This episode frames the U.S.-China rivalry as a Cold War, comparing China’s global influence to Nazi Germany’s economic leverage and apartheid South Africa’s diplomatic normalization despite abuses—15 Hong Kong activists jailed, Tibet/Xinjiang suppression ignored. Xi’s "wolf warrior" tactics and hybrid warfare in the South China Sea mirror Beijing’s pressure on critics like Bloomberg LP or Google, while Hollywood and media (e.g., NYT’s pro-China climate framing) prioritize profits over principles. Pollack dismisses Michelle Obama as a VP "silver bullet," noting her wealth ($300M+) and Martha’s Vineyard ties, instead arguing Biden’s run serves donors (including Hunter Biden-linked backers) and D.C.’s anti-Trump establishment—an "Obama third term" by proxy. The discussion ties China’s dominance to globalization’s failures: Alberta slaughterhouses costing $1B+ in COVID-19 healthcare, Canada’s lack of N95 mask production, and pharmaceutical dependence on Beijing, questioning whether prevailing wages or sovereignty matter in a system rigged for permanent power players. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I go a little bit deeper in my attempt to find an analogy for how to treat China.
I talk more.
Do we use the apartheid demonization, marginalization approach?
Do we use the Cold War approach?
Do we use the how we fought Nazi Germany approach?
I come up with some more ideas on that and I bring out a few facts you might not have heard before.
I hope you enjoy the podcast, but before I get out of the way, may I invite you to become a premium subscriber.
Go to RebelNews.com.
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You get the video version of the podcast, Sheila Gunn Reed Show, David Menzies' show, and it helps us pay the bills.
Okay, here's the podcast.
Tonight, I make the case that we're now in a cold war with China.
It's April 23rd, 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 is the government will buy a public is because it's my bloody right to do so.
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about what approach is the right one for democracies in dealing with China in the future.
How do you handle a belligerent dictatorship, one that's always been at war with its own people and now is increasingly at war with other people like us?
After turning a blind eye to it for years, the Allies finally went to war against Nazi Germany, but only after every possible attempt to stay out of war, Hitler annexed part of Czechoslovakia and the Allies just shrugged.
It was only after the shocking outright ground invasion of Poland that the West finally acted.
And probably for good reason, what would the West have done?
Invaded Germany itself, probably the leading military power of the day.
It took years for the Allies to build up their military to compete.
And the war itself lasted five years, costing countless treasure and millions of lives.
So that's out.
It's the same reason we simply didn't go to war against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
And add in the fact that like the USSR, China is a nuclear power.
Another analogy I used the other day was apartheid South Africa.
And there's a lot to say for that approach.
There was a boycott of South African goods.
And I'm sure that had some bite.
Tourism suffered.
Some South African exports suffered, like South African wines were banned from Canada.
But really the damage there, it seemed to me, was more moral than financial.
It was the denormalization of South Africa, its political and social marginalization, turning it into a pariah state.
It couldn't participate in international meetings like the Commonwealth or the Olympics.
Again, that's not really devastating in an objective way.
That's the diplomatic equivalent of not being invited to someone's birthday party, but it surely stung the elite class who valued those things and felt shunned.
Such an approach to China would work, I think.
They crave international respect and legitimacy.
Hosting the Olympics in 2008 was a huge breakthrough for China when it flipped from being a curious rogue to being the absolute establishment, complete normalization.
Pay no attention to those secret police.
Pay no attention to the crushing of Tibet or the Uyghur province of Xinjiang.
Just look at all those construction cranes and high-tech startups.
And look, they can pull off a great party at the Olympics.
And these communists sure understand capitalism.
Wow, that wasn't just a vindication of them in the eyes of their own subjects, but in the eyes of the world, from professional sports leagues like the NBA to Hollywood.
China is really first on their mind.
And obviously, for tech companies, too, companies like Google refuse to do work with the U.S. Pentagon for moral reasons, but they're only happy to do similar work for China.
They're testing their bad ideas there, like social credit, total surveillance, and they propose to bring those ideas here, I fear.
Hey, did you know that Beijing is getting the Olympics again in 2022, just two years from now?
How do you feel about that?
So yeah, I think that treating China like an apartheid state pariah would actually be powerful, but mainly because it would be so difficult to do.
Look at LeBron James, famous NBA player, very political, very woke.
Look at him try to justify not only taking big cash from China, but telling others in the league to shut up with the criticism of China's pogroms, including in Hong Kong.
Remember this?
We all talk about this freedom of speech.
Yes, we all do have freedom of speech.
But at times there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you're not thinking about others and you only think about yourself.
So I don't believe, I don't want to get into a word or sentence feud with Daryl, with Daryl Moray, but I believe he wasn't educated on the situation at hand.
And he spoke.
And so many people could have been harmed, not only financially, but physically, emotionally, spiritually.
So just be careful what we tweet and we say and what we do, even though, yes, we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too.
Yeah, so you'll be fighting against the LeBrons of the world, the Hollywood studios of the world.
You didn't have billions of dollars of investments by the NBA or Hollywood in apartheid South Africa.
So it's easy for them to denounce.
This won't be.
It's amazing, the sports leagues that took a need to protest racism in America, racism in a country that had a black president, in sports leagues where black men are disproportionately represented compared to their 11% of the U.S. population, where every one of the protesters is a black millionaire.
The wave of self-serving statements, they literally monetized the protest into an endorsement deal.
That same woke, woke culture, well, it's totally silent now, even as China actually rounds up black people thinking that they're carriers of the virus.
I'm not picking on the NBA.
I'm just giving you them as an example.
You could substitute any woke team, feminism, transgenderism, environmentalism, whatever.
China is a bad country for any of those things if you're woke.
Yesterday we showed you the obvious.
They're one of the least free countries when it comes to press freedom, and yet the wokeerati won't say a word against them.
Greta Thunberg was literally invited to the United States, to the United Nations, where she was allowed to scowl at Donald Trump, or I don't know, maybe that was her smiling face.
It's hard to tell.
But she won't say a word about Xi Jinping, even though China is by far the biggest greenhouse gas emitter in the world.
Not a word from the Greenpeaces or Extinction Rebellion types about that, which is odd since China is currently building, what, 1,400, 1,500, 1,600 coal-fired power plants in its own country and around the world.
1600, that's the number.
That's according to the left-wing New York Times.
But still, the Times gives the story of the headline, as Beijing joins climate fights.
Chinese companies build coal plants, even as they demonstrate the opposite.
They just can't help themselves.
Hey, Beijing's joining the climate fight.
Yeah, on the other side, guys.
You know, the New York Times is owned by a Mexican billionaire, right?
His name is Carlos Sleem.
I think he made his money through cell phones.
Why not?
Why shouldn't he own the New York Times, even though he's not a New Yorker?
He's one of the world's richest men, and he surely has all the usual trinkets that billionaires have, a yacht, a fancy jet, private homes, exclusive places around the world.
But owning the New York Times makes him classy, important, influential.
It gives him a seat at the table of global conversations, and it launders his own opinions, which might be crudely expressed, by hiring the finest writers in the world to pursue his political agenda.
So Carlos Schlem owns the Times, and Jeff Bezos, another one of the world's richest men, the owner of Amazon.
Well, he owned the Washington Post.
He owns Washington Post.
Same thing.
Like all internet tycoons, the only thing he really fears is government regulation.
So why not pick up the most influential newspaper in the U.S. capital city to protect yourself?
Oh, hi, Congressman.
I hear you want to investigate Silicon Valley for political bias or for acting in an anti-competitive manner.
Well, it would be a shame if the Washington Post started digging into your expense accounts or a Me Too accusation and put it on the front page.
Yeah, the Washington Post is a political tool.
And I'm only surprised that some Chinese billionaire hasn't bought up American newspapers, especially given how bankrupt some of them are.
I mean, there's a newspaper closing every week.
Remember that in Canada, the most prominent newspaper, the Globe and Mail, it's a massive money loser.
But it's owned by the Thompson family.
They're actually Canada's richest billionaire.
So, yeah, it loses millions of dollars a month, but so what?
It serves the same purpose for the family.
It's an in-house organ for that family and its worldview, and generally for the establishment.
Why would it be surprising if some billionaire bought, I don't know, the LA Times or the Vancouver Sun?
In fact, maybe they already did.
The Vancouver Sun is owned by Post Media, which in turn is owned by a U.S. hedge fund.
Who knows who invests in that?
My point is denormalization and marginalization is hard with China, much harder than for South Africa.
But I think we need to start going there.
We need to treat China, like I said the other day, we need to treat it a bit like we treated the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Don't declare a hot war on it, but don't declare peace either.
Realize that they lie to us, and if they treat their own people so abusively, imagine what they would do to us.
It's hard because in the 1980s, when the West really started to marginalize the Soviet Union, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II started to call the Soviet Union out, that was before the era of ubiquitous telecommunications, before the internet, before we were so integrated.
Before mass, cheap global travel.
There weren't 100,000 Soviet students in Canadian universities as there are 100,000 Chinese sons and daughters of the Communist Party bosses here.
So Soviets were contained.
It was geographical.
We weren't as integrated as we are.
So it was easy for Reagan to speak plainly.
And he wasn't called racist for it because the Russians couldn't play that card.
Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall.
Where's our leaders to say that now to China?
Well, Trump, maybe.
But the media is at war with him.
Look at this story about Michael Bloomberg.
This story is about how Michael Bloomberg's company called Bloomberg, it's a huge media company.
It's so deep into China.
And this was written a few months ago, they worried what would happen if he became president.
It would be a huge conflict of interest because China made him rich.
Well, Michael Bloomberg's not going to become president, but he's still influential in the Democratic Party and in the media.
And that underlying problem remains.
His media company has bet huge on China.
So you can imagine he won't tolerate criticisms of China.
He'll defend China.
No need to imagine, actually, look at this story by a journalist named Lita Hong Fincher.
She said, I am one of the many women Mike Bloomberg's company tried to silence through nondisclosure agreements.
The funny thing is I never even worked for Bloomberg, but my story shows the lengths the Bloomberg machine will go to in order to avoid offending Beijing.
Bloomberg's company, Bloomberg LP, is so dependent on the vast China market for its business that its lawyers threatened to devastate my family financially if I didn't sign an NDA non-disclosure agreement, silencing the news about how Bloomberg News killed a story critical of its Chinese Communist Party leaders.
Yeah.
So I guess China already does have its billionaire owner of a media company, except it's a 5'0 Jewish guy from New York, not a Chinese tycoon.
Xi Jiping is not a dictator.
He has to satisfy his constituents or he's not going to survive.
He's not a dictator?
No, he has to.
He has a constituency to answer to.
He doesn't have a vote.
He doesn't have a democracy.
He doesn't have to.
That doesn't have anything.
He can survive as a voter.
If his advisors think about it.
Isn't they check on him just a revolution?
Yeah, I can have a revolution.
No government survives without the will of the majority of its people.
Yikes, yeah.
We have a bit of a reset job to do, don't you think?
And we won't just be fighting culturally square diplomats from Beijing.
We'll be fighting culturally savvy Hollywood and Manhattan types right here at home.
Oh, and Canada is worse in every measure, of course, because it goes straight to Trudeau himself.
I follow a lot of interesting people on Twitter, not just people I agree with, but also people I disagree with, to see what they're up to and occasionally, once in a while, to change my mind on something.
I also follow some people who are good at looking at problems from new angles and breaking groupthink.
By the way, this pandemic has been awful for groupthink and for deferring to authority because someone says, I'm a doctor, so we have to believe them when they say we're all going to die if we don't put everyone under house arrest for a year.
Anyways, one fellow I follow is Jeff Giesey, who I've met a few times.
Let me show you a string of comments he made just this morning that I thought were very interesting.
He says, perhaps because I like China, my first instinct was to dismiss the Hawks for being alarmist.
They're just trying to recreate the Cold War or deflect from our own flaws, I thought.
The more I follow this, the more they appear right.
China is on the offensive.
Follow it closely.
And then he lists about 10 little proof points.
China's on the offensive in Hong Kong.
Over the weekend, 15 prominent Hong Kong citizens were put under political arrest for their role in last year's protest movement.
China's on the offensive in the South China Sea.
They're building military islands, obviously, to press Japan, Taiwan, other regional democracies.
China's on the offensive in the information space.
It's a fancy way of saying they're everywhere on your phone, on your internet, on the websites, on the news, on Facebook.
China's on the offensive in food supply.
Now, that's terrifying to me.
You'd be shocked how much food in your grocery store comes from China.
I'm guessing half the fish you eat is Chinese.
Imagine if they got into the beef business or the dairy business.
Would you buy raw ground beef or cheese made in China?
And would you even know if it was?
China's been on a public diplomacy offensive with its face mask diplomacy and medical aid to countries.
Exactly.
Just like Vladimir Putin uses energy.
He turns off the taps of the gas pipelines to his enemies.
He did that to Ukraine several times.
Same with China and face masks.
Chinese diplomats and embassies are increasingly engaging in wolf warrior diplomacy, posting accusations, boasts, and name-calling directed at governments and individuals they feel have insulted China.
Warfare in Diplomacy00:08:22
That's so true.
It's off the hook.
I've never seen such bellicosity from diplomats.
They truly sound like they want war.
I don't know if that's just to please their masters back in Beijing, or if it's meant to intimidate us, or what the goal exactly is, but it's pretty undiplomatic.
And in the meantime, we've never been more pitiful in our own replies.
The Chinese version of hybrid 4G warfare, fourth generation warfare, is unrestricted warfare, which involves the full spectrum of the instruments of power.
That's what we're seeing.
That's the thing.
They don't want nuclear war either.
So they want asymmetrical warfare.
They don't want an attack.
And why would they attack us with weapons when they can simply win a Cold War asymmetrically, a war they know they're fighting, but many of us don't know we're fighting, and frankly, a war that many important institutions in North America, well, they had to choose sides.
They choose China's side because they get paid by China.
Look at cell phone companies looking to install Huawei.
So I think all this starts by speaking truth to power, by calling out China like Reagan called out Gorbachev.
Like this.
Look at this.
Shocked to learn that my longtime friend Martin Lee, founder of the Hong Kong Democratic Party, was arrested today, together with many of Hong Kong's most prominent citizens.
Martin is the elder statesman of Hong Kong democracy.
I hope for his immediate release.
I think Alberta's handling of the virus has embarrassed Trudeau, who continues to sulk around the house all day long, while Trudeau's medical equipment, cargo jets, return home empty from China.
Did you see that the other day?
Kenny has so much health equipment, he's sending his surplus to Quebec.
But this tweet by Kenny about Hong Kong will enrage Trudeau the most because it's the Trudeau, it's the truth that Trudeau can't or won't say.
Yeah, good.
It's about time.
Stay with us for more kinds of things that that have to be done.
You know, there's a, during World War II, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing that, you know, was totally different than the, he called it the, you know, the World War II.
He had the War Production Board.
Oh, boy, that's Joe Biden talking to a panel on CNN, Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
It was hard to hide their feelings.
Their faces show that they were cringing for Joe Biden, struggling to get a coherent sentence together, very basic thoughts, forgetting himself, looking down at notes.
If this happened once in a while, you could say, oh, well, it was a long day, stressful day.
It's a gaffe.
He accidentally misspoke.
We all do it, especially politicians who talk nonstop, except Joe Biden isn't particularly working hard.
He's not campaigning.
He's not running a country like Donald Trump is who has, you know, maestro performances, bravura performances in front of hostile questioners at the White House press.
This is Joe Biden struggling to get through an interview via Skype with notes in front of him with the friendliest of interviewees.
Just today, that was from a week or so ago.
Just today, he did another conversation with Al Gore that had about 10 of these strange, bumbling moments in it.
And again, the look on Al Gore's face, the pained look.
Everyone who comes into Joe Biden is coming to the conclusion, this fella is past his prime.
Take a look.
So one of the things that I think is happening now, you pointed out that American business is realizing they've got to price in the car.
They have to price in the price of carbon in the way they're doing it.
They are looking at their bottom line and reduce carbon.
Oh my gosh.
Is he actually in decline?
I suppose we all are in decline from the moment.
There's a certain point in time.
We all head towards our final doom.
But is Joe Biden up to the job of being president, perhaps the most stressful job in the world, the most energetic job in the world joining us now by Skype from the Los Angeles area?
It's our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large of Breitbart.com.
Joel, I just wanted to show those two samples.
I swear I could find 20 of them.
And it's not one goofy comment.
It's worrying enough.
You could see the look on the faces of those reporters.
I'm not a doctor, neither are you.
We're not doing diagnoses, but is there something wrong with Joe Biden?
I think there is.
I'm not sure if we can really tell if it's that much worse than it was 10 years ago, and we just didn't have an opportunity to see him in action as much as we could have.
Remember that when he was nominated as the vice president and Sarah Palin was nominated to be John McCain's running mate, the Obama campaign abruptly pulled Biden out of the public eye for three or four weeks.
They kept him under wraps.
That didn't happen to Sarah Palin.
She was immediately thrust into the public eye.
She had to answer questions, do interviews, and Republicans never would have gotten away with something like that.
But the Obama campaign kept Biden under wraps for quite a while.
Now, perhaps his memory lapses are a little worse now, and perhaps some of his other habits and little ticks on stage are worse and more noticeable.
But he's never exactly been smooth in public.
98% of the time, he's okay.
And sometimes he's very strong.
He sometimes has facts and figures at his disposal.
Sometimes he has very clear presentation of ideas and even makes fine ideological points.
And then he falls apart the other 2% of the time.
The question facing voters isn't necessarily where is Joe Biden's mental capacity today?
It's where is it going to be a year from now, two years from now?
Can he actually function across four years of a presidency in which he's going to cross the threshold into 80 years old, into his ninth decade on the planet?
He's been active in politics since the 1960s, and that is a very, very long time.
Occasionally, it catches up with him.
There was one debate where he was referring to a record player, a device nobody under the age of 30 has ever seen, unless it's in a vintage vinyl store and one of those newly fashionable devices you might pick up, or in the days of retail, when you might have picked up at Best Buy or something like that as a novelty item.
But nobody's really used one.
No one has a record collection.
So he really is not entirely there.
The question is for Democrats, can they do anything about it?
It becomes very difficult to do something about it now because it's so soon after Bernie Sanders was still a viable candidate for the nomination.
And anything the party would do to get rid of Biden would be seen as unfair by the Sanders people because they, after all, felt that their guy should have been the nominee and is at least in second place.
If they wait too long, it becomes much harder to pull off a switch because they're going to have the convention presumably in August.
There's going to be a nomination process.
Procedurally, it gets more difficult to replace a candidate after that process if he is, in fact, ratified as a nominee.
So they've got a window of time, perhaps, in the summer between, let's say, July 4th and the convention in mid-August when they can conceivably switch him with whoever his vice presidential candidate is going to be.
I think on May 1st next week, he is going to announce a committee to choose his running mate.
That could begin the process of moving him out of the race.
It depends how loyal the party establishment is to Biden.
It depends what the alternatives are.
This is going to be something that the leadership of the Democratic Party has to finesse very carefully.
I do not put anything beyond them.
I don't think the rules matter.
We've seen before that they're willing to rig the primary against a candidate they don't want.
They did it against Bernie Sanders in 2016.
They united legally, perhaps, against Bernie Sanders in 2020.
They will do whatever it takes to be competitive in November.
Leadership's Dilemma00:03:39
If you're a Republican, you can watch this and be entertained somewhat, but I wouldn't find it reassuring at all.
Joe Biden cannot beat Donald Trump in the state he's in, and therefore he will either be bolstered by a very strong vice presidential candidate or he will be replaced.
You know, I see more and more that Biden, who's doing these Skype interviews, not unlike you and I are talking here, he has notes in front of him.
He looks down at them.
I mean, it's not details, facts, figures, statistics, technical things that one might need a refresher.
Very basic points.
He stumbles, he forgets his train of thought, he looks down.
In some of these interviews, his wife, Jill Biden, sits right next to him, and it has the feel of not a, I'm his loyal wife, I'm fighting with him.
It has the feel almost of a nurse or someone there to calm him.
And I'm not trying to be mean here, and I acknowledge that sometimes politicians have mannerisms or quirks or even gaffes that we all do.
And I don't feel like I'm piling on unfairly.
I can't see him get through a single Skype interview, and he does them every day now, without screwing up a simple, simple conversation.
You talk about he mentioned a record player, and he did it in a way he was trying to have a cultural reference everyone could connect to.
And he went back to something when his life was at its prime, record players.
I've seen him do that.
I've seen him refer to himself as a candidate for Senate, because that's imprinted in his mind for 40 years.
I've seen him refer to politicians by the name of a prominent politician 40, 50 years ago.
He falsely called someone the name, I think, of a very old governor from the 60s.
So it's almost like those Alzheimer's patients who are losing their memories of today and reminiscing sentimentally about the memories they have as a young man.
I am not a doctor and I might be dead wrong, but my God, it reminds me of someone losing their cognitive ability.
It's hard not to draw that conclusion.
And once you start thinking about that, everything he does, even ordinary forgetfulness, reinforces that conclusion.
So for example, this week he had an interview where he held up a picture of his granddaughters and he misstated the number of granddaughters he had before quickly correcting himself.
Now that's the sort of error anyone can make.
I was trying to explain to someone earlier this week the number of siblings I have and I left somebody out.
So, you know, that sort of happens.
But once you start seeing the pattern, as you mentioned, substituting the wrong name of a politician 30 or 40 years ago for someone who's active today, mixing up the office he's running for, having to be prompted by his wife.
Once you start seeing that pattern and you take into account how old he is, it really does seem to just look at me now, struggling for the right word in a live interview.
It seems like there's something wrong.
And it's got to be troubling.
Remember also that Democrats made John McCain's age a very important issue in 2008.
They said that he had had skin cancer.
They had wartime injuries, which was a bit of a low blow, but they went there.
And they said he could not be trusted to serve out four years or eight years, if that were the case, if he were re-elected.
Now, he did actually survive the eight years of Obama's presidency and passed away a short time thereafter, but he would have made it through the eight years.
Donors And Candidates00:10:22
The point is, Democrats made age a legitimate issue to discuss.
And it's, once again, legitimate.
There's a lot of discussion now.
I saw in 538.com about a week ago, there was an article about what it would take to remove a party nominee.
Now, they didn't just limit it to Biden.
They also considered Trump because although when he ran for president, he was in his late 60s.
He's now in his early 70s, considerably younger than Biden and sharper than Biden.
But they wanted to give the inquiry kind of a bipartisan sheer or sheen.
And look, it's pretty easy in the Republican case.
You've got Mike Pence as the vice president.
So, if Donald Trump can't serve, Mike Pence steps up.
There's nobody who would vote for Trump who wouldn't vote for Pence.
So, it's not going to take anything away.
With Biden, it's more of a basket of unknowns.
You don't know who he's going to choose.
You just know he's committed to choosing a woman.
Stacey Abrams has said it's got to be a black woman.
He's already committed to appointing a black woman to the Supreme Court.
But Stacey Abrams has said, black women, correctly, she said, black women are the most loyal voting bloc in the Democratic Party, and they need to be rewarded for their loyalty.
The problem with that argument is the more loyal you are, the less you need to be rewarded to retain your loyalty.
But that's another story.
We have to see who he's going to pick.
The likeliest pick is Kamala Harris.
They seem to get along.
She is very left-wing on policy, which will please the Bernie Sanders people, but she's also a former prosecutor, which at least ties her into the Democratic establishment, and that will win her some points with people who like Biden.
She's well tapped into the Clinton fundraising network.
The Clintons like her, the Obama's like her.
Everybody in a position of power in the party likes her.
So she's the likeliest choice.
And it then becomes a question of who would she choose?
Suppose Biden is asked to step off the ticket, Kamala Harris moves into the top spot.
Who does the party put in place as number two?
And the answer is really not going to be satisfactory to anybody.
The party has moved so far left that it almost doesn't matter at this point who the candidate is.
We're going to see people voting on parties this time in a way we haven't in a very long time.
There was an evangelical leader earlier this week whose name escapes me for the moment.
I'm having a Biden moment.
But he was a never-Trumper back in 2016, and he said that he was going to support Trump in 2020, and that one of the reasons he was going to do so was it had just become clear to him that the elections are really about parties right now rather than about candidates.
And Donald Trump has been very faithful to the policies of his party.
He's been a conservative.
He's been a pro-life conservative, a pro-religious liberty conservative, and so forth.
And Biden is essentially an empty shell, and his party has become so left-wing that he has moved along with it.
So the choice is now very stark.
And for a voter who cares about exemplary leadership, which President Trump hasn't always shown in his personal life, at least before he came to Washington, it's not as big a deal as it might have been once upon a time when the parties were closer.
When the Republicans and Democrats had essentially very similar pro-market, pro-free trade, pro-globalization policies in the 1990s, the difference between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton was basically age if you were a Democrat and trustworthiness if you were a Republican.
I think one of the Republican slogans was trust Dole.
It really came down to personal characteristics.
That's definitely not the case anymore.
It's almost the case that if the Republicans nominated a cardboard box and the Democrats nominated a worn-out tire, that people would still vote for their respective candidates based on the parties because they just are so different and they're so opposed to one another.
I read in the New York Post, which is a scrappy tabloid.
It's like our Toronto Sun chain of newspapers in Canada.
It's got a sense of humor and a reverence to it.
I like it.
They had, I forget who the author was, but they brooded a scenario where, and I'm just going to run it by you, I think you probably know the one I mean, where Joe Biden chose Michelle Obama, Barack Obama's wife, as his running mate.
And then after the inauguration, Biden steps down and you got yourself a President Obama.
And I read through it and I thought, first of all, that would bring all the fond memories of the Obama years back for a lot of Democrats.
It would give sort of the centrist, you know, continuation vibe.
First woman candidate, another black candidate.
The media loved Michelle Obama.
I don't think she's half as graceful or charming as her husband, but good enough.
And I know this was like a flight of fancy, but I read that and I thought, yikes, that's a silver bullet.
What do you think of that fantasy theory?
Well, I don't think it can work.
First of all, she's not going to leave behind all the riches that she's been able to enjoy.
She's probably got a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars at the moment.
She's running a film production company with her husband, enjoying life on Martha's Vineyard near a beach that will be flooded if they say what they mean or mean what they say about global warming.
I mean, why would she give all that up?
She's going to be influential regardless.
She doesn't need to be a candidate.
She actually loses some credibility as a candidate.
She can certainly campaign for him, and I'm sure she'll be a featured speaker at the convention.
But like it or not, regardless of who the candidate is, we are going to see something of an Obama third term if any of the Democrats become president right now.
Biden has already revealed some of his potential cabinet picks, and aside from some of the people who ran against him, like Beto O'Rourke and Pete Budigej, who would certainly get important posts, it's basically going to be a rehash of the Obama administration.
Add that to the fact that the D.C. metro area, which staffs most of the federal government agencies, is vehemently anti-Trump.
And you have a situation where if Biden wins, the Obamas are going to control everything anyway.
They're basically tied in to the apparatus of government.
The Clintons will also have a similar kind of influence.
So why would any of these people go into the race when they can be super influential from afar without any of the costs or drawbacks, without losing any money, without losing any image, street credibility, whatever, without losing any friendships?
I mean, the Obamas are in a prime position, and they don't need to run for anything.
I think they also probably believe that if Biden can't win on his own, they can't save him.
And from where they sit, it's okay to wait four years.
They don't feel the same sense of urgency, I think, that people who are still in the arena might tend to feel.
And I think they think their chances will be a lot better in four years than they are with Biden.
The Democratic Party is building up a bench.
They'll have good candidates in four years' time.
They've got a couple of governors who are showing some potential.
They've got young leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and so forth.
So I think the smart move for the Obamas is to offer moral support to Joe Biden and campaign for him.
Hope he wins because winning is better than losing, but bet on a stronger candidate for the open seat in the White House in 2024.
Last question for you.
Sometimes people who are candidates, they want it, but the people around them want it more.
You talked about the permanent political class.
I suppose you could call it the deep state if you want.
But if someone's been a donor to Joe Biden for 20 years, if someone's been a staffer who's hitched their career to his for 20 years, they might want Biden to run for president even more than he does.
Maybe Biden's family, including his son, Hunter Biden, who seemed to enrich himself from China through his dad's political connections.
Do you think it's possible that in his heart of hearts, Biden feels like this isn't right, like it's not a good fit?
Do you think maybe even his own wife says, oh, Joe's not really up to it?
Do you think there's just so much pressure that they must continue, but that really they're doing the bidding of supporters and he's not burning with fire for this and he'd rather just be a grandpa enjoying his senior years?
I thought to that.
I'm not sure that the donors around Biden need him to win.
I do think that the donor class in the Democratic Party needed Bernie Sanders not to win.
And in early 2019, when I went to my first, one of my first events of the campaign, when the campaign was just getting started and Bernie Sanders had just announced he was running, I went to one of his speeches here in L.A.
And I remember texting someone or maybe I wrote it up in the article, my coverage of the event, that Biden's donors have to be beating down his door, asking him to run.
Because Sanders is so radical and his policies are so out there that Democrats had to be afraid that he would have tanked the entire party.
And I imagine that even some Republicans would have been happier to see Biden run because in the event that Trump loses, you'd want the alternative to be not so terrible.
I think that whole is out of the barn already because I think the party has moved so far left that it almost doesn't matter that Biden's the candidate.
But there definitely was a desperation to have someone who could beat Sanders and it looked like only Biden had the institutional heft to do it.
I don't know that they're so loyal now.
This is the process that the Democratic Party has to manage.
It's going to require a lot of political finesse, but they have to have those donors on board if they're going to switch someone else in for the presidential slot.
And they have to assure the Biden donors that they're going to have what they want from another candidate.
Now, they can never promise 100% of what they want.
But I agree with you that that tends to be a problem in politics, that the donors often want something more than the politicians do, and the politicians have to run.
In this case, partly because there was a four-year interim when Biden didn't run in 2016 anyway, I don't know that there's as much tying the donors to Biden personally as there was motivating the donors to bring him in as a foil to Sanders.
So it's a very interesting question, and we'll have to see how they manage it.
Slave Labor Debate00:05:11
Well, Joel, thank you so much for taking so much time.
I know you're at home like so many of us are trying to run the household and homeschooling and all that.
So thanks for taking the time and for your wisdom as always.
I look forward to a return to normalcy, but it's been great to have you join us a couple times in a row from home.
So nice to see you again.
Thank you.
I hope to be back soon.
Right on.
There you have it.
Joel Pollack, the senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
He joined us via Skype from his home in the Los Angeles area.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about Earth Day and the annual press freedom rankings.
Paul writes, they gave China a low rating to give the rankings more credibility.
This survey seems to be really about who has embraced globalism the best that year.
Well, I just will not accept anyone saying America's, what, ranked, was it 45 or 55 and Canada's what, 16?
I'm saying that's just not true.
Whatever you think about Donald Trump, America is the freest place in the world to be a journalist.
The First Amendment is rock solid.
I mean, I'm not tearing down Norway, which they put as number one, but they put it as number one because it's an inoffensive, tiny European social welfare democracy.
America is the living, beating heart of free press around the world.
And I say that with some jealousy because of their First Amendment.
Bruce writes, Ezra's comment on Earth Day is spot on.
As Mark Levin said a few years ago, the old reds are the new greens.
I think so.
There is a deep state in science, in environmentalism.
You can ban things in the name of the environment that you couldn't ban elsewhere.
And I think we've discovered that public health warriors like Teresa Tam, like so many others, they're part of the deep state too, and they're absolutely plugged into the UN.
The World Health Organization is a UN agency.
They don't believe in local sovereignty.
They don't believe in freedom.
By definition, a public health doctor is about control.
Whereas a regular doctor that meets patients is about making the patient better, very different.
On my interview with Manny Montanegrino, Karen writes, the whole point of these restrictions were to save the elderly.
Foreign workers bringing in COVID-19 is counterproductive.
You know what?
It's a false economy.
When you look back through the sweep of time, you see slave labor.
There's been slavery on every single continent in the world other than Antarctica.
There really has been.
And it's such a blight on humanity.
And, you know, look at not just the damage that was done morally at the time by slavery, but to this day, the wounds of American slavery, even though it was 150 years ago, the Emancipation Proclamation, the wounds of slavery are still hurting today.
You can't deny that.
And what we are doing with temporary foreign workers is a form of wage slavery.
And what we were doing by outsourcing our factories to China to save a few bucks an hour on labor is a form of slavery.
Now, they're not utter slaves, but in some ways they are.
We pay them less than the law would allow for a Canadian.
A lot of illegal aliens picking fruit or whatever they do in California, because they're sort of in the shadows, they can't avail themselves of laws, legal protection, so they're vulnerable to all sorts of things.
And why?
I say again, if you have a cheap indentured worker, which is really what a temporary foreign worker is, like at the cargo plant in Alberta, it's not like your steak is going to be half price.
It might be 5% cheaper because the cost of your steak, you know, that laborer cutting it up, is such a small part of the cost.
It's not like your food is in any substantial way cheaper because we use foreign slave labor.
But we brought all these problems here.
And you know what?
How about pay people a decent wage, a prevailing wage?
And you know what?
If you can't find someone willing to work for peanuts at a restaurant drive-through, well, pay what you need to pay or shut it down.
There's no constitutional right to have a cheap coffee, donut, or burger.
And if you have to pay an extra 50 cents because you're paying a living wage to the people inside, that is not only morally better than bringing in cheap, subsidized, de facto slave labor, it's going to, in the long run, I mean, what is the price of having close to 1,000 COVID-19 cases in those two slaughterhouses in Alberta?
So we saved a few bucks that all went in the pocket of those multinationals, and now the province is saddled with a billion dollars with health care.
Where's the savings there?
I just don't get it.
I want to get away from the slave labor approach.
If something's worth doing, pay the guy to do it.
And if it's a few extra bucks, get over it.
I think we have to get out of that globalist thing.
And this comes from a guy who is a Fraser Institute alumni, alumnus.
I even, when I was 22, I interned with the Koch Foundation in Washington, D.C. There's nothing more open borders than that.
But I see now that that simply doesn't work on its own.
You can't just have a race to the bottom in terms of wages.
Breaking Away From Globalism00:00:22
When you do that, you wind up giving your entire industry to China, including not a single N95 man mask manufacturer in Canada.
90% plus of our pharmaceuticals are made in China.
We're hooped because of that globalization.
You tell me if you disagree with me.
All right, folks, that's my show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night.