The Democratic primaries pit Bernie Sanders—a self-described socialist with ties to Cuba and a Soviet honeymoon—against Joe Biden, whose family allegedly profited from Ukraine ($50K/month) and China deals. Ilhan Omar’s rise, fueled by identity politics and CAIR links, mirrors the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ growth (6 members in the 1990s to nearly 100 today), reshaping the party while alienating Jewish voters. Trump’s attacks on progressives like AOC and Tlaib risk amplifying their influence, as their radicalism gains traction in media and institutions despite legal scrutiny. The party’s shift toward pluralities of far-left ideology may leave traditional Democrats permanently sidelined. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I've got a fun recap of the Democratic presidential primaries in the States and obviously I support Donald Trump and regard myself as a Republican even though I'm a Canadian.
I'm not a member of any U.S. party.
Obviously my sympathies are with them.
But I got to tell you it has been so entertaining watching the Democratic Party.
I've been riveted to it and I think everyone has, I think.
I'm going to take you through some of my favorite moments of the campaign.
I think I've got 10 clips for you that really tell the story.
Some of them you got to see with your own eyes.
This one of Michael Bloomberg touching a pizza and licking his fingers and then touching the pizza again.
Oh my God.
I mean, oh, so you got to see it.
So you can get some of it on the podcast version, but you got to get the video version.
And it's easy to do that.
Just become a premium subscriber to what we're now calling Rebel News Plus.
But all that means is you get the video version of these podcasts.
And you get Sheila Gunrid's show too and David Menzie's show too.
Just go to rebelnews.com and it's really easy to find.
Subscribe button, eight bucks a month.
And you'll see the video part too.
Okay, here's the rest of the audio podcast.
Tonight, what just happened in the U.S. Democratic primaries?
I'll show you some video clips that help tell the story.
It's March 4th 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 normally rely on U.S. experts like our friend Joel Pollack to dissect what's going on in U.S. politics.
And Joel is particularly good because he really follows the Democratic Party.
He goes to their events, I mean.
He talks to them.
He tries to understand them on their terms.
He's not a partisan Republican sniper.
He's not into gotcha or unfair criticisms.
He's obviously conservative in his ideology and he supports Trump, but it's not blind love for Trump and it's not at the expense of his journalistic and intellectual integrity.
I really rely on Joel for the Democrats.
I'd like to think that I personally would give Democrats credit where it's due too.
But to be candid with you, I'm having trouble sympathizing with any of their candidates right now.
I like Tulsi Gabbard, but I admit that some of that is just aesthetic.
I like the fact that she's young and attractive and a military veteran who's actually served.
I like the fact that she bucks the Democratic Party's establishment, and she even sued Hillary Clinton when Clinton alleged that Tulsi is a Russian agent or something.
Imagine a life of military service and then servicing Congress and having Clinton call you a traitor, the same Hillary Clinton whose Clinton Global Foundation accepted literally hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign governments and corporations during Clinton's time as Secretary of State, clearly for political and business quid pro quo.
I like Tulsi just for that, but alas, she never took hold.
Perhaps it was because she was from Hawaii, a small and remote state.
Perhaps it's because the Democratic establishment just refused and rigged the rules of their party debates.
In fact, they changed them again today in a way to rule her out, but to let others like Tom Steyer in.
He's the California billionaire who tried to buy his way in, and he did buy his way into various debates.
Oh well, too bad.
Let me play for you my video, just one last video of Tulsi Gabbard, just because it's so cute.
Look at this.
Where I...
Flowers of colours and birds of the sun.
That's her husband, by the way, if you didn't get that.
I got to tell you, they're quirky, but they're real.
I liked that she didn't indulge the madness of her party too, by the way.
She voted present, I think, or abstain or something neutral on the impeachment vote, which shows some sanity.
But alas, she is not a contender, so let's look at who was.
I mentioned that Tom Steyer, the global warming-obsessed impeachment-obsessed billionaire, tried to buy his way into the race.
And he did, in fact, buy his way onto the stage.
He was cardboard, though.
He dropped out.
But what about this guy?
That guy is actually, can you see it there, the meatball in the front?
That is a meatball that looks like Michael Bloomberg, who doesn't just have $1 billion like Tom Steyer.
Bloomberg's estimated to be worth more than $60 billion, and he spent it like mad, including on that meatball meme.
Bloomberg bought that and paid for that.
He spent his money on anything.
He bought weird ads, anything.
Really, anyone with an idea could sell it to him.
It was a miracle for ad agencies.
Look at this one.
Donald Trump eats burnt steak.
Mike Bloomberg likes his mediaware.
I mean, Bloomberg is 78 years old, and he has more than $60 billion.
Let's say he lives another 10 years.
May he live many more.
But let's say he lives 10 years.
That's still $6 billion a year he could spend, actually more, since Bloomberg's wealth is still increasing.
That means Bloomberg could spend $500 million every month and still not spend all of his money.
So he literally thought, buy anything and everything, any kooky idea, every kooky idea, he just said yes, because money is literally no object to him.
I've been in the U.S. a little bit in recent months, and wherever you go, if there's a TV on in the background, you know, a lot of restaurants and bars have a TV on, you can't escape Mike Bloomberg and his TV ads.
Just everywhere.
He dropped between $500 million and $700 million in just a couple months.
I don't know the final figures.
And yet it was a disaster.
He just didn't move the needle.
I think he won American Samoa.
Not sure how that happened.
He literally could have offered every Democratic Party delegate $10 million cash to vote for him, and he would have done better and spent less money.
He was a bit weird as billionaires can be.
Look at this.
This is a video his own team released.
If you didn't know who this guy was, and he was at the community picnic touching all the food and then licking all of his fingers and then touching the food again, you'd say, ooh, gross, smart enough.
Don't do that.
Don't double dip.
Don't lick your fingers and touch everything in this era of coronavirus.
But when the weirdo licking and touching and licking and touching is worth $60 billion, No one around him says anything because they're either scared of him or more likely looking to ingratiate themselves with him.
He's had lots of weird moments like that that made him, I think, weird and unlikable.
Like this one.
Did you see this?
He spends a lot of time in Texas.
Tejas, we'd say here.
What did you say?
Tejas.
Tejas.
That's Spanish for Texas.
Okay.
You're in a Cuban neighborhood, so you got to know what to do.
Yeah, man.
Woo!
You just nit Tejas.
That's what we say here.
I read my briefing notes from my PR agency, and they said to call it Tejas, because everyone does.
Don't mess with Tejas.
Have you been to Dallas Tejas?
Oh, my God.
Yeah, no.
Bloomberg makes Mark Zuckerberg look lifelike and human.
Bloomberg is many times richer than Donald Trump, who is also a billionaire.
And by many measures, look, Bloomberg is more successful than Trump, but Trump at least is a human.
He knows how to fight and to laugh and to fight while laughing and laugh while fighting.
Like this, that Trump said just last weekend in his speech at the CPAC convention I was at.
She was really mean to Minnie Mike, I'll tell you, the way she treated him.
He didn't know what hit him.
He's going, oh, get me off of this stage.
Get me off.
Get me off of this stage.
I'm sorry, don't tell me you didn't laugh.
That's funny.
I don't care what you think of Trump.
You have to admit he has a comedian's timing.
He's a quick wit.
He's an entertainer.
Elizabeth Warren's Criticism00:12:07
He wouldn't say, oh, they call it Tejas.
What?
Now, Trump was talking there in that little clip about how Elizabeth Warren took Bloomberg out to the woodshed in the debates a few weeks ago.
It was amazing.
I showed you this clip the other day.
Remember this?
The mayor has to stand on his record.
And what we need to know is exactly what's lurking out there.
He has gotten some number of women, dozens, who knows, to sign non-disclosure agreements, both for sexual harassment and for gender discrimination in the workplace.
So, Mr. Mayor, are you willing to release all of those women from those nondisclosure agreements so we can hear their side of the story?
We have a very few nondisclosure agreements.
How many are you?
Let me finish.
How many is there?
None of them accuse me of doing anything other than maybe they didn't like the joke I told.
And let me just talk.
There's agreements between two parties that wanted to keep it quiet, and that's up to them.
They signed those agreements, and we'll live with them.
So wait, when you say it is up to you, I just want to be clear.
Some is how many?
And when you say they signed them and they wanted them, if they wish now to speak out and tell their side of the story about what it is they allege that's now okay with you, you're releasing them on television tonight.
Senator Cal.
Is that right?
Senator tonight?
Senator the company and somebody else, in this case, a man or a woman, or could be more than that, they decided when they made an agreement that they wanted to keep it quiet for everybody's interest.
They signed the agreements and that's what we're going to live with.
I'm sorry.
No, the question is: are the women bound by being muzzled by you?
And you could release them from that immediately.
Because understand, this is not just a question of the mayor's character.
This is also a question about elections.
I got to tell you, that was deadly.
As Nigel Farage put it in a tweet just today, only ideas and personality win in politics, and you can't buy those with money.
I don't know about you, but I found it deeply comforting that a guy who dumped, I don't know, $700 million, and remember that's U.S. money, so that's almost a billion Canadian dollars, he couldn't move the needle in a democracy.
And whatever Tom Steyer, the billionaire, spent.
Isn't that comforting?
I mean, seriously, I thought it was.
And it shows what a hoax the whole Russia, Russia, Russia thing was.
You know, in the end, the Russians spent just over $100,000 in Facebook ads in the 2016 U.S. election, and the media claimed that rigged the election.
Hey, $700 million didn't rig the election.
Now, Pete Buttigieg was really odd as a candidate, I thought.
He looked like he was made in a lab, too.
Bloomberg was weird, but he was weird in his own quirky way, like Howard Hughes, maybe, like a recluse billionaire.
But Buttigej was weird in a robotic way.
He obviously studied and tried to mimic Barack Obama.
The way we do every other election, what are you doing against the person who got the most votes?
Just a thought.
Brings us together.
This country was built.
It is a movement reaching in to church basements and barbershops.
And in our school universities and women in halls.
And if the boy, we can line up the role of it and we can line up the Senate.
Shines as a beacon around the world once more.
And this is our chance to answer that call.
Yeah, something odd about him, I think he was with the CIA.
I got nothing against a guy who works for the CIA per se, although it feels like he's living a life as an alias, as a cover story.
He just didn't seem really, he really felt phony, so much so that the New York Times, of all people, basically called him out.
Take a look at this.
You've been on the front lines of corporate price fixing.
You've been on the front lines of our misadventures in foreign policy.
You've had direct experience of many of the things that make a lot of young people very angry about the way that this country is operating right now.
You don't seem to embody that anger.
So the proposition that I've been on front lines of corporate price fixing is just to get that out of the way.
You worked for a company that was fixing bread prices.
No.
I worked for a consulting company that had a client that may have been involved in fixing, or was apparently in a scandal.
I was not aware of the Canadian bread pricing scandal until last night.
They didn't like him, and they like every Democrat.
There's another candidate named Amy Klobuchar who dropped out quickly too.
Almost all of them dropped out and pledged their support to Joe Biden at the same time.
Biggest misconception is that I'm boring because I'm not.
Yeah.
Butigej, Klobuchar, even Beto O'Rourke.
Remember him?
He dropped out earlier.
All of a sudden, they all assembled next to Joe Biden on the same day.
This was before last night's Super Tuesday vote.
And that was the point.
The Democratic Party establishment was getting all the moderate candidates out of the race to coalesce behind Joe Biden, but leaving Elizabeth Warren, the leftist activist, in to split Bernie Sanders' radical left vote.
She has no chance of winning, zero chance.
But last night, she surely cost Bernie lots of support in key states like Texas and California.
So it was smart to leave her in for the Biden Democrat establishment.
Remember how it worked for Donald Trump four years ago?
Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination in much the same way.
He was the only interesting guy, and he was running against more than a dozen competitors.
So the vote split between one Trump and many anti-Trump candidates, establishment candidates.
So he won even without a majority at first.
The Democrats are trying to stop that dynamic to make it one moderate, Joe Biden, as the anti-Bernie, and to keep Elizabeth Warren in to split the hard-left vote.
They're trying to flip the dynamics around on Bernie Sanders.
Now, Bloomberg stayed in just long enough to realize that his $700 million campaign wasn't working and wouldn't work.
He had to find out for himself, I guess.
So now it's down to two, really.
Yeah, Elizabeth Warren is in there, but not really.
It's down to two.
Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.
The others remaining aren't really serious.
And you know what?
Joe Biden is actually in the lead now.
And I'm pretty sure he's going to win.
They'll arrange it that way, like they arranged for Hillary Clinton to beat Bernie Sanders last time.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
That's what they did with intricate insider rules.
Last time, it was that superdelegates could overcome the foolish choice of mere Democratic Party members.
So they replaced Bernie Sanders last time, a radical socialist, who for years wasn't even really a Democrat.
You know, Bernie Sanders wasn't in the Democratic Party, he was in the Socialist Party.
But Bernie Sanders, from an electoral point of view, at least he had passion and authenticity.
They replaced him with an evil robot, Hillary Clinton.
At least Bloomberg is a goofy robot, and Tom Steyer and Pete Buttichege are bland robots.
Clinton was an unlikable robot, and those are the worst kind of robots.
So now the option is Joe Biden, who is likable.
He's losing his marbles.
Sorry to say it.
He is, but he's usually likable, usually.
Now he's 77 years old.
Bloomberg's 78 years old.
Bernie Sanders is 78 years old, too.
Trump is 73, but I got to say he feels 63 to me in terms of his energy level.
Bernie had a heart attack on the campaign already.
And I'm not sure about Biden, but look at that eye.
Look at his eye there.
Strange things happen to him.
In one of the debates, suddenly his eye was full of blood.
It was terrifying.
I don't know what that meant.
Was it just a tiny little blood vessel burst and why?
I don't know.
But mainly, I think Joe Biden's losing it a bit.
Forgetting what day it is, forgetting what place he's in, what state he's in.
Now, maybe that's excusable.
He's flying around so much.
But I don't know.
Is this normal?
Books!
Tomorrow's Superstar Tuesday, and I want to thank you all.
I tell you what, I'm rushing ahead, aren't I?
150 million people have been killed since 2007 when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability.
They would put 720 million million women back in the workforce.
Nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime.
My name's Joe Biden.
I'm a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate.
What's not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it?
And what a neat town.
Play the radio.
Make sure the television, excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night.
Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.
We choose science over fiction.
We choose truth over facts.
Think about it.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
All men and women created by the goal.
You know the thing.
Yeah, I do know the thing.
So Biden is 77.
He would be 78 years old when inaugurated if he wins.
I just don't see it.
Him going full tilt, global travel, 18-hour workdays like Trump does.
I just don't see it with Joe Biden.
Biden is likable, so that's a plus.
It's odd, though, that Barack Obama, who endorsed Justin Trudeau, for heaven's sakes, hasn't quite fully, really endorsed Joe Biden yet, has he?
But here's an official ad rolled out by Bernie Sanders.
Bernie is somebody who has the virtue of saying exactly what he believes.
Great authenticity, great passion, and is fearless.
Bernie served on the Veterans Committee and got bills done.
I think people are ready for a call to action.
They want honest leadership who cares about them.
They want somebody who's going to fight for them.
And they will find it in Bernie.
That's right.
Feel the burn.
I'm Bernie Sanders.
If you're a lefty, that's inspiring, I think.
Here's another one-minute Bernie Sanders ad.
I know it's socialism and group identity politics, but again, there's energy and authenticity and passion here.
Take a look.
With these hands, we will rise.
With these hands, we will transform this country with these hands.
We will have Medicare for all with these hands.
We will have college for all with these hands.
We will have criminal justice reform with these hands.
We will strike down the vestiges of racism and discrimination and homophobia and xenophobia with these hands.
Be we black or brown or red or white or yellow or the swirl in between.
With these hands, we will elect Senator Bernie Sanders as the next president of the United States of America.
Now look, Bernie isn't pure.
As Bloomberg himself pointed out, Bernie doesn't rage against millionaires anymore, just against billionaires, because Bernie himself has become a millionaire with three houses.
Joe Biden's Family Scammers00:03:13
What a wonderful country we have.
The best-known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses.
What I miss here.
But still, as Washington lifers go, Bernie is relatively clean.
Not so for Joe Biden.
Joe Biden's family cashes in and has for years, like Hillary Clinton and Bill would do.
Joe Biden would make a political move and his son and other family members would monetize it in the private sector.
Yeah, right.
Joe Biden, for example, threatened Ukraine if they didn't do what he said, like calling off a prosecutor from investigating corruption.
Do you remember this?
I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kyiv, and I was supposed to announce that there's another billion-dollar loan guarantee.
And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor, and they didn't.
So they said they were walking out to the press conference.
I said, no, I said, I'm not going to, we're not going to give you the billion dollars.
They said, you have no authority.
You're not the president.
The president said, I said, call him.
I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting a billion dollars.
I said, you're not getting a billion.
I'm going to be leaving here.
I think it was, what, six hours?
I looked.
I said, I'm leaving in six hours.
If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money.
Oh, son of a bitch.
Got fired.
And they put in place someone who was solid.
Bit of a quid pro quo there, wasn't there?
It just so happens that Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, went to Ukraine to offer his services for $50,000 a month to a Ukrainian energy company despite having no experience or expertise.
It was all meddled up with what Joe Biden was doing politically.
Same sort of thing happened when Biden went to China.
He literally had his family on the plane with him because they arrived to make parallel deals.
Here's another clip.
A 2013 trip to China getting new attention this morning, not for what Joe Biden did, but for who he brought with him.
His son, Hunter, joining the then vice president on the official visit to Beijing, along with Hunter's daughter, Finnegan.
Unknown to the press back then, Hunter Biden was forming a Chinese private equity fund, planning to raise money, including from Chinese investors.
Years later, Hunter Biden acknowledged that during the trip, he met with a Chinese banker, which his spokesperson describes as a social visit, not a business one.
Ten days after the Biden's trip, Shanghai authorities issued the fund's business license.
So that's the Democrats' choice now: Bernie the Socialist or Joe Biden, the daughtering corrupt insider.
I'm worried about both.
Bernie is a radical, a socialist, a leftist, a Cuba lover who literally took his honeymoon in the Soviet Union.
That's real.
That really happened.
Or on the other hand, Joe Biden, which means all the deep state folks really pulling the strings again.
I mean, you don't really think he'd be making the decisions himself, do you?
Al-Qaeda and Nancy Pelosi00:15:51
You can't even remember what day it is.
It would be deep state plus his family scammers raking it in by the billion.
So yeah, I'm for Trump.
How about you?
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Hey, do you remember this very excruciating attempt at a walking interview by our own Kian Bechdy in Washington, D.C.?
Take a look.
Ilhan, if I could get a moment of your time.
If I could get a moment of your time, could you tell me why you filed illegal tax returns in 2014 and 2015?
Which committee?
Maybe.
Can you tell me definitively or not, is Ahmad Elsie your brother?
Hold it up.
For the Macau?
Yeah.
We're in the middle of the legislative reason.
Yeah.
Is he your brother?
We're going to which one?
Hmm.
It's foreign affairs.
I'll go with you.
Can you tell me definitively yes or no?
Is he your brother?
And why can't you answer that question?
Why did you refer to him as your child's uncle on Instagram?
And why did you lie on court documents saying that you hadn't seen him since 2011 when in fact you'd been talking to him all the time on Instagram?
Sir, we're not doing ambush interviews.
This isn't an ambush.
You can send me an email.
Why are you so afraid to answer these questions?
I got to tell you, if someone asked me if I had married my sister, my first reaction would be to explosive laughter.
Say, what?
And then if they were serious, I'd say, no, of course not.
I found it extremely odd that she would not answer those questions.
But there are many odd things about Ilhan Omar, the hijabi Muslim migrant to the United States who is now a congresswoman.
Kean has done some great work trying to get answers on the scene, but now there's a new book with the wonderful name American Ingrate that I think just perfectly sums up Ilhan Omar.
And we're glad to be joined now via Skype from New York City with the author of American Ingrate, Benjamin Weingarten, who is also a senior contributor at the Federalist.
Welcome to the channel.
American Ingrid, I have to compliment you.
That's how she strikes me.
Someone who left the world's worst country by any measure, Somalia, came to one of the world's best countries, America, was given everything, has high privileges and status, and yet so clearly despises her new home.
American Ingrade, that's just perfect.
Well, Ezra, thanks for having me, and I appreciate the praise on the title, which I agree really gets to the core of what so irks people about Ilhan Omar, someone who has risen to the height of power in Washington, D.C. as not only a congresswoman who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee dealing with our most sensitive national security and foreign policy information, but as well as someone who is the co-chair for Bernie Sanders' campaign in the all-important state of Minnesota in 2020,
someone who's put out a battery of bills that Ben Rhodes, the former National Security Council official from the Obama administration, has called the new progressive baseline.
And the fact we can't even get basic answers about this alleged and I think heavily substantiated issue of marriage fraud associated with potentially marrying her brother, which implicates also immigration issues, perjury, all manner of other crimes as well, is a remarkable thing.
And I will say that after this book came out, reflecting the fact that she and her camp have never grappled with these issues and may never grapple with these issues, is that within days, her campaign put out a fundraising email in which they claimed that my book was incitement and I was trying to incite violence against her as an Islamophobe.
And she threw all sorts of other invective at me.
When this is a book with 1,200 endnotes that is heavily, diligently substantiated and grapples with all manner of issues regarding Ilhan Omar, her background plays just one small part in one chapter and that alone illustrates the danger of Ilhan Omar, that these compromising issues are barely a footnote in her entire record.
And the fact that she would attack anyone who dares subject her to the same scrutiny that every American elected official should be subjected to reflects the fact that she doesn't want us to know the truth about her.
Yeah, you're so you said a lot of things there, but the fact that she would imply that your book about her is some sort of call to violence, it's incredible.
Let me play a few clips that you referred to in your book.
One is when she calls 9-11 the worst terrorist attack in American history, the worst death toll in America since the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Some people did something here.
Take a quick look at that.
Some people did something?
Just so blasé, I want to show you one more thing.
She was doing a TV show and she called, she praised al-Qaeda, how people even say al-Qaeda.
Take a quick look at this.
And so the thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said al-Qaeda, he sort of like, his shoulders went up.
And, you know, Al-Qaeda, you know, hospital.
Thanks for letting me show those clips, Benjamin.
My point is she has the audacity to imply that you support violence when she either praises the honor of al-Qaeda or writes off 9-11 as some people did something.
Yeah, she treats a disaster, a jihadist attack perpetrated on Americans so flippantly.
And then actually, if you read the full context of her remarks, because she'll always claim that her quotes are taken out of context, what she's actually trying to argue in that clip is that Muslims were the real victims because they were brought under the scrutiny of American law enforcement after 9-11.
And she frequently portrays herself as the victim, as she did in response to my own book.
And as for Al-Qaeda, it's even worse than just the notion of trying to create legitimacy.
But she argues in that clip that Al-Qaeda is essentially somehow morally equivalent to the U.S. military, for example.
This is someone who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
It's absolutely remarkable that someone could have access to our most sensitive national security and foreign policy information with views like these.
And as I delve into at great length in American Ingrid, in a time where we are so concerned in America, supposedly, about foreign interference and collusion in our elections and in our political system, Ilhan Omar has substantial ties to Islamists, both domestic in terms of terror-tied groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations, as well as foreign, including leadership in both the Turkish and Somali governments as well.
I had an op-ed in the New York Post about her ties to the Erdogan regime just about a week ago.
It is truly staggering when you consider not just her rhetoric, but her actions and her associations as well, that this is someone who is a leading light in the Democratic Party today.
Yeah.
Well, that's the incredible thing is that, listen, if she was elected in a heavily Somali district in Minnesota, there's only so many things that the broader political establishment can do about that.
If you have mass Muslim immigration that ghettoizes itself, you were going to get a reflection of that demographic.
But she has been elevated to these high positions and accepted by senior people in the party, whether it's Bernie Sanders or you mentioned Ben Rhodes, the former Obama administration poobah, or even just Nancy Pelosi giving her various committee assignments.
She is who she is, but she has been held up as a symbol of the Democratic Party by others who should know better.
Why don't they know better?
Do they want to capture the Muslim vote?
Do they want to capture why would the Democratic Party, which historically, for example, has been the party that many Jews supported 50 years ago, you could even say it was a party that believed in national defense.
I guess it's longer than that for John F. Kennedy.
But what is in it for the Nancy Pelosi's and the Bernie Sanders of the world to promote such a radical?
Yeah, you make a lot of interesting points there.
And what I argue in the book is that really this sort of switch that has happened in the Democratic Party, and it is encapsulated in the issue of Israel and those who purport to be anti-Zionists when in reality they're Jew haters.
Israel is sort of the proxy for a whole host of other issues as to where the Democratic Party has shifted.
You're absolutely right.
Nancy Pelosi caved first when the Democrat-controlled House would not censure Ilhan Omar by name and for her invocation of anti-Semitic tropes specifically.
And it even started before that, as you noted, when Pelosi made a deal with the devil with the progressives and put Ilhan Omar on that House Foreign Affairs Committee in the first place.
And as to the question of why, I think it is twofold.
There's a part of this which is sort of cynical, ideological, and partisan, which deals with the fact that Ilhan Omar and those like her represent sort of the personification of the multiculturalist, intersectionalist, identity politics, grievance-based victimology part of the Democratic Party.
They stand sort of at the highest point on that privilege or anti-privilege hierarchy.
And so there's a political reason why Democrats believe in promoting Ilhan Omar and her acolytes.
And then there's also the fact that the Muslim population in America votes or self-identifies at about two-thirds or more Democrat.
It's a substantially growing population.
And if you think the views on Israel and Jewish people generally are odious, then I think you have to consider, and I make this case in the book, that Democrats are basically trading Jewish votes for Muslim votes.
Muslim votes will be a growth industry for the Democratic Party, and increasingly the Jewish vote for Democrats is likely going to decline or become de minimis.
And what I argue in the book extensively is that the forgotten person in all of this is Barack Obama.
Barack Obama, over eight years, paved the way for Ilhan Omar's radical rhetoric, her radical policies, her associations with all manner of Islamists and other radicals, both foreign and domestic.
He's the forgotten player in all this, and he hasn't gotten his due, but in my book, I give him his due.
That's an excellent point.
And I should tell you, up here in Canada, where a Somali migrant became Justin Trudeau's immigration minister, and by the way, Ahmed Hassan, as you can see in this photo, is quite chummy with Ilhan Omar, which is terrifying.
In Canada, that math you talked about has absolutely come true.
The Jewish population in Canada has remained static at about 1%, whereas the Muslim population is now 3-4%.
Trudeau can do the math, and he knows which side of that divide he's on on many policies.
Let me ask you this.
Is there any way to stop it?
Is there any way to roll back this move?
I see that Bernie Sanders staggered a bit in the Super Tuesday Democratic primaries, but I don't think that that's a rebuke of Ilhan Omar.
I think I'm stretching too far.
Maybe online Twitter Democrats are a little edgier than actual Democrats who show up to vote.
But is that wing of the party, the AOCs, the Ilhan Omars, is it strong on the ground or is it more a media concoction?
How can Democrats take ownership of their party again, working Democrats, working class, middle-class Democrats, non-radical Democrats, or is that moment past?
I think what we're witnessing right now in real time is the last gasp fight of the Democratic establishment against the progressive young Turks, so to speak.
And what I would say is that while this might not be reflected in an AOC-dominated House and AOC becoming Speaker in 2020 or two or even four years down the road, just one statistic that I cite in the book is very staggering, and that's that when the Congressional Progressive Caucus was founded in the early 90s, there were six members, including Bernie Sanders.
Speaker Pelosi was also one of the early members before she left when she became minority leader the first time around.
Today, there are nearly 100 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
More than 40% of all Democrats forming the majority in the House are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
I'd simply ask, in terms of their political power, would Nancy Pelosi, under normal circumstances in a pre-squad world, have pushed for the impeachment charade that we witnessed in America?
Would Gerald Nadler, would Elliot Engel, would even necessarily Adam Schiff?
I think it's very clear.
And also, would Democratic presidential candidates be staking out the most left positions that we've ever seen from a Democratic field from its very start?
I think the answers are self-evident.
And that should tell you the fact that Democrats are good at math.
They can count.
They see that the future is one that progressives stand to inherit.
And I think what you're seeing is this generational and ideological divide playing out in real time.
But the sort of fight between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks is going to rage on beyond this election.
Well, that is terrifying.
But we started by showing you a clip, and then you gave us some more commentary on the immigration and marriage fraud issues that have embroiled Ilhan Omar.
And you're right.
She hasn't confessed to them, but there's so much evidence that has come forward.
As you say, they're largely substantiated.
Al Capone, in the end, was undone, not in a bank robbery or a murder, but through mail fraud, wire fraud, like a technical offense that put him away.
Ilhan Omar's greatest offense to the world was not the fake marriage to her brother, a sham marriage for immigration purposes, but it may be her undoing.
What do you think the likelihood is of that turning into a formal criminal charge?
I know that, you know, prosecutions of any crime have to be done in a nonpartisan way, and it can't be just ordered up by some politician.
But do you think it's likely that Ilhan Omar will be prosecuted for that crime?
And do you think that'll take her out of the game?
Well, let me say this.
First of all, as to the state of our justice system in America when it comes to made men and made women to stick with the sort of mafia parlance that you reference in terms of Al Capone, it's very clear there's a double standard in our justice system.
Emphasizing Radicalness In Democrats00:04:42
And that alone, I think, speaks to the challenge of me believing that the odds are strong that there will be prosecution of Ilhan Omar on top of the fact that there are potentially statute of limitation issues as well.
But all of that said, she acts with such impunity that I think it's very likely for there to be any number of missteps.
And in some sense, her lawlessness and her kind of just flaunting the fact that she can do whatever she wants is indicative of not just ingratitude, but that lawlessness bleeds into animus and a lack of respect for the country, which cannot happen if you're a legislator.
Your job is to abide by the laws.
But what I will say is that there have been ethics violations that have been committed.
And it's also very clear that she also fudged her tax forms in part relating to that original likely marriage fraud and that she filed jointly for taxes for at least two years with a man who was not her legal husband.
So do I think there's more criminality likely to come and ethics violations to come?
Absolutely, but there needs to be an outcry and it has to be a bipartisan outcry.
And the sad thing about her district, and you mentioned the large Somali refugee population there, is that it is really, based upon my time spent on the ground there, the white woke elites, the upper crust in the Minnesota Twin Cities area, the Minneapolis Twin Cities area, who are really her biggest supporters.
She has actually enraged some portions of her fellow Somali refugees.
And the biggest whistleblowers have ironically been Somali-American Muslim refugees who feel that she is such a danger that she must be exposed.
That's a really telling fact.
Isn't that incredible?
We're talking with Benjamin Weingarten, the author of American Ingrate.
I have one last question for you.
And by the way, we're going to have a link underneath this video in the description to the Amazon page, fascinating, something that we've been interested in from afar up here in Canada.
Now, Donald Trump has deliberately shone the spotlight on the squad, not so much in the last few months as the Democratic presidential primaries have taken center stage.
But before that, I think Trump's strategy, if I can guess, was to emphasize the craziest part of the Democratic Party, to make that the face of it, to show to middle America as opposed to, say, a Joe Biden face of the campaign.
What do you think of Trump emphasizing the wackiness?
Wacky's too gentle a word.
Emphasizing the radicalness of Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Oquesio-Cortez.
Is there a danger that Trump thinks it's offensive, but he's actually giving more oxygen to Omar and AOC who might be successful?
What do you think Republicans should do, I guess is what I'm asking?
Yeah, well, my view is be careful what you wish for.
It looks like Bernie Sanders may be done effectively after what's transpired over the last 72 hours, which shows you the power that remains in the Democratic establishment.
But all that said, I don't think that if the general election had been Bernie Sanders versus Donald Trump, that it would have been such a layup as many people seem to believe, because in part, the Bernie Sanders AOC squad progressive wing really has a message that they ardently believe in and articulate, and they have a very passionate base, much more impassioned than the Democratic establishment's supporters.
So what I would suggest is this.
It certainly pays to emphasize the radical part of the Democratic Party on the politics, but I think substantively, it's actually right.
I think the president is right.
This is the core of the Democratic Party.
It is not the majority yet.
It may be a plurality.
But ultimately, I believe, and I argue in this book, that it stands to triumph, that today we may have a squad, but tomorrow it might be a battalion and bigger than that.
Because all of the trends in American life, whether you look at woke capital and the executives who run our corporations and their radical leftism, or you look at multi-generations of schools producing people like Ilhan Omar and AOC and Rashida Tlaib and the others, you look at all of our core institutions, essentially.
They're dominated by people who think like the squad and who want to hold the squad up.
And it is really the white woke elites that have swung the most left over the last couple of decades.
And they have substantial political power relative to other demographic groups when you break it down by demographics.
So all that said, I think in the long run, it is the squad's party to lose, but it's going to be a knockdown-dragout fight as this works itself out.
And as a conservative, I'll look forward to it with a big bag of popcorn.
Top Secret Document Revealed00:04:44
Amazing.
Well, I'm so glad that you made some time for us.
I know Ilhan Omar is a big issue in the United States, but she has been turned into a sort of heroine in Canada's media party as well.
And no doubt, in some ways, we're further progressed down that road in our country up here, too.
The book's called American Ingrate.
You can buy it at the Amazon link in the description below.
We've been talking with author Benjamin Weingarten, who's also a senior contributor at the Federalist.
Great to have you with us today.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
I appreciate it.
All right.
Our pleasure.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back to my monologue yesterday about the top secret document I sent to the elections commissioner.
Carol writes, I can't stop laughing about your response to Election Canada's demand for documents.
All joking aside, though, I think your worst fears are about to become reality.
I believe they will raid the rebels' office, and instead of five lawyers, there will be ten.
How do you sleep with all these investigations?
Your wife mustn't have much hair left on her head with all this stress.
Well, Carol, look, I believe we're going to win in the end.
I think that's my secret source of confidence, is that I feel like I can see how this story is going to end, and I think it's going to end well.
Because although Elections Canada is clearly out of control, I've read the law, and I don't think we violated it.
And if someone finds that we do, I know that we'll appeal that to a court.
And I am confident enough that there is still enough freedom left in Canada that we will win.
Now, how do I get from here to there?
There's two major types of obstacle.
One is stress, hassle, time.
That's, I guess, the one you're referring to.
I don't know.
I sort of live at a certain stress level.
If things aren't stressful enough, I get bored.
So I don't mind the stress so much because I feel like we're going to win in the end.
The other is financial.
I literally an hour ago got our latest bill from our lawyers.
It's a big bill.
And that's not something I can just calm myself through.
So that's the major threat is the financial threat.
So for that, I rely on our viewers.
What else am I going to do?
I'm not going to get money from the government.
We're not part of the corporate legacy media.
We're not going to get a bailout.
So if I can keep my confidence because I know we're going to win, I don't mind the stress of the fight.
And as long as our viewers are with us, we'll pay the lawyers to win.
I think we're going to win.
Bob writes, you got to put that cartoon on a t-shirt.
I want one.
Bob, we have the t-shirts.
I'm not sure if they're on our store right now, but yesterday we were so excited by this cartoon that we made it available on our store.
If it's not available right now, it will be really shortly.
Plus, I want to wear that shirt around because it's a fun shirt.
And I show that shirt to my family, and they liked it too, because you don't even have to be politically to think it's a fun shirt.
Sidney writes, Ezra, next time you talk to the book cops, thank them for selling another book for you.
It should be arriving soon from Amazon.
Can't wait to read it.
Well, Sydney, it's funny you say that because this morning my book once again reached number one political bestseller on the Amazon.ca list.
Number two book overall of any books, fiction or nonfiction, Canadian or foreign.
And I mean, I think the book is good.
Thank you.
But it was really made for the election.
And the election was over in October, and it's March now.
So the book had naturally fallen out of the bestseller list.
I don't know what the ranking was, but it wasn't in the top 10 anymore.
And after the first interrogation, the book hit number one.
And yesterday and this morning again, it hit number one as the best political book, best-selling.
So yeah, I mean, I don't want these book prosecutors, but that's the thing.
If you tell people you're not allowed to read this book about Trudeau, why?
Because Trudeau says so.
I can't think of better marketing than that.
Now, I would rather to be left to live in a free country and sell the book on its own merits.
By the way, last I checked, it had over 400 reviews on Amazon, and the average review is five stars out of five.
So I guess people like the book.
But I have to tell you the truth, our number one salesman is Justin Trudeau and his book banners themselves.
Isn't that weird?
Well, that's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rubber World Headquarters, good night.