Canada’s spring election pits Justin Trudeau against Aaron O’Toole, whose leadership falters after distancing from Rebel News. Pandemic policies—lockdowns, fines, and civil liberties erosion—sparked backlash: 17,000 COVID deaths vs. 6,800–8,500 annual flu deaths, with enforcement hypocrisy (e.g., ladder-fall misclassified as COVID). Dr. Barry Cooper calls it "administrative tyranny," while critics like Michelle Rempel avoid dissent due to media threats. Big tech’s censorship mirrors Orwell’s 1984, stifling debate globally, yet Rebel News resists suppression. Trudeau’s likely majority risks deepening civil liberties crackdowns, exposing Canada’s growing divide between state control and public skepticism. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, I think it's pretty clear the stars are aligning.
We're going to have an election this fall in Canada.
Pretty sure about it.
There's a cabinet shuffle.
Trudeau's sharpening his blades.
The media party's getting revved up.
And I'm a little bit worried about Aaron O'Toole.
I'll tell you why I think an election is coming and how the Conservatives are doing so far.
That's ahead.
Before I do, let me invite you to become a video viewer of these podcasts.
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Go to rebelnews.com, click subscribe.
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Okay, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, a spring election is coming, and I'm afraid Justin Trudeau is going to win again.
It's January 12, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
Spring Election Looms00:04:47
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government about why publisher is because it's my bloody right to do so.
The last election was October of 2019, just 15 months ago.
But it feels like an eternity ago.
The whole world has changed.
The pandemic was unknown and unthinkable back then.
The world's economy was being led by our close friend and ally, the United States, and that's usually enough for us to benefit by being just close to them.
But then came the virus from China that scared us all and killed 17,000 Canadians.
I acknowledge that those statistics are questionable.
I see headlines that there are no flu cases this year, and I wonder if they're simply being counted as COVID cases.
The symptoms are similar.
I know that every year about six, eight thousand people die from the regular flu, so it's fair to say COVID-19 is like a bad flu season, maybe twice as bad.
And no one should be happy about that.
But it is simply not true that this meets any reasonable standard for a national emergency, a national lockdown, a national flattening of our civil liberties.
In Alberta, which is one of the few jurisdictions to publish useful information, you can see that a grand total of 33 people in all of Alberta have died from the virus who did not have serious underlying conditions.
Out of 1,307 total deaths.
Now, I'm not saying there is a moral difference.
A life is a life.
But it is useful to govern our public policy to know that this virus is not a serious risk to people under 70 who are healthy.
Statistically, it's just not.
So why are those people, young, healthy people, being locked down, curfewed, fined, and economically and socially devastated?
If the average age of people dying is 82, why are we threatening to taser a 21-year-old, extremely fit hockey player on an outdoor skating rink?
What's the science or the public policy there?
But you see, no one in authority is asking such questions, and everyone is stressed and confused at best, scared at worst.
I know there are some people who will never again emerge from their homes in a normal way, never again visit their grandchildren again, never go to the restaurant again, never travel again.
I know one grandparent who told me his own daughter refuses to meet him, not because they're not getting along.
She just is terrified, she says, of killing him.
So she just won't visit him.
She has been psychologically abused, I guess, turned into such a terrified person, and she is now abusing him in a way.
I don't know.
It's very unhealthy what's going on.
And I'm sure that's one of thousands of such cases.
So imagine what such a population en masse looks like in an election vote.
The answer is they vote from a position of terror.
Or at least many of them do.
They vote for the party that has taken the pandemic the most seriously.
And by seriously, I don't really mean scientifically.
I mean the most dramatically, the most extremely.
There is no reason for a curfew as Quebec has done.
The virus is not safe at 7.59 p.m., but deadly at 8 p.m.
That's not science.
That's theater.
It's public health theater.
I saw this insane headline in the Montreal Gazette.
Doctors saying they're going to have to start killing people if we don't have a curfew.
Imagine saying that, how unethical that is to say.
You know, we're going to have to start putting up with this public health theater much like we've all learned to put up with airline security theater airports, except for that charade takes, what, an extra 20 minutes of your life and only when you travel.
It's limited in scope and cost.
Sure, it's over time cost hundreds of billions of dollars in lost time and destruction to the travel industry, but that's chomp change compared to what lockdowns have done to all of us all the time.
A perpetual airport security line for everything, just for stepping out of your house.
Trillions of dollars in damage already.
But also countless profiteers too.
This is so absurd.
It sounds made up like satire.
Californian's Gavin Newsom, he's the governor saying, sure, lots of little people have gone bankrupt.
Lots of working class people, lots of small businesses, but the billionaires are doing even better than ever.
Paradoxical Politicians & Lockdowns00:11:06
Yeah, paradoxically, the crazier the politician is about the lockdown, the more likely they are to be re-elected, or at least the more dramatic they are, the most concerned they are, the most authoritarian they are.
So far in the past year, when provinces have gone to the polls in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, those governments have come back with increased majorities.
Trump lost his election, but barely.
And I put it to you, it's because of the pandemic in a couple of ways.
The fear-mongers made people afraid, slowed down the economy, and of course, most importantly, the pandemic allowed mail-in voting to be approved by the courts in the last moments of the campaign.
As our friend Joel Pollack says, it wasn't free.
It wasn't fair, but it was made legal.
The Democrats saw to that.
So here we come now in Canada.
Look at this.
Cabinet ministers who aren't running again have been asked to step down to clear the decks for new cabinet ministers and new candidates.
Why would you do that just 15 months after the last election?
Obviously, an election is coming, a cabinet shuffle.
No important changes.
The foreign ministers shuffle, but not disavowed.
No major changes, but just getting ready for the looming election.
This is the team that will govern if they win again, which I think they will.
And you know that because the Liberals have revved up their smear machine, they're getting ready.
Their go-to move in the campaign, I mean, it worked last time, it'll be their go-to move again now, is calling everyone they hate a Nazi.
Everyone they hate is a Nazi.
It's childish, but it works because the media party uses the same playbook, so they'll go along with it again, of course.
They'll add a new word to that, terrorist, domestic terrorist, because of what happened in Washington last week.
A summer Black Lives Matter riots.
They would never use the word domestic terrorist, but now they'll call any conservative a terrorist.
They'll simply call their enemies Nazis, terrorists.
In other words, they'll actually incite violence against their own conservative opponents.
They're all in on it.
And naturally, they're putting us here at Rebel News on that list because we are the largest independent news media company in Canada, the largest that has an audience.
We produce an awful lot of news contrary to the official narrative.
We're rebutting, we're refuting the official line all the time.
They can't have that.
And because we don't take Justin Trudeau's bailout money, he hasn't been able to buy us off or buy our silence.
So I fear they're going to try and come for us in some other way.
Like the big tech companies silenced Donald Trump by just banning him, like they silenced the new app called Parlor, just shutting it down, smashing every company that did business with it.
So of course Justin Trudeau is going to have a spring election.
Here's an aggregator of every public opinion poll in Canada in recent weeks and months.
Now this is from the CBC's website, but it really isn't the CBC's opinion.
It's just them compiling the work of other pollsters.
And you can see the polls for weeks, for months.
The polls have all said the same thing with remarkable uniformity.
The Liberals are going to win.
The only question is how big?
Pretty much a 50-50 chance of Trudeau either getting a majority or a minority.
Less than 10% chance of the Conservatives winning and only with a minority.
Now, again, this isn't really the opinion of the CBC.
It's what these polls would suggest if you aggregate them.
Things can change in an election campaign.
Events matter.
But do you really think they're going to change?
Has the new Conservative leader Aaron O'Toole put together a battle plan and a team to execute that plan?
Well, he has something called a shadow cabinet, right?
With official critics for different subjects, right?
But as we showed you with that simple quiz, his front bench has pretty much been invisible this past year.
That was the quiz.
Can you name, without Googling it, the health minister?
Can you name the environment minister?
Can you name the minister of other things that are in the news, the foreign minister, the defense minister?
Very few people can, which goes to the fact they're not getting the message out.
Here's Michelle Rempel, the health critic.
I had to Google that.
Take a listen to this.
I'm going to be totally upfront with you guys.
I spent Christmas alone in Calgary.
It's a really hard decision to make.
I didn't get to see my family at Christmas.
I miss my husband.
He's in Oklahoma.
But I knew if I went down to Oklahoma, I knew that I would have vulturous CBC reporters reporting on my whereabouts, saying that I was a bad example to the Canadian public.
And I knew I couldn't go.
So it's a personal complaint that although she has a six-figure income and she's recording that from home, she's complaining that she can't actually skedaddle off to the United States to be with her family there because she's worried she's going to be caught and embarrassed.
So she wants to go and she's letting you know she wants to go, but she's worried about being caught.
So she told us what she actually wants to do secretly.
So she doesn't want to live under the rules that the rest of us have to live in.
And certainly she doesn't want to stay here and fight.
She wants to go to the States.
Now, some might expect her to actually fight given her job title.
It's her job, which is paying her six figures plus endless perks and expense accounts.
She is the health critic for the conservative opposition.
But she just wants to go to the U.S. during the lockdown.
How about staying fight?
Look, I want to go to the U.S. too.
Millions of the rest of us want to go somewhere nice and warm where you don't have to wear a mask, where you can go to a restaurant.
But she is actually the only person in all of Canada called official opposition critic for health, which should tell you your job.
Oppose the government on matters of health, the pandemic.
But instead of fighting, she wants to run away and only because she's worried she'll be caught doesn't she go.
This is not very inspiring.
Come on, we're going to get slaughtered in this next election.
And by we, I mean the opposition to Trudeau, anyone who's worried about him, he's going to get a majority this time.
Although I'm not really sure what he would do differently with the majority as opposed to what he's doing now.
I mean, has he been stopped with any of his plans now?
He has us all in a state of emergency now.
Parliament barely functions now.
It's borrowing, what, a billion dollars a day to spend now?
Massive sweetheart contracts to liberal insiders now.
A totally lapdog media now.
Really?
What would Justin Trudeau do with a majority that he can't do with his minority now?
A few things.
The parliament, the committees looking into ethics, they would be even more toothless finding out his own corruption, his own ethics, like the We Charity and the SNC Lab Land.
He'd control the ethics committee about things like that, his secret vacations.
But really, he's never apologized.
He's never admitted doing anything wrong.
He just keeps operating.
He pays his $500 ethics fine and moves on.
It's worked for him his whole life.
Why would he stop now?
I think he'd do more in the way of civil liberty squashing if he had a majority.
His MPs more or less are calling for conservatives to be labeled terrorists and extremists and violent people now.
That's enough to scare Aaron O'Toole, apparently.
I mean, just hours after we published our email interview with O'Toole yesterday in the morning, O'Toole then told the Globe and Mail that he wouldn't have anything more to do with us.
Why?
What happened in those few hours?
Did we misquote him?
No, we didn't.
Did we do something wrong?
Of course not.
We ran the interview verbatim.
It was a good interview.
I thought he looked good in it.
He panicked, though, because the fancy people, who are also the mean people, told him that they would call him a terrorist or a Nazi or whatever if he didn't disown us, even though he just did that interview with us, which is pretty weird.
I mean, we're a media company.
We don't really need the endorsement of politicians.
It's sort of the opposite.
Normally, politicians try to get the endorsement of media, except the media is completely bought and sold in Canada already.
They're all for Trudeau.
So for O'Toole to say he's not going to give us his endorsement, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
It's sort of upside down.
Now, we will keep reporting the news as we always do.
We really do good work during elections, if I may say so myself, and we'll do an even better job this time given our expanded team.
We've got new reporters now.
We got Drea in Vancouver.
We got Andrew and Tamara in Ontario.
We're looking to hire in Montreal and Ottawa.
I'm excited about things.
And obviously, we still think that Aaron O'Toole winning is better than Justin Trudeau winning.
We just don't think that's very likely.
And after O'Toole showed how quickly and pathetically he caves into the media party, the mean girls on Twitter, well, I really don't think O'Toole needs to worry about us.
I think he needs to worry about his own party's base, which is surely demoralized.
If you cave in so quickly, you're not ready for a campaign.
I'd expect more from a military man.
I won't tell you any names, but I can assure you that today I have received a large number of messages from very senior conservatives, even in O'Toole's own staff, who say they're flabbergasted by his complete surrender to the media party.
I mean, forget about O'Toole's repeated promises to stand up to cancel culture.
Now he's in charge of cancel culture.
He's trying to cancel us.
Don't think that's going to happen though, mate, because he's worried the media party will cancel him if he doesn't cancel us.
He can't cancel us.
I promise you we will still be here fighting hard the day after the next federal election.
I'm not so sure if O'Toole will be.
Not that I don't like the guy.
I mean, he seems to be a good enough guy, but he really hasn't done anything since becoming leader.
And neither have most of his critics other than complaining about not being able to escape the lockdown.
And at the first whiff of gunpowder yesterday, they surrendered to the media party about us for no reason.
Come on.
Well, I think we know how it's going to go every day during the campaign.
I mean, really, is something going to change now?
So we're getting ready for the election, just like we did last time.
We'll be covering the campaign everywhere we can, including the leaders' debates, even if we have to go to the federal court to get an order to let us in again.
And unlike O'Toole's critics, you won't have trouble finding out where we stand on Justin Trudeau or his policies, will you?
Stay with us for more.
Conservative Authors Debate00:08:47
Well, as you know, one of our favorite things to do is to talk to conservative authors or authors with the other side of the story, people who have a dissident opinion.
Tragically, it's very rare in our media literature landscape.
But what a pleasure to have such a thoughtful book published today against the establishment opinion on COVID-19.
The title of the new book is called COVID-19, The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic.
And that's exactly what it is, isn't it?
And it's published by the Frontier Center for Public Policy, one of the good guys, that's for sure.
It's co-authored with Marco Navarro-Gini and Dr. Barry Cooper, who joins us today via Zoom.
Dr. Cooper, great to see you again.
Congratulations on this book.
And I have to say, I'm a little bit surprised that Amazon is even letting you sell it because they have censored other books that take a skeptical view of the pandemic moral panic.
Well, what we do, I mean, we footnote things up the yin-yang.
We got, I don't know how many hundred footnotes.
So it's actually not meant to be a polemical discussion of all of the misinformation and kind of goofiness around COVID-19.
It really is a scholarly analysis.
And we use, believe it or not, a certified lefty intellectual, Michel Foucault, to provide the main conceptual lens through which we look at all this stuff, namely his concept of what in French he calls it pouvoir savoir, power knowledge.
And that, we think, is the central issue in all of this nonsense that's been going on.
Well, you talk about an idea that was popularized about 50 years ago in a book written by Stanley Cohen called Folk Devils and Moral Panics.
And right away, I think you're getting into it because it's an emotional thing.
It's a faith thing.
It's a superstition thing.
Without even, I have not read that book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, but right away I'm thinking the madness of the Salem witch trials.
I'm thinking of madnesses, maybe even some anti-Semitic pogroms.
Oh, the Jews have poisoned our well.
We have to get rid of the Jews.
Or some of the superstitions that grew up around the Great Plague, the Black Death.
I think that there's a great psychological fear over things.
I mean, listen, COVID-19 is a real disease, and it has killed around 17,000 Canadians.
But I point out that the flu on any given year kills 8,500.
So it's twice as bad as an average flu year.
But this is not the apocalypse that our political class says it is, or am I wrong?
No, that's exactly right.
When the guy who's a sociologist in the UK, you're probably too young to remember the mods and the rockers.
I remember them.
I didn't realize until I started studying this stuff in graduate school that in the UK, this was almost seen as the end of the world as we know it.
A bunch of young men, mainly, going down to Brighton and fighting each other.
This was supposed to be some kind of apocalyptic event that would end civilization in the UK.
Well, that attitude can be transferred to all of the examples, the historical examples you just cited, and it is certainly important in the COVID panic.
I just have your blurb here, the book, and I want to read it because it's really in bullet point form.
And this really, I think you've grasped the way of thinking here.
Let me read just 50 words.
The process occurs in stages.
One, an event or perhaps a person is defined as a threat, perhaps only a vague threat to existing values, traditions, or interests.
Two, the event is simplified and presented in the mass and now social media in a stereotypical way.
Three, moral barricades are manned by editors, politicians, experts, and other right-thinking people and socially authorized knowers.
Four, ways of coping with the disturbance are developed and eventually five, the public profile of the disturbance, event, individual, etc., declines and is forgotten or is retained as a memory and as a diffuse or potential threat.
The folk devil, I really think that's the thinking going on.
And I think people wearing masks, it's like they're maybe in the past they would have worn a garlic around their neck to be immune from a Dracula or even a religious rosary or something.
I think the mask is a quasi-religious pagan symbol of, oh, I'm a believer.
I'm against the folk devil.
Begone, folk devil.
Begone.
Oh, you're not wearing your mask.
You must be in league with the folk devil.
Yes, exactly.
The number of people who have, I just encountered them in stores, some of whom are wearing masks, some of whom are not, have said exactly that, that their customers who come in who are not wearing masks.
They are treated by other customers as if they're somehow infected.
Those who are think of themselves as being morally superior.
They don't seem to get the symbolism.
I mean, the whole point of a mask is to shut you up.
The experimental evidence on the effect of masks is, let's say, mixed.
Nobody wants to talk about that.
So you get these authoritative doctors saying one thing and other equally certified doctors saying other things.
And so normal people just get confused and they say, well, I guess I get it.
Better do what everybody else is doing.
And that's why they do it.
One of the interesting things in the last month, Doctor, is how many of this official class, you talked about the official knowers, the high priests of this moral panic.
How many of them have, in their personal and sometimes private and even sneaky conduct, have exempted themselves from the rituals that they command us to do.
I'm talking about politicians going away on a sunny beach here in Ontario.
You had one doctor take five vacations.
Now he just gets a $1 million severance.
A police chief who's enforcing the laws, he goes to the beach.
And by the way, I'm all for going to warm and sunny beaches.
But these are the enforcers of the new austerity.
And I think this is how it always is, is that all these inquisitors, all these investigators, they don't, A, they don't believe in it.
And B, they're the biggest hypocrites of all.
What effect, if any, do you think that this almost daily discovery of lockdown cheaters, and I'm only using that word for the lockdown enforcers who cheat.
You and I are normal humans trying to live our lives.
But when an enforcer is caught locked down cheating, what do you think the impact of that is, Doctor?
I would say that the first impact is that nobody says we're all in this together anymore.
You remember that slogan, a meaningless slogan?
We haven't heard that lately because everybody in this country and in most other countries know we're not all in this together, particularly when these enforcers and other authorized, important people go off to Hawaii or to the West Indies or something like that.
We've never really been in it together.
Everyone has known from at least last March, probably from February, that the effect of this virus on human populations is much, is differentiated.
I mean, old people who are sick are the ones who get it and have serious effects.
And then there are huge problems with the statistics.
Do you die with or from COVID?
There's been so much evidence about people who die with it are diagnosed as having died from it.
And people know this.
And so they simply distrust, and I would say quite properly, distrust these self-styled authorities because they are not really authoritative.
They refuse to acknowledge what they don't know.
And the rest of us can figure that out pretty quickly.
Yeah, I mean, the absurd case of someone falling off a ladder, dying from falling off a ladder, and it was tagged as a COVID-19 death.
Skepticism And Sourness00:06:57
So how do we get out of this?
Because I think that things are getting worse, not better, in 2021.
I mean, I recall, and I point out that the mandatory masks were not brought in until August, September, when the months after the pandemic peaked in early mid-April.
So the masks all came in together in August, September.
And now the vaccine, I'm certain we're going to have vaccine passports, freedom passports, flying passport, whatever you want to call them.
I think things are about to get tougher.
And I think all these previous waves of civil liberties violations, those were just to condition us to, I mean, now they've got curfews in Quebec, and they're talking about it in Ontario.
What's the end game here?
Like, what's next?
Is this how it's going to be forever?
That's a very good question.
It would take a kind of responsibility among our politicians, for which there is absolutely no evidence at the present, for them to start behaving responsibly.
I don't think that's going to happen.
I mean, Lord Acton did not say absolute power makes you more generous.
It is a very corrupting thing in terms of our entire political system.
And it divides in terms of the lack of trust that ordinary Canadians have for their political leaders.
It's not going to end well.
I can't see how our politicians are going to actually use some common sense for a change.
They certainly haven't in the last year.
You know, I'm pretty sure we're heading into a spring election.
Justin Trudeau shuffled his cabinet.
They're making announcements that sound like they're clearing the decks for a campaign.
The media is in almost complete support of the lockdown.
There's a few skeptics out there, but I really think they're an anomaly.
Opposition parties are either silent or egging on the governments to do more.
The only government in Canada that has tried to put on the brakes a bit is Jason Kenney in Alberta, and he was undermined by his own caucus, and the media has just been pillaring him.
I can't see any organized opposition to this.
Doctors who speak out are getting complaints to the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
I see no institution that's acting as a break here.
I see a lot acting as an accelerator, but none acting as a break.
Yeah, I agree entirely.
On the other side, reality is still what it is.
And eventually, reality, as all of the climate change guys say, reality gets the last innings at bat.
I mean, we'll see.
I suspect, you know, I'm not in the business of predicting, but I suspect that there may be a sufficient number of Canadians who say this, we have a technical term in political science.
The short firm is BS.
This is so much BS that we're not going to take it anymore.
But that will lead to some very serious, I would say, political disorders.
But I can't see any other way out.
We're talking to Dr. Barry Cooper, the author of the new book, COVID-19, the politics of a pandemic moral panic.
You know, I don't wear a mask.
I sometimes wear a mask exemption button just to stop scolds from coming up to me.
I have noticed in the last two months a souring of the public mood, whereas people never used to remark or anything.
Now I see people with masks on that are either not wearing them properly or clearly hate wearing them coming up to me and scolding me.
And I think it's because they have a cognitive dissonance.
They hate the masks.
They're irritated by it.
I think their own use of the mask is in a manner that indicates they don't really believe in it.
But they're saying, if I have to do this, you have to also.
It's not that they're actually worried about the virus.
They're just saying, how come you're not complying like I am?
There's a sourness there I didn't notice until a few months ago.
I don't know.
It reminds me of how people in the Soviet Union used to live.
There was your public face, and then there's your secret, honest talk that you would have only with true friends and close family members.
You had a public facade and then a private facade.
And you always had to worry about informants and snitches, which, by the way, we're seeing again.
I wonder if all the compliant mask wearers and people cheering along, if they secretly know that this whole thing is a scam.
I don't know.
I just sense a sourness out there against people who are not believers.
What comes after the sourness and these sort of laser looks of disgust when you're not wearing your mask are jokes.
The Soviet Union was famous for its very funny and completely critical of the establishment jokes.
So when, say, Teresa Tam gets ridiculed, that's a good sign.
When the prime minister gets ridiculed because of this, that will be a good sign.
And I suspect it will be coming fairly soon.
You know what?
I take your point.
And of course, jokes, I mean, the Ayatollah says there are no jokes in Islam.
He hated jokes.
Stalin, I mean, he sent, I think Souls and Itson was sent to the Gulag for writing a joke about Stalin's mustache.
But both of those stories make the point that, yeah, jokes are a sign of rebellion.
Was it Orwell who said every joke is a little revolution?
I think it was him.
But that didn't stop Solz and Itson from being sent to the Gulag.
So we can make jokes, but as they're still cracking down on us, as they're giving us $6,000 curfew fines in Montreal, you can joke about that gallows humor, black humor, but the jackboot is still there.
If you're banned from Twitter, if you're banned from flying on an airplane, you can make all the jokes you like, but it doesn't make the situation much better, though.
That's absolutely correct.
This form of tyranny is what Hannah Arendt called administrative tyranny.
And she said something very interesting about it.
It is the worst kind of tyranny because the desperate measure of tyrannicide is not available.
It is just an administrative blob about which most of us are, we can be ironic, we can make jokes and so on, but we still have to put up with the mask police.
Administrative Tyranny00:03:54
We still have to put up with dirty looks when we go into co-op and we're not wearing a mask.
But, you know, you have to do what you have to do, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, I don't mind the dirty looks and I don't even mind the scolding.
I assure you, I give better than I get.
But it's the cops with guns and tasers.
Like it's the cops screaming at Ocean Wiseblatt on that outdoor hockey arena in Calgary and threatening to taser him.
That's what I don't know how to deal with.
And I'm worried that there will be much worse things before things get better.
In the meantime, Dr. Cooper, congratulations on your book.
We'll have a link to it underneath this video.
And I think I'd like to send this video out to our viewers across Canada because I think they'd be very interested in hearing your thoughtful points.
The book is called COVID-19, The Politics of a Pandemic, Moral Panic.
I think that's such a helpful way of looking at it.
Yes, it is a real disease that has killed twice the annual death toll of the annual flu.
It is, but the civil liberties restrictions, the diminution of parliament, the overweening powers of the police, that has nothing to do with the virus.
That has everything to do with, as Dr. Cooper says, absolute power.
Thanks for your time today.
I wish you good luck with this book.
And, you know, we'll have to have you back on to talk more about this in the future.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right, you take care.
There you have it.
Dr. Barry Cooper, co-author of the book with Marco Navarrogini.
And you can get it at the link below.
Stay with us.
Morehead.
On my show last night, Paul writes, conservative party members let the media party choose who is and isn't electable so we get controlled opposition.
Canada dies in weakness.
You know, I was watching this whole thing unfold yesterday, and it was like some Twitter chatterbox's gossips that managed to provoke O'Toole's communications director in making it a big deal.
Like, seriously, if she would have just focused on doing her real work rather than wasting time on Twitter, it would have been a nothing.
Who lets some Twitter trolls command their whole day and turn it into a two-day story?
I'm so embarrassed for them.
Nellis writes, big tech has now become the Ministry of Truth, it seems.
Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message, so therefore whoever controls the medium controls the messages on it.
You are so right.
You know, it's funny.
Twitter was starting to censor candidates in Uganda.
Apparently, there's some political thing going on, maybe it's election.
I haven't followed it.
So Twitter was trying to do their moves in Uganda.
And today the Ugandan president said, no, we're just going to shut you down on Facebook too.
And look at this tweet from Twitter.
Oh, we're out.
How dare you censor us?
Do you forget that you just censored the president of the United States last week?
And they're outraged at censorship.
You know what?
I'm on Team Uganda in this one.
Bruce writes, the interview with Calvin Robinson shows us how dangerous these militants are to leftists are to freedom.
It's true to that those who love deplatforming others might end up the same way themselves.
It reminds me of Orwell's 1984.
It's a book worth rereading.
You know what?
I should reread it.
I like to read it every five years.
Probably time to read it again.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here, the Rebel World Headquarters, and we're around the world, but Canada's the big fight, you know.