.
On behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, good night.