Ezra Levant and Benjamin Weingarten critique Ontario’s pandemic policies, exposing inconsistencies like unchecked flights from China while excluding gender studies professors as "essential." Weingarten’s American Ingrade outlines five crisis lessons: China’s menace, globalism’s failures (e.g., WHO’s complicity), data skepticism over Beijing’s lies, Republican pushback against Democratic exploitation, and debt risks. They argue Western leverage—like $1T in U.S. debt—could pressure China but dismiss lawsuits; instead, cutting ties with Huawei’s 5G dominance is key to countering its rise. The pandemic reveals deeper truths about governance, media integrity, and long-term resilience. [Automatically generated summary]
Today on the podcast I'm going to take you through Ontario's list of official essential services.
These are companies and workers who are allowed to go to work during the lockdown, which by inference means if you're not on the list, you're not considered essential.
I can't find any gender studies professors on the list.
Maybe it was left off my copy.
Anyways, I'll go through and I'll give you my thoughts on it.
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Okay, here's the podcast.
Tonight, why are there no gender studies professors on the list of essential services during this coronavirus lockdown?
It's March 26th and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Much of Canada is a ghost town, much of the world too.
I mean there are still cars on the street, but just a fraction, no traffic jams.
It's not quite like those TV shows like The Last Man on Earth or that Will Smith movie where it's so barren you can race your car down what used to be traffic jammed streets, but it's definitely quieter.
Airports of course are practically empty.
Although again, Trudeau is still allowing direct flights from China every single day.
Like this one from Xiamen, China to Vancouver.
It lands.
There's no one taking anyone's temperature when it lands.
They get brochures in English and French.
Hopefully people from Xiamen speak one of those two languages.
It reminds me of when we sent David Menzies to the airport and he interviewed those families getting off the plane from Pakistan.
Remember this?
Did anyone at Border Control take your temperature, for example?
Yes, they did.
When we first landed in Lahore a month ago, they had like a gun that they checked our foreheads for.
That was in Pakistan, not here.
But not here, no.
Is that surprising?
Because that's what I heard from people from Karachi that the airport there was far more strict than it is here.
They're just asking questions and people would just lie and say no, no, no.
But over there, they actually checked you and if anyone had a fever, they'll put you in the face.
And they'll put you to the side.
Actually, when we went around 18 days ago, Pakistan, very, very limited resources, you know, they did check us there at the International Airport in Islamabad.
They did check our temperatures as well.
They actually seemed very conscientious, those passengers, didn't they?
They explained how Pakistan, a poor third world country, disorganized, crowded, they're actually more meticulous there than we are here.
They're more prepared.
They're taking it more seriously than Trudeau is.
And really, how hard is it to get some thermometers to take people's temperatures?
It's not like the olden days where you had to put a mercury thermometer under your tongue and hold it there for a few minutes and squint and try and see the number.
These days, you can put a thermometer on someone's head, an electronic thermometer, and push a button and it's almost instant to get a fever reading.
How hard is that to hand those out?
Why have we not done that yet at any of our airports?
Don't ask.
So while we let in more flights from China and the world every single day, well, the rest of us are under a version of house arrest.
That's why the streets are empty, the schools are empty, even though they don't have to be empty, as Taiwan shows.
In Taiwan, they just make their kids wear face masks all day, except lunch where they eat behind those little screens.
The whole country of Taiwan, and it's very integrated with China.
Just two fatalities in all of Taiwan.
I mean, of course, each of those deaths is a tragedy, but only two.
So yeah, we're hurting ourselves more than the virus is hurting us.
I've come to that opinion.
So last night at midnight was when the Ontario curfew kicked into effect.
It really is like a curfew, but for grown-ups, for responsible people.
And instead of a curfew for teenagers limiting what they can do for fun, this curfew limits what responsible people can do to earn a living.
So yeah, the government basically fired everybody, whether they're sick or not, at risk or not, because we haven't screened anyone.
We're not stopping foreign flights.
We're not even wearing masks.
So we're just firing everyone.
The opposite of what Taiwan did.
Except in Ontario, as without elsewhere, there are lists of exemptions.
Funny enough, we're on the list in a few different ways.
They allow online services, that's what we do.
They allow TV production, that's what we do.
Those are considered essential, I guess.
But I got to thinking, I sure could use a barber.
I know that I could use a barber most of the time.
And when I could get a haircut, I hated it.
I remember when.
So this is a tiny bit of karma for me.
The one time I want a haircut, I can't get it.
But I understand that a haircut is actually a pretty intimate thing in terms of being very close to someone, close to their face, touching them for 20 minutes, being in the range of their breath.
And I could imagine that would really be a way to spread the virus.
And I can imagine that people could generally go without a haircut for a few weeks.
Except the barbers of COVID, of course, they can't go a few weeks without haircuts now, can they?
I started looking through the list of exemptions of people who are called essential.
Let me read it.
List of essential workplaces, essential workplaces in response to COVID-19.
If you have questions about what will be open or impacts to your business or employment, call the stop the spread business information line at 188-444-3659.
Now, I phoned that number twice.
And neither time I got through, was it because thousands of people were calling?
Who knows?
But who's actually even answering on the other end of that line?
And what expertise do they have to immediately render a judgment on the phone for a company or a worker to effectively decide whether they live or die?
What's the training for that phone answering position?
What's their authority?
I imagine that different people could describe what they do in two totally different ways, and one would be allowed to live and one would be told to die.
By live and die, I don't mean death by the virus.
I mean an economic death.
Could you send documentation to this line?
Could you have a lawyer call for you?
If they tell you you have to shut down your business, could you appeal?
Come to think of it, who would actually call this line to ask?
If you want to work, why not just keep your business open and ask for forgiveness rather than permission?
I mean, only if you need to work for a living.
I showed you this clip yesterday.
Take a look.
Chicken in village.
Boris Johnson said this.
So when Boris Johnson says something, he immediately.
Boris Johnson said this.
Boris Johnson said this.
You're not allowed.
You can't be sovereign food anymore.
Quarantine!
Finish!
Close!
Close now!
Quarantine!
Quarant fucking teen!
Not teen!
Porn!
Quarantine!
Finish!
Who was that angry man telling those people to close up their shop?
A man who happened to bring a camera crew with him, or at least a friend with a phone, and said, film this.
A man who himself didn't have a mask on but claimed to really, really care about this.
And what were those lads inside doing wrong exactly?
They didn't have tables and chairs out.
It was clearly just a takeout chicken shop.
Can people not eat?
Can people not serve people who want to eat?
Where did that busybody get his lunch or dinner from?
Is he a farmer or something?
Essential Workers Defined00:09:56
My feelings are shifting on this story, but today my point is, who is considered essential and who isn't?
Who is really important and who isn't?
I know that a bunch of celebrities made a really cringeworthy, no-makeup, out-of-tune sing-along of John Lennon's Imagined Terrible Song, and they sung it terribly, but they were so pleased with themselves.
It was so weird.
There was no message to it, no donations for the cause, not even advice like an admonition to stay quarantined, just a giant, please look at me, please pay attention to us moment, because those celebrities, most of them B-listers, C-listers, realized that they're not essential.
Am I right?
Same with Greta Tunberg, who felt the need to tell us that, no, she doesn't have the virus.
She didn't even go to the doctor to check.
In fact, her symptoms are very mild.
She barely even noticed them.
But hey, everybody, look at me.
Hey, look at me.
No, no, Greta.
You're not essential, are you?
We all sort of forgot about you.
No one cares.
Here's a video that was broadcast at a Super Bowl a while back, a few years ago.
It's a video built around an old Paul Harvey radio short.
I think it was an ad for pickup trucks, but the point is, you can see the point in a second.
Now, you tell me, who is more essential?
Those actresses and singers, Gal Godot and Jimmy Fallon and Creta Tunberg, or these anonymous people in this little ad?
And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker.
So God made a farmer.
God said, I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper, then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.
So God made a farmer.
God said, I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die, then dry his eyes and say maybe next year.
I need somebody who can shape an axe handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of hay, wire feed sacks, and shoe scraps, who planting time and harvest season will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon and then painting from tractor back put in another 72 hours.
So God made a farmer.
God said I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to yeen lambs and wean pigs and tend to pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadowlark.
So God made a farmer.
It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight and not cut corners.
Somebody to see, weed, feed, breed, and break and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk.
Somebody who'd bail a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing.
Who would laugh and then sigh And then reply with smiling eyes when his son says that he wants to spend his life doing what dad does.
So God made a farmer.
Yeah, I know who I could live without if it came down to choosing between celebrities or farmers.
I'm not going to go through everyone on the list of essential workers.
It's a very long list.
Here's a summary of them.
I'll sort of go through it and I'll read some details.
Supply chains.
What's that?
That's basically getting everything from where it's made to us, from farm to fork, as it's sometimes said, from factory to you.
Trucks, trains, warehouses, hardworking guys, packages, that whole thing.
Retail and wholesaling.
This is detailed later on on the memo as food, household items, including pet food, smart.
Things like consumer products necessary to maintain the safety, sanitation, and essential operations of residences and businesses.
They also include liquor and marijuana in the list.
Things like hardware stores, obviously.
Auto mechanics, obviously gas stations.
Businesses that supply office products and services, including providing computer-related, sorry, computer products and related repair and maintenance services.
Makes sense.
And we all need those things to operate.
Food services and accommodations.
Pretty self-explanatory.
Institutional, residential, commercial, and industrial maintenance.
Yeah, exactly.
You can't have things break down.
You want things to be clean.
Isn't that the case?
These days, a janitor who knows how to do a deep clean to disinfect something is more useful than, oh, say, a gender studies professor.
It's actually a huge list because it's so particular.
I'll just skim some of the headings.
Telecommunications and IT infrastructure service providers.
Transportation.
Manufacturing and production.
Agriculture and food production.
Construction.
It's a good point.
Construction is a huge industry.
We need to build things, places to live, places to work, road construction, mines, whatever.
It's just too important to shut it down.
Some construction projects can't be shut down without doing devastating damage to the progress of the building.
And more to the point, imagine how many families depend on those workers to earn a living.
Financial activities, fair enough.
Resources, I like this one.
Mines, oil, gas, forestry, etc.
It's all systems go for those.
Of course it is.
Do you think we'd even be able to survive in Canada without natural resources, without oil and gas and fossil fuels?
You know, you can't spell pandemic without the word panic, right?
If you look at it.
You want to see what real panic would look like?
Imagine no cars, no natural gas to heat your home or cook, no fossil fuel generated electricity, no gas-fired power plants.
That would be a panic.
Even though that's the future that the Gretas of the world want.
Environmental services, that's like cleanups of spills.
Utilities and community services.
That's everything from your garbage collector, garbage man, to water and power companies to your home.
It specifically includes things like prisons and courts.
Communications industries.
They say communications industries are essential, and I think they're right.
How do we know what's going on in the world?
How do we know the news about the virus, about the response to it, and about how our politicians are failing?
It's no surprise that Justin Trudeau just announced a new multi-million dollar bribe for journalists.
Even liberal journalists are starting to see how awful he is at actually leading during a time of crisis.
Better slop a little bit more cash on them in another bailout.
Research.
This includes medical research.
I can imagine that just stopping any medical research midstream could wreck it.
More to the point we probably need research now more than ever about the virus.
Healthcare and seniors care and social services.
Obviously, healthcare is exempt from the work ban, including seniors' homes.
Interestingly, they emphasize exemptions for emergency health care of all sorts, but not routine or elective medicine.
Let me read.
Healthcare professionals providing emergency care, including dentists, optometrists, and physiotherapists.
Let me read the justice sector.
The courts are still open, of course.
We can't descend into utter lawlessness, but only urgent matters, which suggests that perhaps we have a few too many lawyers and a bit too much litigation in regular times.
I believe that.
Then they have a catch-all that I find interesting.
Let me read this.
Other businesses, car rentals, couriers, laundromats, and dry cleaners and laundries.
I say again, I don't see any peace and conflict studies groups there.
I don't see any transgender lobbyists there.
I don't see any of the things that our society is obsessed with in peacetime.
But if you're a security guard, of course you're important in the real world now.
If you're a check caching company on the corner, of course you're important in the real world.
There were a few government agencies on the list, as well as there should be police and courts are the instruments of the state and we need them.
But really the list is a comprehensive description of most blue-collar jobs and a few truly necessary white-collar professions.
I don't mean to say that anyone should be ordered not to work.
If you work in a retail clothing store selling high fashion in a mall, you have as much right to work as anyone.
Any work is dignified, as the good book says, in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.
Any work is good.
But it's a reminder of what's a luxury and what's essential when the chips are down and who we really need to make our civilization work, especially in a crisis, and who we really don't need.
Not a lot of politicians on the list, is there?
But I do see in the news, though, that Canada's MPs and senators managed to give themselves a $2.5 million pay raise that will just coincidentally kick in next week.
929,000 Canadians who aren't on the list above or more likely who want to work but were laid off, whether they're restaurant waiters or flight attendants or hotel staff, yeah, they'd like a raise too because they're getting zero right now.
Alas, they're just not the ultimate essential workers in the minds of our politicians.
The politicians themselves who will always, always take care of themselves first.
Essential Workers Debate00:15:58
Am I right?
Stay with us for more.
I remember a few weeks ago when we had an author on who's got the authoritative book on Ilhan Omar.
She, of course, is the radical Islamist Democrat from the state of Minnesota who's taken the country by storm.
She's part of the squad, the book, and I just finally received mine from Amazon.
It's called American Ingrade.
And I tell you that because I recommend it if you're looking for something to while away the time in self-isolation and you're getting a little sick of watching Netflix, it is the definitive takedown of Ilhan Omar, very timely.
And the reason I mention that today is because the author of that book, Benjamin Weingarten, talks about other things too.
And of course, I follow him online at thefederalist.com, where he has a new essay called Five Major Paradigm Shifts.
The Wuhan Flu Crisis Has Revealed Americans Need.
And he joins us now from his home via Skype.
Well, Benjamin, thanks very much for seeing us again.
And congrats again on the book.
I recommend it.
It's, you know what?
After a while, you get sick of watching movies and you want to have something that's not a screen and something that makes you smarter, not dumber, like a lot of the movies I've been watching.
Well, Ezra, I really appreciate it.
And the book's thesis is actually playing out in real time right now because Ilhan Omar is trying to use, on top of all the other things that those on the left are trying to use, the Chinese coronavirus crisis to advance, to advance lifting sanctions on Iran under the guise of this crisis.
So the book's thesis is playing out in real time, and she's proving to be a danger to this country and putting America last and our worst adversaries first.
Yeah, that's no surprise.
Well, I want to shift gears.
I mean, I wanted to mention the book because it's, and as I said to you when we spoke last time, it's just the perfect title.
She absolutely is the definition of ingrained, her treatment of America and her fellow Americans.
But this coronavirus, or as Donald Trump calls it, the Chinese virus, or as you call it, the Wuhan flu crisis, and I think all of that is appropriate.
I think it's terrible.
It's devastating to the economy.
So far, it has not yet been devastating in terms of health and loss of life.
I'm not saying that any quantum of deaths is acceptable, but I mean, every death is a tragedy, but it has not yet been the devastating pandemic many have feared it would be.
Hopefully it won't.
But it has revealed a lot of problems in the way we do things.
And you've made a list of five changes to how Americans, and I think most of these apply to Canada too, have to think, can we bang through them?
You got five of them.
The first one, I think, is sort of obvious, and I know you do too, but a lot of people have been in denial.
It's communist China is a global menace.
How would a paradigm shift look now that we know that's true?
Well, I think the first point would be that we essentially need to unwind the integration of China.
And when I say China, I mean the Chinese Communist Party and the entities that it controls, which is essentially all of the entities in that country, from the global political system, the global economic system.
We essentially need to undo the globalist paradigm in particular when it comes to putting ourselves at the mercy of this adversarial, hostile regime.
And so this goes for America and the rest of the free world as well.
That starts with decoupling from the Chinese Communist Party in every strategically significant sector.
And that has been shown in most crystal terms, in this case, in terms of the Chinese Communist Party through one of its English language propaganda publications, threatening to cut off the availability of essential medical supplies.
In other words, we're putting our life and limb, our fate, in the hands of a hostile adversary.
And that is simply suicidal.
Yeah.
I think they poisoned us, and now they're threatening to withhold the medicine to that same poison.
It is insane that China produces so many of the meds for the West.
And I see that American pharmaceutical companies are squawking about Trump's strong suggestion that they repatriate their factories.
Why?
I mean, really, are they saving 5% or 10%?
It's so trivial, the financial savings per pill, let's say, and the devastating costs of this virus and everything else ought to make us realize that that's a fool's errand to try and save a few bucks, but invite all these other Chinese communist problems into our own homes.
You have a special emphasis here on the World Health Organization.
They've been liars on this the whole time through.
Give us a bit of a rundown of their boss, Tedros Adanum Gebreus.
I don't know if I'm saying that right.
He's the boss of the World Health Organization.
He was chosen by China, wasn't he?
It appears that China backed his campaign to run the WHO, which it bears noting is an organ of the United Nations, the globalist institution, our excellence.
And he not only has been tied to China through its backing of him at WHO, but he previously served, I believe, as health minister in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia and in particular its health sector are inextricably intertwined with China.
It's my understanding.
There's substantial relations between the two countries.
And consequently, I would suggest all you have to do is look at statements to come out of the WHO, favorable toward the Chinese Communist Party and Xi blaming, appraising them for their leadership during this crisis, saying originally that it appeared this was not a human-to-human transmitted virus, essentially propagating Chinese Communist Party propaganda, which directly correlated with the spread, the metastasization of this pandemic the world over.
So again, the corruption of global institutions by their work with the Chinese Communist Party has real consequences for the life and limb of the West.
On top of, of course, again, these global supply chains that put us at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party and even the open borders strategy.
And in many instances, and Secretary of State Pompeo said this, the Chinese Communist Party threatened those countries, for example, I believe in Europe, not to impose gravel bans from China when, of course, this was being spread from China.
So again, we see the corruption of every aspect of our lives essentially by this inextricably intertwined relationship with the Chinese Communist Party that has proven disastrous to the West.
Yeah, you know, it's ironic that one of the countries most marginalized and abused by the United Nations and its constituent agencies like the World Health Organization is Taiwan.
As you know, some decades ago, Taiwan, or the Republic of China, was thrown out and Communist China was welcomed in.
And because of that, Taiwan has been sidelined from the World Health Organization.
Now, that was disastrous in the past, the SARS outbreak, et cetera.
But they learned to get along without the World Health Organization.
They learned not to trust the World Health Organization.
They knew they had to go it on their own.
And I put it to you, and I'm just thinking of this as we're discussing this, that perhaps the fact that Taiwan was forcibly ejected from the central globalist instrument, the United Nations, is the reason why last I checked, they only had two deaths from coronavirus, very few infections, even though they're right next to China, integrated with China in a number of ways.
800,000 Taiwanese people live in China, almost half a million work in China, and yet they managed to stop the virus because they knew you can't trust the World Health Organization.
I think that's proof that...
You're absolutely right.
Taiwan's response has been the model for what the global response should have been.
Taiwan understands the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and those bureaus around the world that it has, in some cases, poisoned.
Your core point, I think, bears reiterating, which is all these countries around the world were put to a choice.
Do I have diplomatic relations with Taiwan and then no relationship with China and be shut out of China's market?
Or do I choose China over what would have been the right choice?
And even the U.S. doesn't have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan because of the China relationship.
It again just shows you how they poison really our global peace and prosperity in many ways.
And I think you're absolutely right.
Taiwan is far better off because it is more independent of these very organizations that China has been influencing for all these decades.
Not just more independent, but they know the World Health Organization lies.
They know it.
They know they're malicious.
We in Canada and probably in the United States saying, oh, World Health Organization sounds like good guys because we don't know how political, partisan, and malicious they are.
Taiwan knows.
Okay, let's keep cracking.
Number three, we must establish principles for dealing with crises.
Now, that's a pretty general statement.
Explain what you mean.
It's the longest point, I think, in your essay.
My main point here is simply this.
And I'm saying this, and I wrote this piece before we found out that the Imperial College study out of the UK, which projected that in the best case scenario with the most draconian measures, we'd have something on the order of 1.1 to 1.2 million deaths in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands of deaths in the UK, has now been completely revised downward.
Yet that study was the basis largely of the dramatic response that we've seen in the United States and elsewhere.
My point being, we have made these massive societal sacrifices, knowingly doing devastating economic damage that is going to last many months and probably years beyond this crisis on the basis of flimsy data, shoddy data, much of which has come from China, which of course has sought to cover this up and been dishonest with numbers in every realm historically.
And that shoddy data has led consequently to garbage out of the models that use that data to project deaths and casualties and symptomatic versus asymptomatic population.
Is it a rational thing for us in the West to be making these potentially catastrophic decisions where our governments essentially break the legs of business owners and then have to bail all of them out on the basis of shoddy data and thus the garbage that comes out of the models on which the data is based?
That just does simply not seem like a rational policy for the West or anyone for that matter.
Yeah, and every word you said there about the pandemic could equally be applied to the theory of man-made global warming, I put it to you.
Point four, the GOP, the Republican Party, needs a real response for Democrats' games.
I presume that you mean the procedural games, the trying to salt bills with all sorts of perks for friends and constituent groups.
Is that what you mean?
I think it is stunning to me how befuddled so many, both elected officials in the Republican Party and even commentators as well, are so stunned that Democrats would cynically and shamefully extort the country essentially to try to put forth as temporary measures their most leftist policies so that ultimately when we get out of the crisis mode,
they can then make them permanent and impose the agenda that they want in environmentalism, in criminal justice, in the healthcare system, in every other facet of our lives, in immigration.
So what I suggest is this reflects the fact that many on the right do not fundamentally understand the nature of their political opponent, which seeks to use every possible avenue it has to impose its agenda upon us.
And my response would be, where's the Republican response in kind of, okay, if you're going to try to foster your leftist agenda, well, where's our agenda in terms of completely opening up the economy so that when we do recover from this, we not only return to the kind of economic growth we had seen, but economic growth actually accelerates far beyond it.
The fact that Republicans wouldn't even think that way shows you that Democrats are going to eat our lunch most of the time.
Yeah.
I was just thinking earlier today about how the list of essential services to Ontario where we are is on lockdown as are other jurisdictions.
I think one of the more hopeful things that could come from this is a gazillion parents and students can realize that they can learn either at home or by remote or from a YouTube-based school and that a lot of the government-run schools, the student loan debt, the superpriced colleges may be something that we don't quite need.
I don't know.
That's a little bit of hopefulness on my part.
Your last point is basically getting the fiscal situation in order.
I see talk of the U.S. bailout, three, four, five, six trillion dollars, a staggering sum of money.
My first thought was, are you going to borrow that from China?
Are you really just enriching China again?
What do you mean with your fifth point?
Very simply, everyone's known in America, we've long been on a trajectory where in the very near term, the interest on U.S. national debt alone was going to be the biggest budget item outside of entitlement spending.
That is just a stunning economic fact.
This completely blows out budgets that we're already trending that way.
And so I pose the rhetorical question.
So what happens when the next pandemic hits and it's 10 times as bad?
Or there are massive terrorist attacks around the country or cyber attacks from China or some enemy unknown.
Then how big is the bailout at that point?
And of course, we'd already be in a much worse fiscal situation at that point.
So clearly at the federal level, and while there does not seem to be any will for it, we are in for a reckoning if we do not act now.
What we will witness down the road will be catastrophic.
But incidentally, I argue that the same goes for the fact that, granted, this is a completely extreme shock and this was a government-induced shock to our economy and basically shutting it down.
The fact that so many businesses immediately required a bailout and also even that so many households are in such fiscal shambles as a consequence of this all indicates, and it goes the same for government, that we are very short-term oriented and debt-based.
We value debt over savings.
There are even tax reasons built into our code why that is the case.
But we need prudence because tough times do hit.
Talking About Reparations00:08:34
And how prepared will we be for the next pandemic, given the sacrifices being made now, what is going on at the federal level now?
So prudence is not something that's often viewed favorably.
But I think this crisis should cause us to reexamine the fact that we ought to build savings at every level and that we should not be so reliant on short-term gains and a debt orientation as well at all levels of our society.
Let me ask you one last question.
I put this to Joel Pollock of Breitbart.com the other day.
I see that there is a lawsuit in China against Donald Trump, accusing Trump of spreading the virus to China.
It's absurd.
It's a conspiracy theory.
But of course, the courts in China are not independent.
This is the express view of the Communist Party and their diplomats, for example.
So I thought, well, what about suing China?
Americans, Canadians suing China, not for the virus itself, but rather the cover-up, the negligence, the malice, what they intentionally did.
Let's assume that the virus had a natural origin and was not cooked up in their Wuhan virology lab, which just is such a huge coincidence, but let's just leave that alone.
Their cover-up, their lying, their destruction of samples, their refusal to let the Centers for Disease Control on the ground, their refusals to warn or limit travel.
There's a lawsuit, but there's also the possibility of reparations.
Muamar Gaddafi paid reparations to people he murdered through terrorism.
Sudan is looking to pay reparations right now to get back in the good graces of the world.
Do you think there is any way that through politics or diplomacy or litigation, Americans, Canadians will ever see any sort of reparations from China?
Or is it sort of the opposite?
The main reparation is just to stop giving them power and money over us.
Stop giving them power over us, as well as underwriting their malevolent, ambitious agenda to be the dominant world power, would certainly be one part of a rebuke to the Chinese Communist Party.
But I do think there ought to be a real effort.
And I know that there are some in Congress who are trying to work on measures towards this point of reparations.
There actually was a lawsuit filed, I think, out of Las Vegas trying to hold the Chinese Communist Party liable.
And there was a great article in War on the Rocks as well saying that actually under international law standards, China is clearly liable.
So I don't hold out a lot of hope that China will necessarily make concessions.
But look, America has a lot of leverage in this instance, not only in the fact that it's a symbiotic relationship in terms of all this trade that we have with them and these supply chains that are interconnected, but also them holding our debt.
I mean, look, do you think if the rules were reversed, that China wouldn't seriously be floating, for example, just saying we're going to cancel the debt, we're going to stop paying interest until you stop this hostile information operation against us?
Those in the financial sector here would say, that's crazy.
You're talking about America defaulting.
But I would say, look, the other side has completely defaulted already.
And they're the ones who are responsible for this.
So what are our levers of power?
One of them is economic.
And one of them is in the form of the, I believe, over a trillion dollars in U.S. debt that they hold.
Yeah.
If you owe the bank $1,000 and you can't pay, you're in trouble.
If you owe the bank $1 trillion and you can't pay, the bank's in trouble.
And I think maybe that's what you're talking about with China.
It looks like they're powerful because they hold all this American debt, but maybe, and of course, and America's reliability as an honest dealer is paramount.
But I think you're exactly right.
If the shoe were on the other foot.
And I think of Canada.
I mean, Canada and other Commonwealth countries led a boycott of South Africa until its apartheid regime was dismantled.
Wouldn't it be something if there was some coalition of democracies that if not quite an economic boycott, because I don't think that's feasible, but at least just had some moral statement about China?
Impossible again through the UN structures.
They have a veto on everything.
I just hope that the realignment you talk about in this essay, we might see it.
One last point.
I'm putting on the screen right now a chart by Pew Research.
They interviewed people in dozens of countries asking if they have a favorable or unfavorable view of China.
Canada, Sweden, and Japan were the three countries that were most opposed to China a year ago, and that's partly because China still has two Canadian hostages, believe it or not.
I would love to see an updated version of this survey.
in 2020 after the virus.
I imagine every country is more hostile to China, and we need to see that reflected in our national politics and maybe our global institutions.
Ben Weingarten, last word to you.
If there's one thing that's realistic that could come out of this whole thing, what would that be?
One change.
Well, let me say the most important thing would be that every country that has gone along with the idea of allowing the Chinese Communist Party, via Huawei, or other parties to build your 5G infrastructure to control global telecommunications, backtrack, back out of the deal just as fast as the Chinese Communist Party would back out of a deal that put them at our mercy.
It is absolutely insane.
It would be the most impactful thing we could do to stop the rise of this hostile power and ultimately hopefully someday see the Chinese Communist Party fall.
Yeah, I agree.
Well, listen, great to have you here today.
We've been talking with Benjamin Weingarten.
His essay was in thefederalist.com and his book, which I have in my hand, is American Ingrade Ilhan Omar and the Progressive Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party.
Ben, thanks for your time today.
Stay safe, stay healthy.
We'll talk to you again.
Likewise, thanks so much, Ezra.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Cheers.
Stay with us.
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