Ezra Levant counters "black extremist" claims that Canada is racist, citing a study where 80% of Canadians—including 69% of Indigenous respondents—view race relations as improving despite historical issues like the Indian Act. He mocks Desmond Cole’s profanity-laden tweets while defending Canada’s openness, then pivots to B.J. Campbell’s 2018 analysis predicting a 37% U.S. revolution risk using flood-insurance logic, comparing it to Chile’s subway-fare riots and Hong Kong’s protests. Preparedness, they argue, isn’t paranoia—it’s rational survival strategy when trust in authority crumbles. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh hey rebels, I saw this story on CTV with Desmond Cole.
He's a black extremist activist huckster hustler.
I saw him on CTV saying we're a white supremacist society and he was referring to a survey on racism and I actually did what CTV didn't.
I read the survey and I'll take you through it.
Before I do, let me invite you to become a premium subscriber.
Go to premium.rebelnews.com.
It's eight bucks a month and you get the video version of this.
I'm going to show you some graphs and charts today.
So that would be an example of the value of a premium.rebelnews.com subscription.
Anyway, here's the podcast.
Hi, everybody.
Ezra Levant here.
I recorded today's monologue before the news of Andrew Scheer stepping down because I'm on the road and wanted to get that show squared away.
And then what do you know?
Andrew Scheer goes ahead and resigns.
Now, reports say that the fundraising arm of the Conservative Party discovered that he was getting unapproved payments to cover the costs of his kids' private school in Ottawa.
And they were outraged by this.
I do think that is sort of outrageous.
I mean, he makes a quarter million dollars a year as the leader of the opposition.
And he's done so for 10 years because he was making a huge salary as Speaker of the House.
And both as leader of the opposition and Speaker of the House, he had a free home, so he wasn't paying for that.
And of course, you get a ton of perks as an MP.
So I just don't understand why he couldn't pay for his own school.
And it's not like he just moved to Ottawa.
I just find the whole thing very odd, and it undermines any claim he has to taking on Justin Trudeau's extravagances.
It just doesn't make sense, and it certainly doesn't square with his image of a just folks regular Joe.
I find it odd, and he says that's not why he resigned.
Maybe that's true.
But the fact is, he's gone.
And to which I say, good.
He's an unremarkable man who did not leave a mark.
And I think the problem was he was not a fighter.
He was never in the trenches.
He was just sort of a candidate that gamed the system that made sense maybe on paper, but not in spirit.
And the good news is he's gone.
And now the party doesn't have to dig him out and blast him out as son had thought they might have to do.
And now we can get on with this.
And I look forward to seeing the names of the people who will throw their hat into the ring.
I don't know who it'll be yet.
If I had to pull some names out of the air, I'd suggest, oh, for example, Pierre Polyev from the Ottawa area or Candace Bergen, the outstanding Manitoba MP.
Racial Denial In Canada00:15:06
Those are just a couple of examples.
Either way, Rebel News will be part of the debate and part of the process in the months ahead.
The only source you'll be able to trust, because I tell you one thing, the CBC ain't going to play it straight.
All right, that's it for my on the road update.
Now back to my pre-recorded show.
Tonight, a new study shows that Canada is not a racist country and racism activists are outraged.
It's December 12th, 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'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I know that Canada is not a racist country.
I know it because I've lived here my whole life.
I've lived in Vancouver, in Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa.
I've traveled to nine provinces and two territories.
I've met tens of thousands of people.
I know it's not racist.
Now, all of us are sinners, and all of us have our quirks and prejudices and even bigotries.
But as countries go, I truly think we've got the best score on that issue.
I mean, America is amazing, but they did have slavery.
There's no doubt about it.
And Jim Crow laws, we avoided that, didn't we, since we were part of the British Empire and they literally declared war against slavery.
200 years ago, the British Navy literally hunted down slave ships the same way they hunted down pirates.
There are some ethnically homogeneous countries like Japan, for example, that don't have any racism, but that's simply because there's no one else there, ethnically speaking.
It's a hypothetical issue.
Canada's pretty good.
I acknowledge we have treated Aboriginal people poorly to this day in the Indian Act.
But I think in the main, most racism is actually conducted in the name of do-goodery.
The Indian Act itself was designed to help Indians by treating them like children, to protect them.
You see that in the act to this day, special government protections for Indians, giving the governments the power, for example, to revise a last will and testament if some government bureaucrat thinks someone on the reserve didn't do it right.
It really treats Indians like children.
So yeah, there's still racism, but I truly believe it's done by the do-gooders more than by normal people.
You see it in the Black Lives Matter movement, which is a U.S. street gang, really.
I say that advisedly.
They were involved in various politically motivated riots.
They operated with the approval of the Obama White House.
They were like the exclamation point on Obama's policies.
In my view, they were a way to ensure that the black community kept voting Democrat no matter how bad things got in Democrat-run cities like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore.
But that's just not a thing here in Canada.
There are some old black communities in Canada, including in Nova Scotia, and they face some discrimination, it's true, but there's no massive, deep, ingrained, deep-seated racism against blacks in Canada.
Sorry, I just don't accept that.
And neither would Harriet Tubman, who helped free black slaves and lead them through the Underground Railroad to Canada.
Here's the CBC admitting this.
They're beaming with pride in Canada's role in that, just last month, because there's this new movie out about Tubman, and there's a brief mention of Canada there.
So the CBC was really excited.
The CBC was pretty upset that the movie spelled a Canadian city's name wrong.
Take a look at this.
Follow that North Star.
Tubman's journey following the North Star ultimately led her to St. Catharines, Ontario.
You are welcome here anytime.
The last stop on the Underground Railroad.
While the city is briefly featured in the film and unfortunately misspelled, Tubman called it home for nearly 10 years.
So the CBC is in a pickle.
On the one hand, they're proud of Harriet Tubman's role and Canada's role.
And like so many second raiders, the CBC is really excited when someone in the United States notices us.
So they were thrilled to talk about the movie and Canada's role in freeing the slaves.
That's fine.
But on the other hand, they really believe in the grievance culture too, in being unhappy and seeing the worst of people.
So they don't want to get carried away by how excellent Canada was on the slavery issue.
I mean, sure, Canada may be where all the slaves dreamed of escaping to, but the CBC knows that deep down in our hearts, we were evil racists too.
They have done their best to demonize John A. McDonald, and they cheer whenever his statue is taken down.
They cheered when he was removed from our $10 bill and replaced by a black woman that really no one had heard of before, Viola Desmond.
Someone whose grand experience with fighting racism was that she was asked to leave a theater in Nova Scotia because she sat in a place where the white theater owners said was reserved for whites.
Now that's racist.
And that wasn't a racist law.
was a racist theater owner.
And she faced an obscure tax prosecution over being short one cent in her tax for her theater ticket.
She fought it.
Her lawyer screwed up.
The judge said so himself.
The judge said she was wronged.
The judge was on her side.
So that's the story.
She left Canada and just moved to the States.
So she fought this one foolish theater thing and then got on with her life.
I sympathize with her.
I agree with her.
I agree with the judge.
I'm not sure if she's a great champion of freedom on par with our founding prime minister, but she's necessary for the narrative that paints Canada's past as deeply racist.
I'm sorry, it just wasn't.
If that movie theater incident was your worst case of racist atrocities worthy of being put on the $10 bill, you've had a pretty easy go of it.
And to this day, the same thing.
There just really isn't any high office in Canada that is closed in any way to minorities.
We've had visible minority premiers.
I think of Ujil Desange.
We've had judges, leaders of industry, obviously sports heroes, entertainment heroes.
Think of rapper Drake and Toronto's basketball team, the Raptors.
My main thoughts about them are then they're sort of American.
It's not about how black they are, it's about how American they are.
They were completely embraced as Canadian heroes, though.
To say that we have some sort of inherent racism in Canada just isn't true.
Now, Black Lives Matter set up a branch plant in Canada, sort of a colony.
But it was so fake.
None of the grievances fit.
It didn't ring true.
They were importing U.S. themes and stories and grievances to here.
It made no sense.
Totally reminded me of Occupy Wall Street, another fake grassroots protest that was sent up from America.
I mean, I get it in America, their banks failed a dozen years ago and were bailed out by the government a dozen years ago.
None of our Canadian banks failed.
None were bailed out, so the whole complaint didn't work.
Same with Black Lives Matter.
We just didn't have the things they were mad about.
But of course, there's a market for grievances the same way Trudeau put Viola Desmond on the $10 bill, the same way we have an official affirmative action law in Canada called the Employment Equity Act, the same way Trudeau has racial quotas in his cabinet.
We go through those motions because Trudeau and a lot of the establishment buys into the Marxism of racial grievance politics.
He takes the so-called solutions to problems we never had, or at least didn't have in any intolerable way.
There were black cowboys in Alberta a century ago.
It was no big deal.
It wasn't the way it was in the Confederate States.
But like I say, there's a whole industry built up around racial hucksters trying to get us to hate each other.
It's a copycat thing.
If America has this whole grievance industry, why shouldn't Canada?
Even if we didn't have the same problems.
And so look at this.
A new survey shows that racism isn't really a big deal in Canada, but the racism industry is furious.
Let me read the headline.
Racism not a big problem?
Activists say survey shows Canadians in denial.
I'm not wrong.
It's the children.
Let me quote the story.
A new national survey shows that Canadians are in denial about racism, says one Toronto activist.
The Enveronics Institute for Survey Research and the Canadian Race Relations Foundation released the Race Relations in Canada 2019 survey on Tuesday outlining Canadian views on racial discrimination.
But do you see how the story was written?
Before they even tell you what the survey says, an actual statistically sound survey.
They tell you that it's all wrong because a Toronto activist said we're all in denial.
What?
Let me read some more.
Canadians were optimistic reporting on other aspects, race and discrimination.
Eight in ten Canadians said race relations in their own communities are generally good, with the largest majority of positive views held by white respondents, 84%, and the smallest majority among Indigenous respondents, 69%.
So Canadians are optimistic, eh?
They think race relations are good.
Even Aboriginal Canadians, 69%, think race relations are good.
Oh, but they're all wrong, you see, because some activist says so, and he's got to earn a living, people, so let's be mad at each other.
The survey also found that Canadians were more likely to view racial discrimination as the attitudes and actions of individuals, not a systemic issue embedded in Canadian institutions.
Two-thirds of respondents said people from all races have the same opportunities to succeed in life.
That is a fantasy, said Toronto activist and writer Desmond Cole in an interview on CTV News Channel.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of Canadians are in denial that racism is a static thing.
You know, listen to him.
And here's the thing, Todd.
We can ask Canadians how they feel about this all they want to.
The only people whose opinions on this subject matter are the people who are experiencing racism.
Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, black and indigenous people in particular, because this study shows that we're experiencing the most racism.
Duh.
Got it.
So millions of Canadians who think things are pretty good.
And then maybe there's a few bad apples out there, or maybe there's just some cranky people.
Well, those people are wrong.
There's just this one guy who it just so happens his income, his whole celebrity depends on calling his own country racist, his own neighbors racist and white supremacists.
So believe this guy.
Sorry, buddy.
If Canada were white supremacist, you probably wouldn't be on CTV calling us white supremacists.
It's a paradox that way.
Desmond Cole, professional race betor, he's just wrong.
At least that's what the science says.
And by science, I mean the survey, if that can be called science.
Take a look at the actual study here.
Let me show you the survey they're talking about.
Look at the chart on page nine.
Not only do most Canadians think race relations are good, we think it's getting better.
34% say it's improved.
41% say it's staying the same.
True, 18% say things are worse.
But again, those are numbers that show a success.
Things are the same or getting better.
That's not what white supremacy looks like.
On page 10, almost everyone says our race relations are better here than in the U.S. That's probably true.
But that's a problem for Desmond Cole and all the other hucksters.
How are they going to hustle if we're all fine without them to pour salt in our wounds?
Maybe he should go down to the States.
They're probably looking for a grievance monger like him.
Look at the chart on page 12.
Overwhelmingly, people say we all get along.
We can all get ahead.
Just one more chart.
No wonder they didn't mention this on the CTV story.
Page 13.
Will all racialized people in Canada be treated with respect in your lifetime?
Now, racialized is a weird way of saying visible minorities.
And you can see that they've broken down the answers by race.
Now, being treated with respect is such a subjective question.
It's not, will you be treated equally before the law?
We already have that.
It's not, will you be able to send your kids to any university, get any job, be a success?
We already have all of that.
So the question is, will you be treated with respect?
That's a feelings question.
All right, fine.
Let's ask a feelings question.
58% of whites say yes, we'll all be treated with respect.
And look at the next line.
63% of Chinese people think so.
They think Canada is less racist than guilty white liberals.
Look at the next line.
69% of South Asian people, that means people from India or Pakistan, they think we'll all be treated with respect.
They love it here.
And even look, 63% of Aboriginal people say so, which is quite something since I would say no, they are treated disrespectfully by the Indian Act.
They don't care.
And even the black community that Desmond Cole claims to speaks for, 50% of them say yeah, respect.
Almost identical to what white people say.
I think white people are the most guilty about this country.
Everyone else pretty much loves it.
One more chart, page 14.
Asked to visible minorities only.
Will your kids face more or less racism than you?
And they all say the same or less.
All of them.
No one in real life thinks we're racist, except this grouchy ingrate on CTV calling us all white supremacists.
So who's this guy?
Well, here's one of his official biographies.
His work with Black Lives Matter movement and more recently his successful effort to remove the Toronto police presidents from Toronto schools have pushed his voice to the forefront.
Hang on, that's what you're doing in life to make the world a better place?
You're working to get police out of schools?
How is that pro-anything?
How is that pro-black?
Isn't Toronto's police chief himself black?
Isn't the force very multiracial?
Isn't this really about him being pro-black or is this really about him being anti-police?
Because I would think getting kids friendly and comfortable with police is a good thing.
Well, let me let him describe himself.
Here are some of his tweets from his own Twitter feed.
I'm going to show you what he's like when he's not watching his P's and Q's on CTV.
Here's his tweets on Redacted.
I'm not going to edit them, but I'm not going to speak them all out loud.
Here's a simple one.
F the police.
Oh, got it.
Here's another one.
Also, F mainstream Canadian media outlets for constantly forcing independent journalists and ordinary folks to do what you won't.
You are literally killing us with your complicity in silence.
What?
The man who burned those flags is a hero and must be protected at all costs.
Sorry, here's the next one.
Think body cameras are the answer?
You want to watch Africans die, then adjudicate your humanity from your couch after the fact?
Assessing Unlikely Events00:16:26
F that.
Well, first of all, if they're here, we don't call them Africans anymore.
I mean, I guess you could call them African Canadian, but they're Canadians, mate.
You've got to stop separating people by race.
And body cams, they make everyone on their best behavior.
And yeah, if a cop did kill someone, I want proof of it.
I also want proof that any complaint isn't just from some grievance huckster like you.
I think body cams are good for both police and suspects.
Let me read some more.
God, keep these hands glorious and free.
F the police and school security.
Black people also pay tuition.
So he's writing a beautiful parody of our anthem with F the Police in it.
What a classy guy.
Never allow yourself to be silenced.
Unless you're contradicting me, in which case, shut the F up.
This guy's a real Canadian, isn't he?
I support sleeping with conservatives because someone has to F some sense into him.
Yeah, this guy's great.
Actually, earlier I said that Canada just isn't a hateful, racist place.
You know, reading all these tweets from Desmond Cole, maybe I'm wrong.
I think we've discovered a fountain of hatred.
It's so weirdly the guy who's calling all the rest of us bigots.
But he sounds like he's the biggest hater around.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, I can't remember which U.S. congressman it was, but he tweeted a link to the most surprising and interesting essay I've read all year.
It was basically, why would anyone want an AR-15?
The way it was phrased was, what the hell do you need an AR-15 for anyways?
It's a question put to firearms rights enthusiasts or preppers, people who say they're preparing for some event.
And it seems like a normal liberal question to say, come on, what do you really need that for?
But as I started to read this essay, I felt like the scales were falling from my eyes because it was written not by someone who I think is particularly known for his politics or his journalism or even his firearms rights, but rather for statistics and in particular, stormwater hydrology and the mathematics of unlikely events.
Let me give you one second of what I mean before I introduce our guest today.
How likely is it that on any given year, if you're living near a floodplain, that you will be the victim of a 100-year flood?
Well, obviously, that means one in a hundred years.
But what if you live there for five years, for 10 years, for 30 years over the course of the life of your mortgage?
All of a sudden, the likelihood that your house might be destroyed by a once-a-century flood becomes very large to the point where you need insurance to get a mortgage, flood insurance.
And imagine using that same sort of thinking, not about a natural flood, but a political storm, like a revolution.
And even America, the most stable, strong democracy in the world, well, it had a revolution in 1776, and it had a near revolution in the Civil War.
Why, that's two in just a couple hundred years.
Joining us now to talk more about where this argument goes, this thought experiment, is B.J. Campbell, the author of this fascinating piece that I suddenly found myself reading.
You can read his work itself on freakoutery.com, and we'll have his contact information on the screen.
Well, BJ, thank you so much for taking the time to join us via Skype.
I just started reading.
You say you're not a professional writer, but I couldn't stop once I started.
Tell us a little bit about this article.
I know you wrote it a while back, but it only came to my attention after a congressman tweeted it.
Yeah, it was Thomas Massey tweeted it, actually, and I got a neat little traffic spike out of it.
But the article really went big, I think, probably right after it was written.
It was featured on the front page of Medium, and they blasted it out on Twitter and stuff like that, you know, I think spring of last year of 2018.
Well, forgive me for catching up.
I'm a little bit behind, but you know what?
It's timeless.
It's timeless.
Tell me how you started thinking about these cataclysmic or catastrophic events.
Is that what you do for a living?
I'm a stormwater hydrologist.
And so what stormwater hydrologists do, I'm a civil engineer, and what we use stormwater hydrology for is to try and determine, you know, how big the size of pipe, how wide a bridge has to be, how to make sure our buildings are outside of floodplains and all that sort of thing as it relates to civil engineering infrastructure.
And so this kind of thinking is, you know, it's baked into our field and the terminology is baked into our field.
And what I did in the article was I went through what we call a historical frequency analysis, which is a really straightforward mathematical way to try and predict, you know, the likelihood over time of very unlikely events.
And, you know, which is a simpler version of what risk analysis professionals do.
And we can talk about that a little bit later because, I mean, when they do the kind of thing, they end up with more alarming answers than what I get.
But I can step you through the mathematical analysis at the beginning, if you like.
I mean, it's really pretty simple.
It's at most high school algebra.
It's all you really need to follow it.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm not a math expert, but the way you laid it out, even I could follow it.
Why don't you take us through it a little bit?
I mean, if I may, you started saying, well, why would these tech billionaires be buying these bunkers, these survivalist bunkers?
Does it make any sense?
And you showed mathematically, yes, it did.
And you started to, I thought that was an interesting place to start.
Why would a billionaire spend $50 million on some zombie apocalypse place for real?
Not just joke about it, but I actually do.
Why don't you start to take us through it?
And I'll do my best not to interrupt.
I'm just so excited by the subject.
It is such a great piece.
Why don't you take us through your reasoning?
You have to determine a flood, right, that you're concerned about.
And in the United States, for the National Flood Insurance Program, we're concerned with the 100-year flood.
And there's a push in the field now to stop calling it that because it makes people think that it's only ever going to happen every 100 years.
So if you had one last year, you're not going to have one this year, which is the gambler's fallacy, right?
So they start talking about it now as the flood that's likely to happen at a 1% recurrence interval.
So the chance of this is 1% per year.
It's 0.01.
But what you do to try and figure out, say, the chance of a flood over a 30-year mortgage, you don't just add that up 30 times because it wouldn't be honest.
What you have to do is you have to back figure it.
What you do is you say, all right, well, there's a 99% chance of no flood.
And what you're looking for is that 99% chance of no flood to happen 30 times in a row, right?
So the way you would calculate that is to say 0.99 times 0.99 times 0.99, et cetera, 30 times.
So it's 0.99 to the 30th power, right?
And then that would give you a chance of maybe 74% of no flood, which means you have a 26% chance of at least one flood, right?
Makes sense over the course of your 30-year mortgage.
That's a big deal, and nobody sells you your house, right?
So, or they require you to pay cash or you have to get insurance or such.
Well, we can do the same thing with violent revolutions.
So let me pull up the figures here just to be clear.
So if we say the average establishment of colonies on the United States is 1678, and I wrote the article last year, so it's 340 years since that, right?
And we've had two, as you mentioned earlier, we've had two qualifying events of attempts at nationwide violent revolution, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.
That's two data points inside 340 years, which is a.00588%, or not percent.
That's the chance, like a little over half a percent chance per year of this happening.
And then if you say, well, what's our, we're not worried about whether there's going to be a civil war during our mortgage.
We're worried about it happening in our lifetime.
We all live to be about 78 years old and do the same kind of math.
And the result that you get is a 37% chance that there's a violent revolution across any of our given lifespans.
That's large.
That's bigger than, you know, it's bigger than the chance that your home gets flooded out.
So when we talk about nobody wants to buy a house in a floodplain, but nobody's thinking about the fact that the chance of violent revolution during your lifetime is larger than that.
Yeah, that's incredible.
I mean, I never thought of it that way, but it is true.
I mean, people think, well, those are all settled.
It could never happen again.
But you have another data point in your essay.
You said in 2010, 8.5 million tourists visited Syria.
And I wouldn't have thought it, but I suppose it was stable and people went there for historical things.
And then Anthony Bourdain did a, you know, he did one of his shows there in Syria, Nate Food.
And then it's become this disastrous revolutionary place.
And I mean, it's sort of obvious when you do it mathematically, but you look around the world and you say as a modest calculation, maybe 3% of the world's countries are in some form of violent revolt at any given time.
Like Africa alone, what's the odds of a particular country having a violent revolution in your lifetime?
I'd say it's getting close to 100%.
I mean, I didn't do the numbers for Africa.
It's hard to even start to know where to begin where to do the numbers for Africa because it's a tough place.
But like, and I did this, you know, I wrote this article before Chile and Hong Kong.
Those might have been data points that would have been thrown into the article as well.
You know, this kind of thing.
It happens.
And the level to which it happens and the amount of, you know, I guess, overall violence is, you can kind of vary.
And so you have to come up with whatever your cutoff is.
But there's certainly a lot of places going on right now where this is happening.
And it's happened before and it's going to happen again.
And you can't, no honest person would say that the United States is going to last forever and until the end of time.
Right?
So then the question becomes, well, how long?
And how do you estimate that?
And now, I mentioned earlier, this is a historical frequency analysis.
And part of going into a historical frequency analysis, you assume kind of the independence of events.
I'm dealing with the weather, right?
And the weather, you presume, isn't changing that much.
Now, we could have the global warming argument, but let's set that aside and just say the weather doesn't change that much.
This is how the statistics roll.
And what a risk analysis professional would do when you're doing this kind of analysis is they would look at indicators.
They wouldn't look at historical, and they might use it as a baseline.
And that's something that I haven't done, but there was a great article in the New Yorker middle of last year, around the same time when some of the discussion about the second civil war was heating up in the media.
And that author went and interviewed a bunch of risk analysis professionals, like folks that were ex-military or just in the general risk analysis field.
And the consensus among them was that you had a 35% chance of it coming up in the next 15 years.
Yeah, that's a lot larger.
And it sounds crazy until it happens.
You know, when I was when ISIS, I mean, we just talked about Syria going from a stable, it was an authoritarian regime, no doubt.
It wasn't a place that many of us would have chosen to make our home.
But in 2010, Syria was stable.
You could say it was very stable.
But if you look around those places, I mean, one of the ancient cities conquered by ISIS was Palmyra.
That used to be this amazing, beautiful, architectural, cultural city that's now in ruins.
Think of Istanbul.
That used to be called Constantinople, the largest, richest, most Christian city in the world.
Now it's Istanbul.
The Hadiya Sophia was turned into a mosque.
I guess my point is everything seems absolutely permanent until the moment it's not.
And I think that there's a whole bunch of psychological reasons why we want to dismiss early warnings about trouble for our own sanity, because of our own short life's experience.
I mean, I don't want to seem paranoid, but I don't think anyone saw it coming in most upheavals.
I don't know.
I mean, I suppose you could say you could see the roots of it, but I think there's a human desire to say, oh, it's not going to happen to me.
That just happens to other people.
What do you think?
Well, I mean, let's just look at Syria for a second.
If the Syrians had known that, you know, 10 years later there was going to be 10 million Syrians displaced into Europe and another half million Syrians dead in the ground out of what was going on, they would have left sooner, right?
They would have left before the immigration crisis started.
They would have left before all that kind of stuff.
Found someplace else to live if they'd known that that was coming.
And people generally don't.
I mean, you talk about the psychology of this, and I think that, you know, there are certain personality traits tend to vary across all people.
And if you have a natural inclination to trust authority, then you're going to dismiss this kind of analysis.
And if you have a natural inclination to, or sorry, to trust authority, you're going to dismiss it.
If you have a natural inclination to distrust authority, you're going to be looking at this and going, God, I need to buy another box of ammo.
And so that's kind of the, to tie this back into the AR-15 thing.
I mean, you know, when these sorts of things happen, you know, what are you going to do?
You're going to, either you're screwed and you're in a refugee caravan, or you're going to try and hunker down and hopefully you have enough food.
And if you have, you know, and if you do have enough food and your neighbor doesn't have enough food, but he has a gun and you don't, then guess what?
You don't have enough food anymore.
Right?
And so that's the thinking.
That's the mindset.
And from a game theory perspective, the thinking makes sense.
You know, and it doesn't even have to be a total permanent meltdown.
I remember we were both much younger, but when the Rodney King riots raged in Los Angeles, there was a breakdown in order, not on the scale of a total civilizational collapse or civil war, but certainly for a number of blocks, it was like a civil war.
And you saw a phenomenon of Korean shopkeepers who could no longer rely on the police, so they stood guard on their own shops, on rooftops, with their own firearms to shoot or scare off looters who were targeting them.
It was that moment of anarchy.
And if they didn't have their AR-15, they would have been certainly looted and maybe physically hurt too.
So, I mean, these sound like impossible things until the moment they're out.
I mean, especially these days when we're all plugged in, if the power were to go out for two days and our computers were down and our cell phone batteries were to die, I don't even know how many of us could do basic tasks without our internet or cell phones, just like a three-day power outage.
Three-Day Power Outage00:03:55
I think that would cause looting and anarchy in some parts of the streets in some places, I think, don't you?
Well, you bring up the rooftop Koreans.
Those guys are basically a meme in the gun community.
Everybody thinks they're heroes, which is cool.
It's kind of neat.
And if you look at all the buildings that got burned down, their buildings didn't burn down, right?
On the terms of two days without power, I mean, I know you're in Canada, so you don't experience this at all.
But in the South, when we get a big snowstorm, we lose power for two or three days because we don't have the infrastructure and we have a bunch of pine trees that fall and things like that.
So it kind of depends on what your cultural expectation is and whether or not you're prepared.
So what happens when we're going to have a snowstorm down here?
We all run to the grocery store and we buy everything we need for the next three or four days and we get ready to have a holiday, right?
But we've got a little bit of a warning because you can see it on the weather map.
And folks in Chile didn't have that warning.
I've been talking to a woman I knew a couple decades ago on WhatsApp recently and she's absolutely stuck in the middle of Chile.
She had a baby in Santiago that was in the hospital that had complications and she couldn't get to the hospital to be able to.
She and her man are trying to run flaming barricades to get to the hospital.
That thing happened in the span of a week and it happened because of a fair hike in the subway system.
Yeah, of a few pennies.
You know, you end your essay and I really recommend it.
Once again, you can find it, the essay itself is on the website Medium, or you could go to the website freakoutery.com.
Again, we'll put that on the screen.
But you end with a fun conversation.
And maybe it's easier for us to brainstorm these things if we use a science fiction analogy, because that way we're not so nervous.
We're not engaging our personal prejudices because we're saying, okay, let's just be escapists for a moment.
So you used the fun example of the zombie apocalypse.
And I think, if I'm guessing right, you chose that so that people would engage in the thought experiment, which they might be reluctant to do if you said, well, could there be another American Civil War?
Could there be another American Revolution?
And people would say, no, never.
I don't even want to talk about it.
It's outrageous.
Okay, fine.
Yeah, you nailed that.
Yeah, you nailed that.
I mean, the reason why you picked zombies to have this conversation is because, you know, if there were a zombie apocalypse, we'd all be part of the same tribe.
And so you can strip people's inherent tribalism out of the discussion before they even start having it.
So you don't have to think about sort of, you know, red team, blue team, garbage.
You know, think about zombies and prepare for that is my thought.
And no one's going to say, no, I won't because I really trust zombies or I like, like, so you're removing the real life psychological barriers.
And it's fun.
It's fun.
And you say, well, if there were a zombie apocalypse, what would you want?
And again, this is just for fun, but I think it really helps the thought experiment.
You say, well, you'd want food stockpiles.
You'd want access to clean or cleanable water.
Shelter that exists away from the threat.
You use zombies, or it could be other citizens in a real life example.
Subsistence agriculture, medicinal supplies, a way to defend items one through five in modern terms.
That means firearms, rifles in particular.
And then maybe even an escape method.
And you have another point.
That's for the ethical prepper.
Someone could simply be an unethical prepper, have a gun, and maraude about others.
So all these, this experiment with zombies, I hate to say it, but it could apply to places where the zombies are human, like if you were in northern Iraq these last five years, like if you were in Santiago.
Ethical vs. Unethical Prepper00:05:30
Yeah.
Yeah, Santiago is interesting.
Again, I don't want to say that they're to that level because I've been speaking to folks that are on the ground down there.
And it seems like it, it seems to me like it might be resolving itself politically finally.
But a lot of folks that had, you know, they're in their gated communities that were looping up their guns, you know, because they don't have like a universal gun control.
They have fewer guns than we do, but it's not like their guns don't exist down there.
And they're thankfully seeing the backside of it.
But if that were to rage on for four months or six months or something like that, you could barely get into the grocery store down there for a long period of time.
All the banks are closed.
How are you going to do barter?
Where are you going to get the money?
What are you going to trade?
That kind of thing.
Well, I mean, I've been fascinated by Hong Kong.
We sent a reporter there.
We've done that twice now.
And there were a group of democracy protesters holed up in university called Pauli Yu.
And they have no firearms in Hong Kong.
They were literally fashioning bows and arrows, which were dramatic and I suppose good for the narrative or the political aesthetics of it, but that would be no help or very little help against a fully armed People's Liberation Army rolling in with tanks like they did in Channel Man Square.
I mean, I think it's very beautiful watching those Hong Kong people express their love for freedom, but without some way to back it up, the 100-year flood, they've had, I don't know, a couple hundred years of stability in Hong Kong.
I don't know if I would say they've got 100 years of stability left.
I'd say it's probably measured in terms of one to five years.
I mean, and who knows how it's going to resolve, but I think that's a very unstable situation.
I read one quote from one of the bow and arrow guys in Hong Kong, and he said something.
This is paraphrasing, and I'm sure I'm not going to get it exactly right.
He said, if I'm going to die anyway, I might as well die with a bow and arrow in my hand.
And that really spoke to me.
I was like, whoa, you know, okay.
In terms of how long Hong Kong is going to be stable, I mean, if it were me and I were living in Hong Kong, I would leave.
I'd leave right now.
And if I could.
They can't get out of the country right now, but hopefully the thing resolves enough to where people can bail if necessary.
Because I don't see it resolving itself in a way that is going to be sustainable long term, no matter what, because of the narrative that the Chinese government is spinning within their controlled media inside their own country.
But I'm not an expert, and that's just what I'm reading.
And so let me preface that.
Well, listen, I really appreciate the map.
And I take your point, listen, I'm not an expert in these things either, but I'm an interested amateur.
And what I really appreciated about your piece is that, and this is what the congressman tweeted.
I'll have to dig up the tweet.
He said, if you agree that America or Canada or any other man-made country will not last forever.
And again, ask Constantinople if it lasted forever.
Ask Rome or Palmyra or Jerusalem if it will stand forever.
I mean, the kingdom of Israel.
If something won't last forever, then when will it end?
And what's the likelihood it'll end in your life?
If you start thinking that way, it's a hard way to think.
It's a disillusioning and maybe even a depressing way to think, but maybe it's the rational way to think.
Last word to you, BJ Campbell.
Well, I think that, first off, let's go ahead and give Thomas Massey the credit on that tweet.
He was the one that tweeted it out.
But I think that the thing that goes back really mostly to AR-15s and similar rifles that I go with is that if you buy one of these things, you don't have to kill anyone with it.
You can practice with it.
You can not practice with it.
You can keep it in your attic, locked up with a couple of cans of ammo and never take it out of the attic if you want to.
And given that dynamic, when people say, why would you want to own one?
I just can't think of a reason why you wouldn't want to own one.
Outside of perhaps if you're suicidal, you should probably reconsider having firearms in your house, the mathematics backs that up.
But outside of that, I can't see a reason not to buy one, personally speaking.
I don't understand the argument against them.
Well, it's like in case of emergency, break glass.
You're not breaking the glass every day.
You're waiting for the emergency.
It's really, as we started our conversation, why wouldn't you get flood insurance if you're on a floodplain?
You're not going to use it.
You're not going to use that insurance every time, but the day you need it is too late to buy it.
Yep.
Yep.
You'd rather have it and not need it than need it than not have it.
Yeah, very interesting, very sobering.
I recommend this thoughtful read to anyone.
Even if you don't have a firearm or aren't in the prepper mentality, it's a good way of thinking about the sweep of history and a reminder that things change.
BJ Campbell, thanks so much for your time today.
Thank you for having me.
All right.
There you have it.
I recommend that article on Medium.
Questions Touchy-Feely00:01:15
You'll see the link on our screen.
I found it the most fascinating read I've had in months.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, what did you think of that survey?
By the way, the survey is by a very lefty grievancy group, the Race Relations Foundation.
And the questions were really fuzzy, like, will you feel respected?
There's not really a lot of hard, objective things to ask because we know the answers.
There is equality before the law.
There is no economic barrier to minorities.
That's just a joke.
In fact, across North America, the ethnic groups that do the best economically are, for example, East Indian and Indian Canadians, Indian Americans.
They actually do better economically than old-stock Canadians.
So the questions are very touchy-feely.
Will you feel respected?
And minorities overwhelmingly say, yes.
That is good news.
And yet we have a huge industry that depends on grievance and anger.