Dallas hair salon owner Shelly Luther faced a week in prison and $500/day fines for defying COVID-19 restrictions, despite no staff or customer violations, while Texas officials like Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott condemned the ruling—Abbott later removed jail penalties, though Luther’s contempt case lingered until the Supreme Court intervened. Over $500K in a GoFundMe underscored public outrage as Dave Rubin linked her ordeal to progressive weaponization of identity politics, comparing it to Star Wars’ "Order 66" and citing Locals.com as a decentralized alternative to platforms like Patreon or Stripe that deplatform dissenters. He warned Canada’s firearms ban and Trudeau’s pandemic-era power grabs risked normalizing authoritarianism, urging resistance through individual rights and broader life frameworks beyond political tribalism. [Automatically generated summary]
In Texas, a woman opened her hair salon because her staff needed the work.
They were starving, she said.
Well, a judge didn't like that and called in the salon owner and said, apologize to the politicians you're disagreeing with and call yourself selfish or go to prison.
Well, she wouldn't say it.
And she was sent to prison.
I'll give you the full updates.
I'll show you the video. of how it went down in the court and I'll tell you what the governor, attorney general, and others have to say.
That's ahead.
Before I let you hear that, can I invite you please to become a premium subscriber?
Go to RebelNews.com at $8 a month.
You get the video version of the podcast.
I hope you do because I want you to see what this woman sounded and looked like.
And the judge, too, in the court.
Okay, here's the podcast.
Tonight, a Texas judge sentences a hair salon owner to a week in prison for working.
Well, we see that in Canada, too.
It's May 7th, 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 is government, the why I'll show you, is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Let me show you a video from a courthouse in Dallas, Texas.
A woman named Shelly Luther owns a salon in Dallas called Alamode.
She was dying, but not from the virus, but from the over-the-top political reaction to the virus that had shut down her business and was threatening to throw her entire staff into deep poverty.
That's what I mean by dying.
So I know this is shocking.
She let her staff come in and cut some hair.
It was voluntary all around.
Her staff desperately wanted to do it.
Her customers obviously wanted to.
But the police came and dragged her to court where a hard left-wing judge named Eric Moyer sentenced her to prison.
But not for being open during the pandemic, but for not apologizing to the politicians who had shut her down, for not apologizing for, quote, being selfish.
This judge didn't just want to shut her down, didn't just want to fine her $500 a day, destroying what's left of her business.
He demanded that she morally, psychologically, emotionally denounce herself and praise the politicians who had shut her down.
Politicians who themselves haven't lost a day of pay.
I can guarantee you that.
This judge himself surely makes six figures a year.
I wonder how long he'd go without a paycheck.
But since she wouldn't call herself selfish, since she wouldn't apologize to the politicians, he threw her in prison.
Here, watch a clip from the court TV.
It was actually done by video, this hearing, so you can see who's who on the screen.
Watch this first video.
You can see the judge with his mask on.
The lady in her home in the top left is the court reporter working from home, I think.
She seems to have a very lovely home.
I don't think she's been missing any paychecks.
And Susan Luther, the salon owner, she's not in the witness box in the top right because, I don't know, probably it's too close to his holiness, the judge.
He'd get germs from her.
So she's sitting down in the box on the bottom left.
Anyways, listen to this.
That you now see the error of your ways and understand that the society cannot function where one's own belief in a concept of liberty permits you to flaunt your disdain for the rulings of duly elected officials.
That you owe an apology to the elected officials whom you disrespect disrespected by flagrantly ignoring and, in one case, defiling their orders, which you now know obviously apply to you.
That you understand that the proper way in which an or in an ordered society to engage concerns which you may have had is to hire a lawyer and advocate for change, an exception or an amendment to laws that you find offensive.
That you publicly state that this is the way that citizens in the state should behave and that you represent to this court that you will today cease operation of your salon and not reopen until after further orders of this of the government permit you to do so.
This court will consider the payment of a fine in lieu of the incarceration which you've demonstrated that you have so clearly earned.
Is there anything that you would like to say now?
I understand the point.
Either we in Canada and our American friends and the Brits either were countries of laws or we're not.
We can't each pick and choose which laws we follow.
There's something to that, but that's not really what he said or did, was it?
He said her freedom.
The difference between her going home or going to prison was based on her denouncing herself as immoral and praising the political class as moral.
I'm sorry.
That's not a law, that's not the rule of law, that's not law and order, that's not the rule he just made that up.
Was the offense that she opened her store or that she wasn't obedient to her superiors, of which the judge clearly regards himself as one?
Oh, and I love that.
Hey, you're teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
Your staff are begging you to get some work.
Well, just hire a lawyer and lobby the government for change, or file a lawsuit.
Maybe in six months or a year or two, you'll get a court hearing when the courts open up again finally, and we'll talk about all this then.
Okay well, Shelly stood up to reply.
You can see her in this next video standing up in the box on the bottom left.
She's very respectful, very polite, calls the judge sir many times and says what was actually motivating her, not selfishness, but feeding the children of her staff.
They're starving.
She says, take a listen, judge.
I would like to say that I have much respect for this court and laws and and that i've never been been in this position before and it's not someplace that I want to be.
But I have to disagree with you sir, when I, when you say that i'm selfish, because feeding my kids is not selfish, I have hairstylists that are going hungry because they'd rather feed their kids.
So sir, if you think the law is more important than kids getting fed, then please go ahead with your decision, but I am not going to shut the salon so literally off to prison for a week Imprisoned, seven-day prison sentence plus $500 a day in fines.
I tell you, I wouldn't have been that polite to the judge.
Then again, I'd probably have been sentenced to a month in solitary confinement for making a joke about the judge.
Sure, you don't need a hair salon, Kojak.
I might have said something done like that.
I'm not as polite as Shelly Luther.
America's funny.
Different branches of the government aren't afraid to criticize each other, though.
And unlike here in Canada, politicians aren't afraid to criticize judges, in particular, especially extremist judges like this one.
Now, in Canada, we have extremist judges, too, making extremist rulings all the time.
Can you even remember once when a politician called out a judge?
Well, look at this by no one less than the Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton.
I find it outrageous and out of touch that during this national pandemic, a judge in a county that actually released hardened criminals for fear of contracting COVID-19 would jail a mother for operating her hair salon in an attempt to put food on her family's table.
The trial judge did not need to lock up Shelly Luther.
His order is a shameful abuse of judicial discretion, which seems like another political stunt in Dallas.
He should release Ms. Luther immediately.
Right.
Apparently, this same county released a thousand hardened criminals.
So at least I'll have room in prison for Shelly Luther.
Ken Paxton, the Attorney General there, he's a Republican, and so is the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott.
I think he's a pretty great governor.
But it was his law that was applied by the judge here.
So what does that say about him?
What does he have to say about that?
Well, scratch that.
Who cares what any of these politicians say?
Who cares what the Attorney General says?
Boy, it sure was nice of Ken Paxton to put out a tweet, a virtue signaling tweet, that showed how much he cared.
Shelly Luther was still in prison, though.
Well, I looked up the Texas Constitution, Section 411B.
In all criminal cases, except treason and impeachment, the governor shall have power either after conviction or successful completion of a term of deferred adjudication, community supervision, on the written signed recommendation and advice of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, or a majority thereof.
It's a rambling way of saying, if I read that right.
The governor can pardon Shelly Luther.
He just needs to get a majority of the Board of Pardons and Paroles to sign a recommendation.
Great.
Get on the phone with him.
Have a five-minute conference call.
Sign the piece of paper.
Get Shelly Luther out of prison.
Now, just before I walked in to record this video, I saw some breaking news.
The governor had weighed in personally, not with a pardon, but with a blanket removal of jail as a penalty for violating any of his health orders.
Let me read this from Greg Abbott.
Throwing Texans in jail whose business is shut down through no fault of their own is wrong.
I'm eliminating jail for violating an order.
Retroactive to April 2, superseding local orders.
Criminals shouldn't be released to prevent COVID-19, just to put business owners in their place.
All right.
Now that looks good, but it would, you know, take an expert in Texas law, which I am not, to let me know if this would work, because I understand that Shelly Luther was sentenced for contempt of court.
You saw the judge, because she wouldn't say what the judge told her to say.
She wouldn't call herself selfish.
She wouldn't praise politicians.
The whole thing's nuts.
So will the governor's retroactive rule have anything to do with this order for what I think was a contempt court order?
Now, just one more thing.
I just walked in and I got another update this afternoon.
Apparently, the Texas Supreme Court literally ordered that Shelly should be released, and then there's another court date in the future to talk about it again, I think.
Now, look, there's a lot going on, probably even more happening now that I'm recording in the studio.
I love Texas.
How can you not?
One of my first rebel videos five years ago was going down to Dallas and having some fun, getting some proper cowboy gear, and of course, going on a barbecue odyssey across the state.
I can't even remember what I was actually supposed to be doing down there.
Oh yeah, doing some videos about fracking and how they do it in Texas.
So that's, you know, what's not to love about Texas?
Cowboys, oil and gas, a made-up eating barbecue, and a love for freedom.
Sort of like Alberta, if Alberta weren't under the thumb of Ottawa.
So while a Texas judge throws Shelly Luther into prison, and while Texas politicians did their in Blather, ordinary Canadians tried, ordinary Americans, sorry, tried to fix this.
They put together a GoFundMe crowdfund campaign for her, and in less than a day, it raised half a million dollars.
That's amazing.
That's a pretty good barometer of public sentiment, isn't it?
And wow, will that ever help Shelly and her staff?
But that doesn't take away the wrongness of what the government did to her.
I love Texas, but the fact that this tyranny could happen even there, in what is arguably the freest state in the union, shows the depth of the problem.
It's not just Shelley Luther.
She made a particularly passionate plea.
The judge was particularly cold.
And fortuitously, it was captured on video.
But there are surely thousands of cases like this, perhaps not in prison, but there are thousands of cases of tickets and arrests, even in Canada.
I mean, we're representing Canadians who got outrageous fines for walking in the park or feeding the homeless or even having dinner at home with their friends, but none of them have been thrown in prison yet in Canada that I know of.
So how can this be in Texas?
Well, it shows that part of the human mind that allows authoritarianism to flourish, the bullying gene, the tyrannical gene, if you will, it's in all of us.
Don't think that there aren't plenty of people in our society in the U.S., in Canada, the United Kingdom, who wouldn't love to have China-style authoritarianism here.
There are people amongst us who would thrive in that culture, informants, snitching, complaining, punishing, gloating.
They don't have that part of their personality under control.
I think it's worse on the left by far.
Here's Chicago's mayor the other day.
Now, I've directed Superintendent Brown to order all police districts to give special attention to these parties.
And this is how it's going to be.
We will shut you down.
We will cite you.
And if we need to, we will arrest you and we will take you to jail.
Period.
There should be nothing unambiguous about that.
Don't make us treat you like a criminal.
But if you act like a criminal and you violate the law and you refuse to do what is necessary to save lives in this city in the middle of a pandemic, we will take you to jail, period.
Yeah, pretty easy to see her doing just fine in a dictatorship.
Thank you very little.
Oh, and she had a sneaky visit to the hairstyles too, you see, because she, get this, cares about her hygiene.
That's what she said.
That's why she needed to visit the salon.
I love that hygiene issue.
But you, you can't get a haircut, just her.
And I guarantee you, her hair salon won't be thrown in jail.
Here's another case from Texas this past week.
Lots of Texans have guns.
That's a good guard against government tyranny when things finally get really bad.
But even local cop shops, well, they have tanks.
Swat Teams and Conservatism00:06:48
Take a look at this video.
Keep your hands up.
Here was the hat free shirt.
Pick your hands up.
I can't see him.
What was supposed to be a peaceful protest quickly took a wrong turn?
You're at Big Daddy Zane's, a local bar in West Odessa.
Owner Gabrielle Ellison opened up her doors despite Abbott's latest order.
We can't take it no more.
We're not going to make it.
It risks, she says, she understands all too well.
But it boils down to feeding her family.
I am aware of what's going on down the road.
I'm shocked.
And I had customers come through.
You know, they've got SWAT built up.
They got SWAT built up.
Why would you bring in SWAT on a peaceful situation?
But Ellison says the risk of staying closed outweighs the risk of any virus and potentially getting in trouble with law enforcement.
The possibility of getting my license taken.
Heartbreaking, but they've already took in my income.
Oh my God, I know whose side I'm on.
By the way, this is a real picture, not a Photoshop, of some of Ector County's finest.
Looks like they haven't missed a meal in this whole pandemic.
They haven't missed a paycheck.
Look, I shouldn't poke fun at people for being fat, but their teeny tiny bulletproof jackets sort of remind me of when I go to the lake and the only life jacket left is a kid-size life jacket and I try and put it on.
What's the point, fellas?
It ain't going to help.
So yeah, which side are you on?
Which side are you on here?
Me?
I'm with people who want to work, who want to live.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
I'm very excited to have our next guest today.
He's so many things.
He's a comedian.
He's a commentator.
He's a public speaker.
He's an author.
He's Robin to Jordan Peterson's Batman in Jordan Peterson's World Tour.
He is Dave Rubin, and he joins us now via Skype for his new book, Don't Burn This Book, it's called.
Dave Rubin, great to have you on the program.
What a pleasure.
Ezra, I'm glad to be with you.
You know, it's funny you're making a DC Comics reference with Batman and Robin right there, because I was about to say to you that you're sort of in what I consider the Avengers of Canada, the free speech Avengers.
It's sort of you and Jordan Peterson and Lindsey Shepard and Gad Saad and Yasmin Mohammed and a couple other people.
So we got a little Marvel of DC thing.
We can work it out throughout the interview.
Right on.
Well, what I like best about you, man, I think you've got a winning style.
You make everyone comfortable when you debate uncomfortable things, and that's a real personality trait.
And I'll just say, I mean, obviously I'm a fan.
You can hear it in what I'm saying.
What I like about you and what I wish there was more of is liberals who would engage with conservatives rather than shun them, cancel them.
Frankly, I think you've become a little more conservative over time yourself.
But I mean, you come from a very liberal place.
You worked for The Young Turks.
That's a left-wing show.
You were an intern even with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
How did you resist the temptation just to blacklist, blackball, ignore, and unfriend people you disagree with?
How did you overcome the virus of the left?
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because we could go back even further than that.
I mean, I come from a true liberal in the good sense of liberal family.
I mean, I was born in Brooklyn, New York, before it was hipster Brooklyn, when it was still old school Brooklyn, which was, you know, this mismatch of, you know, of Jews and Greeks and Irish and Italians and blacks and Latinos and this real thing that was the sort of beauty of America, the stew of America.
And then I grew up in Long Island and I went to college in upstate New York.
I lived in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, which is like the lefty liberal paradise of the world.
But, you know, as a Jew, I sort of grew up with, you debate stuff.
That's just what you do every holiday.
Ezra, I'm sure it's the same for you and your family.
Every holiday, it's like you get 30 people around the table.
No topic is off limits.
And then what would happen in my family, everyone would be screaming the entire meal.
And then the second dessert was served, it was like, all right, that's it.
Nobody's angry at anybody.
So what?
You're for abortion, you're against abortion.
You're for high taxes, you're for low taxes.
It was just like, it was let go.
And I think I didn't realize it, honestly, until writing the book that that piece of me really was born there.
It was born very young.
I remember being 11 or 12 years old and trying to get to the adults' table because I thought something interesting was happening there.
So I always felt that piece about debate.
And I would also say that this is where the word liberal and lefty have just been conflated and confused.
Because, you know, there were good liberals.
I know you know this, but there were good liberals like JFK Jr.
Ask not what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country.
There were good liberals in New York.
We had Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a proud defender of the Constitution.
We had Mayor Ed Koch in New York City, who was the mayor for a city of 8 million people from every walk of life and treated everybody the same.
What unfortunately happened in the last five years is as progressive identity politics and groupthink and collectivism grew, they saw the weakness of liberals.
And it's very hard for me to admit in a way, but liberalism in and of itself has a weakness that conservatism does not.
Liberalism, because of the innate desire to be open-minded, will let in basically any idea.
And I think progressives saw that.
They saw that, oh, we can sneak identity politics in.
We can sneak all of this giant government stuff in, guise it as we're being nice to everybody.
And in effect, they decimated the liberals.
And I think you're a bit of a Star Wars guy.
And I always compare it to Order 66 in Revenge of the Sick.
Because basically, the last remaining liberals have pretty much been annihilated in America.
You know, Bill Maher is trying.
You know, I'm trying, but I have no problem when someone says to me, hey, you know, you're more of a conservative now.
If anything, I think in some respects that I'm a modern conservative, meaning I believe in the base ideas of conservatism, meaning individual rights and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
But I don't have to agree with conservatives on every single issue.
As you know, in my book, I lay out a pro-choice position.
And if that can be accepted by those on the right, then I see that as wonderful fertile ground for ideas.
And unfortunately, the left has just decided to purge all the free thinkers.
Fertile Ground for Ideas00:02:10
Well, let me ask you about what you said about Brooklyn, because you listed the mix of people there.
And you mentioned race and ethnicity and things like that.
And I know what you mean.
But it's become a more recent thing to say, as a Jewish man, as a black woman, as a transgender.
And they start an argument.
They, people, I think typically on the left, as a fill-in-the-blank my identity politics here, I believe.
And I think that does two things.
First of all, it's a false authority.
I mean, it's not an appeal to facts or even an argument.
It's listen to me because I have a certain characteristic, not because my ideas are good.
And second of all, it immediately implies that to disagree with that, you're not disagreeing with the idea, but their blackness, woman-ness, transness.
And I think that's probably very different than what you meant back in Brooklyn 40 years ago.
Well, Ezra, I would even go a step further and say when people do that and use their identity first, well, first off, they're using it as a crudgel because they're using it to try to gain some advantage over you.
But I would argue that it's even anti-human because none of us want to be judged on our immutable characteristics.
It doesn't matter to me that you're a cisgendered man.
It's what comes out of your mouth, your ideas, your actions that matter.
When I say it, and I know you understand this, when I say, oh, there were blacks and Latinos and Jews and Greeks and Italians and Irish, my point was that that's the beauty of the stew of America.
Nobody back then walked there.
Nobody in 1940s, 1950s, Brooklyn, in the craziest melting pot that you could possibly imagine with all of these people whose many were first-generation immigrants or second, whose parents came here with nothing or grandparents or they came with nothing.
Everybody was just thrown in to Brooklyn or the Lower East Side.
I mean, this is the quintessential American story.
And nobody walked around saying, I'm Italian, so give me this.
I'm Jewish, give me this.
I'm Irish, give me this.
My point was, you threw all of these people in.
They had their little communities.
They had their foods, their traditions, their holidays, all these things.
Patreon's Political Divide00:15:33
And guess what?
They all started really learning to live together.
And that doesn't mean there weren't fights, there weren't some level of racism and bigotry and some of that old world stuff.
But what happened there, and I think there's a, you know, it's actually a very special thing because you can look at lists of famous authors and philosophers and comedians and actors, and so many of them were Brooklyn-born.
Larry King, who of course is Brooklyn-born, he has a bagel shop here in Beverly Hills.
It's called Brooklyn Water Bagel.
And he has plaques of just all of the famous people, politicians, everything born in Brooklyn.
And there's a reason for it because it represented the beauty of America.
Not because they were Irish first or Jewish first or Italian first, but because they took all of that stuff that had been the gestalt, good word of their families and then blended it into America.
And that is what is so special about this place.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I mean, people came together.
I mean, as the motto says, out of many, one, emplurbus unum.
I think that we're dividing people.
I mean, Trudeau up here never stops talking about diversity.
He wants to pigeonhole people and give them racial or gender identifiers even when they don't want it.
But let me ask you this.
I remember in college, I'm a few years older than you, but back when I was in college, there was a spirit of debate.
And if you were on the left or on the right, and there was a debate on some issue, you were sort of expected to be at the debate.
And if you declined, it was a sign that you really weren't interested in public affairs.
So the idea that one group would boycott the debate if another was there, that just wasn't thinkable because that would be seen as A, you're chickening out, or B, oh, then you're not really serious about this conversation since you just want to have a monologue.
The idea of deplatforming, that new word, it didn't even exist back then.
Tell me a little bit about deplatforming issues.
And I know that you were on Patreon, which is a kind of crowdfunding.
We do it a little differently up here.
But tell us a little bit about deplatforming censorship and your Patreon story, if you don't mind.
Yeah, there's so much there.
I mean, look, again, this goes to sort of what I would describe as the death of old school liberalism, which I am trying to reignite and give life to in my book, because I believe that classical liberalism has good principles that in many ways were the founding principles of the United States, you know, individual rights and light touch of government.
That's a very founding principle here.
But as the progressives came in, they said, you're all bigots and racists and everything.
And then that gave them, in their mind, a license to say, well, we don't have to debate any conservative because if you're a conservative at any level, meaning you're for low taxes or you're not for the welfare state or something else, that is evidence that you are a bigot and a racist.
And why would I platform or appear on a stage or anything else with a bigot and a racist?
And for some reason, and again, this goes to that sort of weakness of the open mind of a liberal, the good liberals just sort of stood there and got executed and no longer exist.
I just simply don't know where they are.
Again, with the exception of Bill Maher and maybe a small smattering of a handful of other people.
But as far as deplatforming, you know, this idea that if a college invites a speaker, if an accredited group at a university invites a speaker, I believe that it is incumbent on the university to let that speaker talk.
Now, that doesn't mean you agree with the speaker.
It doesn't mean that they don't have odious views, but that must be allowed to happen.
Now, especially at a public university, a private university, look, they can do their own thing, whether we like it or not, whether we feel it's an assault on free speech or not.
But a public university, of course.
And just to show that I'm not just saying these things, I believe it.
But so Linda Sarsour, who I believe to be a truly bad actor and a true racist in the way that progressive racism has become a sort of the new pernicious acceptable racism, she was invited to speak at the City University of New York about two years ago.
And I defended her right to speak there.
Everything being equal, I would prefer that I guess no group invite her because her ideas are terrible.
But you know what?
If somebody invited her, you got to defend her right to speak.
So it's not just something I preach about.
It's something that I actually believe in.
As far as Patreon, you know, there was an interesting moment about a year and a half ago where there was an internet guy that I'm guessing you've probably spoke to him at a point, Carl Benjamin Sargon of Akkad, who, you know, he was one of the first sort of lefty people on YouTube about six years ago who was saying, hey, lefties, there's something wrong here.
We're not liberal anymore.
And he actually helped me kind of go on my path because when I started saying the same things, a lot of people said, hey, you got to talk to this guy.
He's been doing it for months now.
And basically, he was on Patreon, which is the crowdfunding site.
And that's where he was supporting his YouTube page.
And then it turned out that not on his Patreon, nor on his YouTube channel, but on another YouTube channel, he was being interviewed and he said the N-word.
And he said it not to use it as a racial pejorative, but to use it to mock the people who use those words, to mock the alt-right in effect.
And Patreon decided to cancel his account.
And I felt, along with Jordan Peterson and then Sam Harris, that that was a bridge too far because it wasn't just that they were going after language, which I would prefer they not go after anyway.
It was that it wasn't even his Patreon nor his own channel that he was funding on Patreon.
It was a word he said on something else altogether.
And they said, we're not going to let you have a livelihood and we're going to shut you down.
And by the way, in effect, as far as I know, he's doing okay.
But that is what spurred me on to create locals.com because I believe in competition and we're building digital homes for creators.
Because you don't own your stuff on YouTube.
You don't own your stuff on Twitter.
And you're basically renting space from a landlord who could cut you off at any moment.
And all of us are kind of sitting ducks there.
So I created that.
That's going to, you know, it's my best effort to solve some of these problems.
You know, and that's very interesting because we've had similar problems.
We haven't yet been deplatformed, but we've come close and we're always under attack.
Here's my question for you.
Even if you were to create a new app or a new website, there's always a deeper level of internet infrastructure, payment processors.
There's only a few of them.
And behind that, banks and then the deep structure of the internet.
Suddenly, I mean, three years ago, we got an email saying we're going to kick you off your, I think it was called a DNS server.
Forgive me if I have the technicalities wrong.
Basically, they said in 24 hours, you're being kicked off your website.
Good luck.
And I had even heard of this company.
I had no idea we were dealing with them.
So even if you have a top-level fix, there's some risk to the basis of the internet.
How do we fix that when it's a handful of companies who don't care about political squawking, who are so unbelievably rich, and now they just care about being woke?
Like, you can't fight with Zuckerberg or Google, and I'm not even talking about them, but people we don't even know who they are.
Right, that's the crazy part.
So it's a great question.
It's the trillion-dollar question, I would say, because when it's fully solved, I actually think it's a trillion-dollar business.
What I've been telling people about locals is we've solved 95% of the problems for 95% of the creators.
So in other words, I can't solve Alex Jones' problem.
Now, I'm not saying I want to be in business to solve Alex Jones' problem.
That's not even a condemnation of Alex Jones.
I would prefer he be on all these platforms.
And if you don't like him, don't watch.
That would be my personal preference.
But in other words, when you ask about payment processors, so through locals, right now we're using Stripe.
And yes, if Alex Jones wants to join locals, well, he can't go on Stripe.
So there's no way for us to pay him or there's no way for him to get paid.
We actually let you use your own Stripe account.
So that's what I mean by 95% of the problems for 95% of the creators.
The direct answer to your question is this is all going to be decentralized and it's going to be a lot of crypto blockchain stuff.
We're working with some companies on some of that on the payment side.
But you know, the next evolution of all this also is that it's going to be decentralized storage because you won't be able to trust just that your server, if you're using Amazon servers or whatever server you're using, that they won't cut you off too.
That's your point.
So we're going to actually have to get to the point where it's decentralized video and audio too.
There are a couple companies that are doing some interesting stuff with that that we're talking to.
But I think one of the problems is for the people that understand these issues, it's like everyone wants the solution tomorrow.
And it's like, you know, if it was possible tomorrow, it would have been done.
Trust me, I'm friends with a lot of the key people in these spaces that understand this stuff.
And as you're saying, there's so many complex issues that when you solve one issue, you actually create three more problems.
So we're working on it.
And I think we have the right team.
And I would welcome any of your viewers to check out what we've done with locals.com.
RubinReport.com is really the first project of local.
We have iOS app.
We have an Android app.
We've built out a great community there.
There's no trolls and there's no bots.
We have our own video player, our own audio player.
This week, I think we're adding it today.
We're adding live chat.
So we've done, you know, there's no algorithmic manipulation of the news feed.
We've done something really, really nice and sleek.
And my hope is if I can solve my problem that we can spawn that off to solve other people's problems.
And I'd love to work with you guys at Rebel on it.
So we should talk separately about that.
Well, thank you very much.
And I know you've got to go, but I think I have 60 seconds left.
You've got so many books.
It's amazing.
The book is called Don't Burn This Book.
The guest is Dave Rubin.
You can buy that book on this website at the link, the Amazon link below the page.
Let me ask you one last question.
That was a great technical answer, but let me bring it back to the larger feeling of your book.
You know, we talked about being deplatformed in debates and political places, but I see stories of men and women getting divorces because he's a Trump supporter and she's not.
I see people writing About such things in the New York Times.
And that's a bigger problem than just politics.
Give me your thoughts on relationships, personal, long-time friendships being ended this way.
Maybe it's always been that way, but it seems to me to be particularly acute.
Give us your last thoughts and then we'll set you free to continue your book tour, my friend.
Well, first off, I wish we had more time to do it.
And for sure, you know, I've been saying to you forever, I wanted to get you live in studio.
So we'll do it via Skype since that's how we're all trapped at the moment.
But I am actually deeply concerned about what you're talking about right now because the amount of emails that I get literally from people saying my wife is divorcing me because I'm a Trump supporter or my friends have abandoned me, I tell some stories about the types of things that happened to me when I just started saying, hey, there's something wrong with the left.
And literally, people that were invited to my wedding telling me I'm a racist and a bigot and they don't even know why they're saying it.
I ask them, well, have I said anything racist?
And it doesn't even matter.
They think because they say it, that is evidence of its truth.
So I'm deeply concerned about that because, you know, as you know, we're in an election year here in the United States.
Corona has everybody kind of confused and up in the air as is.
And one of the things that I try to do in chapter 10 and the final chapter of the book is, you know, we shouldn't be permanently political.
I find if your whole worldview is just through a political lens, meaning the left is this, the right is this, this happened today, and that happened today, and they voted on this, it will lead you to endless misery because politics is about power and a game of power.
It's sort of like Game of Thrones.
The Game of Thrones, basically everyone dies at the end and the couple guys who are alive, they're not that happy because everyone they know is dead.
And I sort of think that that is what politics is.
So you need to have a framework for life that is outside of politics.
I lay out what I think is a pretty decent one in this book.
But if you want a really dense read on that, we'll turn to the most famous man in Canada, turn to Jordan Peterson and read 12 Rules for Life.
Outstanding.
Well, I can hardly wait to tuck into the book.
What a great read.
It's like the story of my life, being deeply platformed and wanting to debate.
And just very interesting.
Dave Rubin, we're big fans up here.
Good luck with the book tour.
Once again, folks, you can buy Don't Burn This Book at the Amazon link below, and we'll email this video out to our readers too.
Good luck, Dave.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right.
Bye-bye.
There you have it, Dave Rubin.
What a good egg.
Oh, I wish more liberals had his open-minded approach to debate.
Stay with us.
More ahead on the run.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about China calling Canada a giant baby.
Bill writes.
It's obvious to everybody but Trudeau that she doesn't respect him and won't give him the Secretary General job.
No, no, no, no.
I think that it's like, you know, when a horse has a kind of, I don't know, what's that called, like a harness on their head that has a stick with, you know, bait and the horse keeps following the bait.
I don't even know what that's called.
That's Trudeau.
Xi Jinping Ping keeps saying, well, just give us a little more.
Give us a little more.
Here's the bait.
We'll give you a seat on the UN Security Council.
And then if you're a very good boy, we'll have to be Secretary General.
So I think he's being trained.
He's being conditioned.
So he's getting sticks and carrots.
Not a lot of carrots, to be frank.
But he's being obedience trained by the Chinese.
So I think they're abusing him psychologically, politically, culturally, economically, to get him conditioned.
to accepting that and like a Pavlovian response doing whatever they have to say.
I don't know, maybe that sounds a little too amateur psychological, but once you think of, once you look at Trudeau's foreign policy through the lens of how do I get on the UN Security Council for a country, how do I become the next Secretary General, get out of this prime minister gig, then a lot of things make sense.
Bernie writes, ever since Trudeau became prime minister, I decided my car was going to be special.
The delivery guy three doors up tonight stopped at the end of my driveway and asked if he could put something on my car.
Then he tells me I made his day.
No, he made my day.
I thought I would share my car with you.
Well, you are certainly expressing yourself.
And I think it'll be interesting to see what cops do.
I think most beat cops would like your car, but it wouldn't shock me if you found an authoritarian bully who punishes you for your car.
I'm sorry, that's just my prediction.
On my interview with Lauren Gunter on Trudeau's firearms ban, Gore writes, do you think I'm going to let this tyrannical trust fund unaccomplished boob disarm me?
The Liberals over and over have made me a criminal overnight.
I'm getting used to it.
Many say molan labé, I mean it.
I think that's the Greek way of saying hands off my guns, or it's more or less what that means.
I don't think it means guns.
It's like don't tread on me.
It's sort of a gun rights credo.
I tell you, when you disarm a population, you can do a lot of things to them.
I think Canada has been psychologically disarmed.
I'm disappointed by how meekly people have gone into various authoritarian regimes, house arrest, banned from parks, can't go for a walk outside, get $800 tickets for walking your dog.
See Slip Into Authoritarianism00:01:01
I'm disappointed how many people have accepted that.
And we're still a semi-armed society.
What happens if there's no panic button, no emergency plan, no firearm there, and the government goes all the way and say, try and stop us.
Just watch me.
I don't think we're there yet, but you can see how things slip away, especially if there's a crisis as a pretext for it.
Trudeau, his worst instincts came out in the crisis.
He wanted to effectively abolish parliament.
He has abolished question period and press conferences de facto.
He's spending and passing laws without a vote.
He wanted to bring in censorship specifically about the virus.
He's seizing guns unrelated to the virus.
Every authoritarian instinct is there.
That's what he got away with in two months.
Imagine what he would get away with in two terms.
Folks, that's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here, the Rebel World Headquarters, seeing you at home, good night.