WestJet canceled a flight on September 9 after a 19-month-old refused a mask, despite legal exemptions for under-2s, sparking outrage among passengers. Meanwhile, Disney’s Mulan filmed in Xinjiang—home to Uyghur camps—credits propaganda outlets and the Public Security Bureau, raising accusations of complicity in genocide and forced labor. Ezra Levant and Gordon Cheng debate potential U.S. trade sanctions or cultural decoupling, noting Trump-era progress but requiring bipartisan support. The episode ties corporate policies to broader human rights concerns, exposing tensions between profit and ethics. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I talk about a bizarre incident on a WestJet flight.
Bizarre but not unpredictable.
WestJet announced it was going zero tolerance with people who don't wear masks, but the thing is the law provides exemptions, including for tiny little babies.
There was a 19-month year old kid who didn't want to wear a mask.
WestJet went ape.
They called the police.
When the police didn't arrest the little girl, WestJet actually canceled the whole flight.
I'll tell you the whole story.
It is nuts.
I don't know what's going on here, but I'll tell you what I know.
Before I do, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
You get the video version out of it.
I will show you a video taken of the FRCA on the airline.
So please consider becoming a Rebel News Plus subscriber.
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Just go to rebelnews.com and click subscribe.
Tonight, WestJet keeps their weird, illegal promise and goes zero tolerance on mask exemptions to cancel the flight because a baby wouldn't wear one.
It's September 9th 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 will watch the house is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I saw this the other day on Twitter and I didn't understand it.
WestJet was going on some PR blitz, a marketing blitz, about how they now have a zero tolerance policy towards people who don't wear masks.
I mean they say it about three different ways, but it's really summed up by their graphic and their slogan, zero tolerance.
Pretty clear what that means, right?
Zero.
And if you break it, you'll be banned for a year, they say.
Now I read that and I was confused.
Most customer service oriented companies don't emphasize things that are uncomfortable or a hassle or bureaucratic or irritating.
You don't really emphasize that if you're in the tourism and hospitality industry.
I know it's old-fashioned, but there once was a time when people actually said things like, the customer's always right.
Imagine saying the customer's always wrong.
It's like the joke, we're not happy until you're not happy.
That's a joke, but the joke is becoming real.
Why would you boast about how strict you are with your customers?
How you're going to punish people, ban them from your company for a year.
What's the thinking there?
I've just never heard of that before from anyone other than, say, I don't know, a government bureaucracy in the worst bureaucracies, monopolies, like the worst government hospitals with the longest lineups.
Have you ever been in a four-hour or an eight-hour emergency room visit?
I have.
You sometimes see signs like that on the wall, basically accusing you of being rude and threatening you in advance, saying rude treatment of employees will result in you being kicked out, stuff like that.
I've seen a lot of signs like that in government hospital waiting rooms and other government bureaucracies, like, for example, the Motor Vehicles Department, which we don't have in Alberta anymore, but the rest of the country still does.
Like this one.
This is from a British government hospital.
You see these in a lot of government places.
Now, I'm not for being rude or violent towards staff, but you normally don't see signs like that in a successful private business.
It's weird that they assume naturally you're going to be unhappy with them, and they don't really care if they come across as threatening to you.
Where else are you going to go?
To the private friendly hospital?
Not in Canada, you're not.
So sit back down and shut up.
I can't be the only Canadian who literally gushes when I have to go to a customer-friendly service of any U.S. hospital.
It's just such a shocking change from our own government system.
My point is, you've got an airline acting like a mean government bureaucracy now.
Like a police force, almost, threatening their own passengers.
If you dare not to wear a mask, even for a moment, they're in zero tolerance.
You'll be banned for a year.
And you say your marketing department came up with this one?
I think they're secretly working for your rivals there in Canada.
Anyways, I read that and I tweeted my reply that I happen to know that's illegal.
That's just plain wrong in law.
And that if any disabled person who's exempt from the mask bylaw is bullied or banned by WestJet with their new zero tolerance BS, I would sue WestJet for them.
Get them a lawyer.
Because I've actually read every mask bylaw in Canada and I encourage you to do so too at our website, maskexemption.ca.
Every single mask bylaw in Canada, every one of them, has some exemptions.
Now, some bylaws have more exemptions than others.
Every one of them, for example, has an exemption for little kids.
All of them cover kids under two years old.
There's no place in Canada where a kid under two has to wear a mask.
Some places it's kids under five are exempt.
All bylaws have exemptions for people who can't touch their face.
So if you're a quadriplegic, you don't have to wear a mask, for example.
Or people with breathing problems or other medical problems, for example.
Some bylaws have, seriously, 10 exemptions.
I've read them.
You can read them at maskexemption.ca.
You can read the airplane bylaw right there.
So I knew this was just plain old false because I read the airplane bylaw, which makes it weirder.
Why are you threatening to go so brutally on your customers, to ban them for a year, when in fact many of them are exempt from the mask?
Like, why are you doing this?
And I know this from reading the law.
You must take your mask down when boarding the flight to prove that you are who your ID says you are.
And then you can take your mask off when you're on the plane, when you're having a snack or a drink, which is served on the flight.
Now, I know that red eye flight overnight from Calgary to Edmonton on WestJet.
I've taken it myself.
People are awake for the first little bit of the flight.
Then they dim the lights in the cabin and people generally try to sleep.
It's a red eye.
It's that night flight.
I can assure you that many people's masks would slip off their noses a little bit, either accidentally or maybe they just pull it off a bit unconsciously, even in their sleep.
And it's dark on the plane.
You'd have to be very weird to be a flight attendant walking through the plane with a flashlight, waking anyone up who didn't have a mask perfectly on mid-sleep.
Unless they were having pretzels and a drink, in which case, hey, no problem, take your whole mask off.
It's just such a weird rule.
Anyways, I said this a week ago when I saw those tweets from WestJet.
I just didn't get it.
Well, now would you look at this?
A family with some small kids was ordered on that flight, that night flight, that WestJet flight, ordered to put their masks on, but the youngest kid was 19 months old.
And as I mentioned, all kids under two are exempt.
But you saw that butch new WestJet.
They're on the warpath against their own people.
So they went harder and harder on this family, who, according to witnesses, stayed calm throughout.
Apparently the little girl, 19 months old, when she was forced to have her mask on, illegally, I might add, you're breaking the law by forcing an exempt person to wear a mask.
She threw up.
That's no good.
Police were called.
Why?
Imagine making that 911 call.
We've got a 19-month-old baby.
Come arrest her.
The cops didn't arrest her, but they still came.
Maybe they knew the law better than the WestJet weirdos by not arresting anyone.
But by this point in time, you can imagine, I don't know, was it 1, 2, 3 a.m. or whatever?
And a lot of people on the plane were just getting frustrated and furious with the whole situation, with the airline.
And frankly, with the cops for making such a production out of this.
Here, take a look at this video.
It's a little bit hard to hear.
This was taken by a passenger on the flight.
But you can tell this is going over very poorly with everyone.
Bullshit!
You're doing it!
Bullshit!
We have all seen it!
This isn't going to get finished.
You goofy fucking cups.
Excuse me!
What is your motorcycle?
This is not my job.
have seen it.
No, no, you're talking.
Everyone has seen it.
Where were you riding a bicycle at this fucking time?
We don't be ignorant.
We don't be ignorant.
We all have seen it.
We all have seen it.
So that zero tolerance thing wasn't working out too well for anyone on the plane.
Not for the little girl who threw up.
Not for the cops who killed just a little bit more of the public support for them.
Not for the airline, which looks as stupid as it looks punitive.
And not for the other passengers who were furious at this whole fiasco, the whole delay.
But no charges were laid.
In a way, that's a loss of face for WestJet, right?
I mean, you call the cops onto a plane.
I see that.
I expect it's going to end with handcuffs and then arrests, but I guess not.
So WestJet flight attendants just lost face.
They made this whole fuss, and the cops didn't arrest anyone.
But they have to show those unruly passengers who's the boss.
I mean, it's all about being boastful and prideful and zero tolerance and kicking people off for a year, right?
Their new policy, the beatings will continue until the morale improves.
So I can't even believe this part.
The flight crew just canceled the whole flight.
They couldn't kick out the individuals they were mad at or the individuals who were mad at them.
They couldn't kick out the people who were saying, get the plane going, sit down.
So they just canceled the whole thing.
Zero tolerance.
Their bosses must be so proud.
What on earth?
Even if you're a pro-mask person, and help me understand how that works, you're on a plane for four hours when people can have their mask down for an hour snacking and drinking.
But let's say you believe in the magic power of masks, even when you can have one down for an hour on a plane.
How do you excuse the entire flight being canceled by petty flight attendants and staff?
You can't.
I'm sorry, you can't trust them not to do it again either.
I mean, they told you they intend to go zero tolerance here.
In multiple interviews since this incident in Calgary, they're not only not apologizing to the family, including the girl they made throw up, they're not apologizing to the other canceled customers.
They're trying to argue the case for it.
They're litigating this.
They're saying, well, fine, the 19-month-year-old kid was exempt, but there was a three-year-old, and the family says the three-year-old had her mask on.
But even if that's not true, that's your big counter argument, WestJet.
That's your big marketing pivot.
A three-year-old kid didn't have her mask on, so we threw a tantrum, called the cops, canceled the whole flight.
I mean, I've heard of air rage before, but never coming from the airline itself.
What a disgrace.
What is wrong with WestJet?
They used to be the good guys, the underdog, with a specialty in customer service way back when.
I guess it was revealed pretty soon after that that was just a big sham.
They were only pretending to be the good guys.
In fact, they were illegally engaging in corporate espionage against Air Canada.
They were caught.
Senior executives were fired.
They paid a massive penalty to Air Canada and gave an apology for their criminal misconduct.
That's when we knew that WestJet's whole wokeness is just a lie meant for public consumption.
Recently, WestJet's weird CEO thought he'd go woke denouncing Wexit.
That's the Western Canadian political movement.
Got nothing to do with airline.
Hey, thanks, WestJet.
Your job is to fly airplanes, not to engage in partisan politics.
Please shut up, you woke weirdos.
How does that help the company?
Help shareholder value?
Help your customers.
You've got a CEO choosing political parties.
It didn't help the airline.
But here we go again.
What kind of weirdness is going on in their corporate headquarters where they think bullying their own passengers, including a three-year-old kid or a 19-month-year-old?
Disney's Choice: Hollywood vs. China00:12:23
How is that a winner?
And then the group punishment, canceling the entire flight in a fit of peak?
WestJet?
No, try WokeJet.
Stay with us for more.
Well, for anyone who has little kids, especially little girls, the debut of the live-action version of Disney's Mulan is a big deal.
Lots of adults like Disney movies too.
They're so well done.
But there's a problem with Mulan, which is the story of a Chinese warrior princess.
The problem is not with the story itself or how it's told, but where it was filmed and specifically the credits at the end of the movie.
Most shocking.
As you can see here, the Disney film was filmed in the Xinjiang region of China, which is the Uyghur Muslim region.
And it gives special thanks to a variety of Chinese propaganda outlets, including the Public Security Bureau in the city of Turpan, or Tulufan, as it's called in China.
Well, that's where concentration camps for those same Chinese Uyghur Muslims are located.
Why would Disney film there to begin with?
And why would it so submissively give praise and thanks to so many Chinese propaganda outlets and to the secret police there?
Joining us now to talk about this is our friend Gordon Cheng, a senior commentator on the subject.
And I must recommend that you follow Gordon every day on Twitter, which I do.
He's at Gordon G. Chang on Twitter, and he joins us now via Skype Gordon.
The movie itself is not the story.
Disney does a good job.
It's the striking and startling bending of the knee to the secret police of China.
That's bizarre.
Yeah, this is horrific.
Because as you point out, these are the same people who run concentration camps.
And as a part of China's minority policies toward the Uyghurs and the Kazakhs, it's not just detaining 1.3 million or perhaps as many as 3 million.
It's also genocidal policies, institutional slavery, officialized rape.
This is horrific.
And for Disney to film in that area was wrong in itself, and certainly to thank them publicly just shows complicity with crimes against humanity.
I read an interesting story about this in the Washington Post by Isaac Stonefish.
And he reminds us that Disney got offside with China more than 20 years ago when it produced a film that was sympathetic to the Dalai Lama.
And that Disney for years tried to apologize, personally apologize to the senior leadership of the Communist Party to win its way back into the heart of the Communist Party, just like the NBA has, just like so many corporations have.
And he posits that this is Disney's way of saying sorry and thank you and we'll bend the knee to you and will never be disobedient again.
It suggests that this flourish of praising the secret police is a purposeful bond with the Chinese Communist Party.
I find that convincing.
What do you think?
Well, that's certainly a convincing explanation.
Now, we don't know Disney's motivation.
Only people in the inside of the organization do.
But we can see what Disney does.
And what Disney does is just wrong.
It's offensive to all of the ideals that Americans hold.
Now, when you have companies that do business in China, this is going to happen.
And it really is up to the White House to establish policies that change the incentives for American companies.
Because as long as they can do business in Xinjiang or what the Uyghurs call East Circuit, this type of stuff is going to happen.
I've seen Secretary Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State, get tougher and tougher with China, including the most recent thing I saw was criticism and denunciation.
And I'm not sure if there's actually trade barriers to importing goods made by these slave labor camps.
I need to brief myself more on that.
But it would be a shot across the bow of all of Hollywood if the Secretary of State or some trade or commerce secretary were to say, if you film a film in Xinjiang that is not an investigative journalistic piece, that will be treated as if you use slave labor to make masks.
I'm just brainstorming here.
The thing is, Disney is almost taunting the United States and saying, we've chosen sides here.
Not only are we doing business with China, we will do business with the Chinese security apparatus in Xinjiang.
And this movie, which we hope to make a billion dollars, is a product of that.
Imagine if this movie were deemed insightful.
I don't believe in censorship and I don't want a totalitarian control of the American economy and certainly not the expressive industries like Hollywood.
But this is a pretty dramatic flick of the nose to Americans and to Secretary Pompeo by the Disney Company.
They're basically saying we're going to do business with the worst people in the worst place, try and stop us.
Yeah, a couple things going on here.
So for instance, even before the Trump administration, the United States had laws against the importation into the U.S. of goods made with forced labor.
And what the Trump administration has done is it's actually started to enforce those laws because previous administrations often did not.
Also, the Trump administration has been sanctioning a number of entities in Xinjiang.
And I think that a few more sanctions are going to be imposed in the not too distant future on products coming out of Xinjiang.
So we're moving in the right direction.
We obviously need to move faster, but this is, as you point out, controversial because we're talking about the products of intellectual property, which always raise First Amendment and other concerns.
You know, it's tough because I know my kids are going to want to watch it.
They don't understand what a Uyghur is.
They don't understand these issues.
They just want to see the newest Disney movie.
And I'm sure it's the same with the NBA.
People just want to see basketball.
And all these popular American cultural industries are lending their reputations to China in a way that we never saw with the Soviet Union.
And in a way that we don't see with other rogue regimes like North Korea or Iran.
It's just China because it's so economically dominant.
Every Western capitalist rushes to make a deal.
How do we decouple from that?
How do we put some distance between us so they're not actually turning our kids and our sports fans and our moviegoers into passive allies of the Communist Party?
That's a great question.
And I think you start with a number of measures that are already on the books.
So for instance, we know that Nike has a three-decade relationship with a South Korean supplier who has a factory in Qingdao in the northeastern part of China, where Uyghurs work under forced labor conditions, essentially slaves.
And these are religious and ethnic and racial minorities.
So what we need to do is prevent the importation of goods by Nike into the U.S. That's going to start to hurt.
You know, in terms of the NBA itself, the comments that it made last year were craven.
And this is a more difficult issue.
But the way to stop that would be for the President of the United States to use his powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to prohibit the NBA from certain activities in China.
Now, this is going to hurt the NBA, but given what's at stake, and you well laid that out, I think that these are steps that we need to take.
Because obviously we're talking about American values here, and we do not need to raise any more children to believe in totalitarianism, slavery, genocide, and all the rest of it.
And that's exactly what's happening right now.
Yeah, especially in this current cultural moment where we're talking about the slavery and racism of the past in America, this great national trauma, to turn a blind eye to it in communist China is quite something.
What do you think of this idea?
And I know you're so busy, you've got to run to do more interviews.
We're always grateful when you stop by our place.
One way that a president could push back in a way that doesn't harm the First Amendment and that isn't really meddlesome is to use the bully pulpit.
I've seen Trump do that with other cultural industries that get too woke, whether it's NFL or NBA or, I mean, he's not shy to speak out and criticize.
And maybe if the president, I mean, the trouble with that is America is so polarized, whatever Trump criticizes, some people reflexively defend just to be opposite of Trump.
But maybe what we need here is not bans or tariffs or, I don't know, some sort of sanctions, but to change the way we talk about made in China, to denormalize it in general.
And it's so ubiquitous, it's tough, but to start to get people to say, oh, made in China, that's not a free place, is it?
Why is it?
And what are the risks?
To use the bully pulpit to change the reputation of stuff made in a dictatorship.
Maybe that's too loosey-goosey and too vague, but what do you think of that?
Well, certainly.
And President Trump and certainly Secretary of State Tomteo have talked about China's human rights violations.
Secretary Pompeo dwelt on this in his July 23 speech at the Nixon Presidential Library, which is a landmark address.
So clearly the administration is along that path.
But the administration can also use its emergency powers to decouple the Chinese and the American and the American economies.
And President Trump has been talking about that most recently in his Labor Day press conference, which I think was incredibly important in some of the things that he said about China.
So we're on this road, Ezra.
We're not going to get there as fast as I would like.
But we have seen President Trump, unlike his predecessors, tackle this issue head on.
And we are making progress.
Last question, just 10 seconds before we go.
Are there any Democrats you can name who are strong on this issue?
It would be so much more helpful if this was a bipartisan issue.
Can you name a Democrat that's strong on this stuff?
Well, before this campaign, which is just warping many people's views, I would say Chuck Schumer, the senator from New York, the minority leader in the Senate, and as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, they've had some very important things they've said about China.
They haven't said them recently because of the campaign, however.
Wow, always an education.
You've given me some homework.
I'm going to go watch that speech at the Nixon Center and I'll rewatch Trump's Labor Day press conference.
Why Stop Using Karen?00:02:36
Great to see you again.
Thanks so much for your time today.
Thank you, Ezra.
Well, it's our great pleasure.
And once again, I want to advise my viewers to help yourself get smart on issues of China by following Gordon Cheng at Gordon G. Chang on Twitter.
Stay with us.
Moran.
Hey, welcome back to my show with Avi Yamini and his arrest.
Paul writes, great report from the newest rebel.
The cops need to be sued.
They need to be publicly shamed.
They aren't cops.
They're government goons.
It needs to be stopped before it spreads.
I tell you, that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie, that weird sort of body armor.
They looked sort of like exoskeletons or something.
I didn't see that when the Black Lives Matter mass protests were in Australia, but boy, they'll come out for a few peaceful folks protesting the lockdown.
But remember, Avi wasn't there to protest the lockdown.
He was here to point a camera at it and say what he saw, a journalist.
They went after him because he was telling the other side of the story.
There must be justice there.
On using Karen, that word, that name Karen, as an insult, a supporter named Karen writes, hey, Ezra, I so respect you.
You are awesome, amazing, and deserve great respect.
Can I ask a huge favor?
Can you please try to stop your news, to stop using Karen?
You have no idea what it does to a woman named Karen.
I thank you for your time and integrity to the truth.
What can I say?
The word has roots.
The word is in common usage.
I'm afraid that horse has left the barn.
I'm afraid that word is out there.
You know, there are other words that have meanings like that.
I'm not going to say some of the names that have become, you know, bywords for things.
And I am very sorry that the name Karen, I mean, it's not just me.
I don't think rebel reporters are using that name more than most.
I think it's really become common parlance.
My best hope, Karen, is that this whole phase of scolding tattletales wraps up in a few months and you can go back to being Karen without the baggage that's thrust upon you.
If you're watching this show, odds are you're not a stereotypical Karen that has besmirched your fine name.