Ezra Levant marks Rebel News’s sixth anniversary, slamming MPs—Liberal, NDP, and even Conservatives like Bob Zimmer—for pushing online censorship while enjoying parliamentary privilege, shielding them from legal consequences for calling Trudeau a "traitor" or the Tory leader a "fascist." A UBC study found just 1% of 2019 election tweets were threatening, yet CBC linked four Quebec arrests to social media, fueling claims of overreach. Trudeau’s Race Relations Committee and Stephen Gilbo’s proposed monitoring agency signal coordinated attacks on free speech, Levant argues, while David Manzi praises Rebel News’s transparency and crowdfunded legal battles—like Sarah Miller’s work—as vital checks against government bias, especially toward Israel or unfair prosecutions. The episode underscores how elites weaponize outrage to silence dissent while evading accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
So at the end of the show, we have a highlight reel of some of the great moments this past year.
I really wish you could see it with your eyes, because we are a video medium primarily.
So let me invite you to become a video subscriber.
We call that Rebel News Plus.
Just go to RebelNews.com and click subscribe.
It's $8 a month, and you get all the podcasts in video form.
Plus access to Sheila Gunnread and David Manzi's show and Andrew Chapados.
And $8 a month goes to keep us strong.
We don't take a dime from Trudeau.
So let me encourage you to do that.
I also talk about a censorship project that the Liberals are driving, but that the NDP and conservative opposition seem to love just as much.
That's in today's podcast.
Tonight, MPs of all parties agree the little people need to be more polite to politicians.
It's February 15th, 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.
But why?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
You know, once upon a time, I used to want to be an MP.
I don't know if you know this, but way back in 2001, I think it was, I actually ran for Parliament, very briefly, for the Canadian Alliance Party in Calgary Southwest after Preston Manning resigned there.
I think I would have won.
I mean, it was Calgary, after all.
And the Canadian Alliance was the successor party to the Reform Party and the precursor to today's Conservative Party.
I won the nomination in Calgary Southwest.
And we were campaigning.
Lawn signs were going up.
The election was just weeks away.
And Stephen Harper became the new leader of the party.
And he wasn't an MP, so he needed a quick and safe entry into Parliament.
And I was running in a special by-election.
So he pushed me aside and he ran in that seat.
I was quite perturbed at the time.
But I sometimes wonder if it was good or bad.
I mean, being a conservative MP from Calgary Southwest is a great job.
It's a safe job.
I love that community.
Four generations of my family are from there.
I know that part of the world very well.
I think I would have represented the community well, I happen to believe.
But would I have survived the discipline of political party life?
Reading out only official party statements, deferring to other MPs who are the official critics on many subjects, deferring to the leader on all subjects, voting as the party tells me to vote, not causing too much trouble, playing nicely with the Ottawa media.
I'm honestly not sure if I would have been able to do that.
I don't know.
I think you can never discount the malice or ignorance of politicians if Pierre Polyev can be sacked and abused by the party leader for doing nothing wrong than anyone can be.
So as much as it was my youthful ambition to be an MP, if I'm really honest with who I am and what I like to do, I don't think I would take that path if I have a time machine to go back there and then do it again.
I think of the things I've been able to accomplish in other fields, including at Sun News, including writing books, including rebel news, our work overseas, whether it's in the UK or Australia or even Hong Kong and Iraq.
And now with our civil liberties projects during the lockdown, things I really don't think I would have been able to do, would have been allowed to do as an MP.
I think an MP's job is to clap for the party leader and nod along.
And unless you are the leader or a senior critic, I think it's like being a dog in a dog sled team.
Unless you're at the front, you really don't get a change in scenery.
I mean, think about this.
Not a single conservative member of parliament or senator has spoken out against the civil liberties outrages of lockdowns.
Are all 100 plus of them fine with it?
Or more likely, have they been told by Aaron O'Toole to shut up?
And they all obey.
Do you really think I could survive in there if I were one of them?
I don't know, maybe.
Maybe I would have trained myself to be obedient.
Could be.
And so my point is: whereas I once was interested in being an MP, I was running.
I now write that off as a youthful fancy.
And as I grow older, my regard for MPs falls with every new year.
I'm sure they're nice people, but look at them.
But their regard for themselves continues to grow every year.
I remind you that as the pandemic spread and the lockdown spread, on April Fool's Day of last year, the MPs and senators all gave themselves a hearty pay raise, every damn one of them.
They all did.
I don't think a single one voted against it.
And in any party, I mean.
If I've got that wrong, please tell me that there's some hero out there that I've missed.
But literally, these lazy seat warmers gave themselves a pay raise, even as Parliament didn't sit for months.
I'm pretty sure they have another pay raise coming this year, too.
They keep wanting more perks, too.
Trudeau sets the tone, obviously, by demanding more and newer private jets for himself and his gold-digging wife.
Our fighter pilots are flying CF-18 jets that are older than the pilots themselves.
That's 1970s, 1980s technology.
And we just bought some old hand-me-downs, some F-18s from Australia.
They're getting rid of theirs to upgrade.
So it's like, you know, you're a little kid inheriting your older brother's clothes, but for fighter jets.
But Trudeau gets the fancy private jets.
Do you see a pattern here?
They think they're an elite class, even especially the socialists in Parliament.
There's no one more elitist than a socialist politician, because he thinks he deserves everything.
He thinks that he's morally superior, so he can pig out.
Just look at how Jack Layton was.
Sorry, St. Jack, but it's true.
He'd have his limo driver drop him off a couple of blocks away from a public event, pull the bike out of the trunk, and he'd bicycle the last block to make an impressive entrance.
That's a fact.
That's the NDP for you.
I mean, Jagmeet Singh is the biggest clothes horse dandy you'll ever meet.
One of his suits is a month of your rent.
He boasts about how rich he is.
These people think they're better than you, all of them of all parties.
And I tell you this lengthy introduction to show you their plans for you.
Your speech.
You see, MPs have protected speech.
I don't know if you know this.
I think you probably do.
It's called parliamentary privilege.
And part of that is an MP can literally say anything in Parliament and not be sued for it.
An MP can stand up and slander anyone.
He could accuse you of murder.
He could say the most shocking and defamatory lies, but parliamentary privilege is absolute.
A court is compelled to throw out any lawsuit against an MP for whatever he says.
It's worse than that.
MPs have their personal misconduct protected too.
MPs who engage in sexual misconduct with staff, sexual harassment, even sexual assault, they have their legal defense paid for by taxpayers, including any hush money paid to the victims.
And these are the folks who lecture you.
And so now let me show you what they all agree on.
This is the news.
And by the way, the conservatives seem to agree with it too.
They all seem to agree that you simply aren't respectful enough to them.
You criticize them too much.
You insult them too much, and you shouldn't show some respect.
They're honorable members.
And, you know, by criticizing, that's a problem when you do it.
Now, they can say anything they want, but they want to take that same freedom away from you.
Look at this.
MPs say hate speech is constraining public discourse.
I love that juxtaposition.
Speech is constraining speech, they say.
That's Orwellian.
But hate speech, I mean, that sounds pretty bad.
Sounds pretty hatey.
And you don't support hate, do you?
I mean, that would make you a hater, too.
You're not a hater, are you?
You're not one of those Nazis, are you?
So stop with the hate speech, okay?
But if you read further, they don't mean anything like uttering a death threat or even the criminal code provisions against hate speech.
They want to ban mean tweets or mean Facebook pages when you talk about politicians.
I'm serious.
Online hate is discouraging Canadians from participating in the democratic process, say MPs.
There's no proof of it offered in the article I read.
The members were speaking during a virtual talk online on online hate hosted by Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, an advocacy group that monitors developments in TV and radio, and the Samara Center, which advocates for citizen engagement.
Users who post hateful and abusive comments disrupt public conversations, causing public discourse to break down, said New Democrat MP Charlie Angus, vice chair of the House of Commons Privacy and Ethics Committee.
We need to have that sense of a public conversation between people with different political views, thereby adding to who we are as Canadians, he said.
For example, Angus said he regularly sees remarks that the prime minister is a traitor who should be hanged, and that the leader of the Conservative Party is a fascist.
Comments he never used to see.
Are you kidding?
The left calls conservatives fascists every hour of every day.
They call us Nazis every hour of every day.
It was the chief epithet towards Donald Trump.
Canadian leftists said the same thing.
They celebrate that.
During the Stephen Harper days, he was called a Nazi.
The CBC celebrated any wacko with F. Harper signs on their cars.
The CBC's own Mary Walsh even did this video calling him Hare Harper and Stasi Steve.
So, help save poor Stasi Steve this season.
God knows Hare Harper doesn't have enough sense to save himself, so let's bring him a load of sense.
Yeah, we are called Nazis every day.
Right up to Trudeau's own office.
Here's Gerald Butz implying that me, a Jew, that I'm a Nazi.
We're Nazis over here at Rebel News.
Charlie Angus, of all people, seriously?
Just last month, he was implying that the Jewish state of Israel was as immoral as the racist South African apartheid regime.
And this is the guy who's telling you and me to stop insulting politicians.
He wants to raise the dialogue.
I love this line.
If left unchecked, such comments could lead to physical attacks, he said.
Really?
Has that ever happened in Canada?
I can't think of an instance.
Let me know if I'm wrong.
Of course, there was the storming of parliament by an ISIS terrorist, but that wasn't a Twitter meanness.
I'm trying to think of someone who's been assassinated.
There was Thomas Darcy McGee.
That's about 150 years ago.
I can't think of a reporter who's been attacked either in Canada.
Oh, except our reporters.
All at the hands of the left.
Like Deion Bewes, the NDP volunteer who punched Sheila Gunread.
Or when that manager of the Trudeau refugee hotel, Radisson, Toronto East, punched David Menzies.
Or frankly, when the lockdown cops get going.
I don't see violence in Canada from grassroots citizens against politicians, so I just don't see it.
I do see some from lefties against us, especially anti-fun Black Lives Matter types who are never accosted by police and who are celebrated by the media.
But why not?
Why are the politicians focusing on mean tweets instead of on actual street criminals like anti-fun and BLM riders?
So this story I've been reading to you rehashed a university study that claims to have studied 1 million tweets.
Do you believe that, though?
I'm pretty sure they didn't read a million tweets, aren't you?
I mean, that would take a very long time.
Let me read from the story.
Chris Tanov commented on the report.
He co-authored with Heidi Tworek titled Troll on the Campaign Trail, an analysis of more than one million tweets directed at candidates in the 2019 federal election campaign.
Tanov is a postdoctoral fellow in the departments of political science and history at the University of British Columbia.
Of the tweets they examined, which include ones later removed for violating Twitter's hate speech policies, 1% were highly negative, threatening or hateful.
15% were of medium negativity, explicit insults.
25% were of low negativity, dismissive or disrespectful.
7% were positive, and 12% were unclear.
So if you believe that they actually did review a million tweets, they say 1% were threatening or hateful.
But those are two very different things, aren't they?
I mean, if you say you hate a politician, that's not a threat.
That's your opinion.
That's actually, you just say what your emotions are.
So how many tweets were actually threatening?
Well, I actually dug up the study that these postdoctoral scholars wrote.
I read the whole thing, if you can believe it.
They didn't actually count the threats made online, at least not that I could see.
They say they talked to politicians in interviews to ask them if they ever were threatened online or in person or on the phone.
I read the report.
They never actually quantify the threat of violence.
Conservatives And Censorship00:03:19
The closest they came to is linking to this CBC news story about threats in Quebec.
So I read it, and they say that four people in Quebec have been arrested for making threats in the past year.
It's not a lot, I don't think.
But a careful read of the story suggests that only a single one of them, the threat was made online.
The others in the CBC story, they're people who made threats and then CBC went to their Facebook page to find something to smear them with.
So the CBC went on their Facebook page to see who they liked.
It's sort of a guilt by association thing to prove that the problem is Facebook itself.
But in only one of these instances was the threat made on social media.
I think I'm probably the only one of 10 people in the entire country who's read this eye-glazing report.
There is no documentation about threats in there.
There's not.
They literally link to a junk news report from the CBC State Broadcaster, the one I just showed you.
That's junk science, but why?
Why this study?
Why?
Are you still missing it?
They want to censor you.
All the politicians want to censor you.
Trudeau's hand-picked Race Relations Committee hand-picked Trudeau's favorite liberal pollster to do a junk poll showing that Canadians want to censor the internet.
That's backed up with a government-funded policy study commissioned by the government showing the government that the government should censor people.
And then Stephen Gilbo, the heritage minister, he announced a new agency to censor social media.
That happened all in the same week.
Do you think that's a coincidence?
And the Conservative Party of Canada, and I say that, I should have air quotes whenever I say that, they have no problem with any of this.
The only word from the Conservatives in the story I just read to you is this.
Foreign actors and their influence on Canadian politics should also be monitored, said Conservative MP Bob Zimmer, a former chair of the Ethics Committee.
That's all you got?
So you're not opposed to it.
In fact, you want to expand it to foreign actors, like, what, Russia or something?
In fairness, maybe Bob Zimmer passionately disagreed with censorship, and the reporter just left that part out.
I mean, it could be, but I doubt it.
Says he wants wider censorship, sounds like.
That's what the party said in the 2019 election in the run-up to the 2019 election.
The party actually said in parliamentary hearings they wanted more censorship faster.
I saw the committee meetings myself.
I did stories on it at the time.
You remember I did my show on it.
And when Stephen Gilbo appeared at the Heritage Committee just a few weeks ago, he was bringing in more censorship.
The conservative critic literally did not ask him a single question about it, did not object to it.
He just didn't.
So yeah, it's unanimous, sounds like.
Just like they all took the raise together.
You think Trudeau and Gilbo are bad?
And Charlie Angus?
Well, you're right.
But if you for a moment think this isn't unanimous amongst all the parties, including O'Toole's so-called conservatives, you're dead wrong.
You Brought This Case Into Focus00:03:46
Seriously, let me know.
If there is a single conservative MP or senator in this entire country who is against censorship, I think this is the time to stand up and be counted.
Oh, I know you'll be Aaron O'Toole.
You'll be sacked just like Derek Sloan was and Pierre Polyev was.
But at least you'll be a conservative.
And you just might help us preserve our freedoms.
Stay with us for a minute.
Hey, you know what today is?
It's February 15th.
You know what that is?
It's our sixth birthday.
Our sixth anniversary of Rebel News.
Can you believe it?
So we asked our team to put together a little highlight reel, a little montage of what we've been up to lately.
I haven't even seen it yet, so we're going to watch it together at the same time.
I'm going to say goodbye to you now, but let me leave you with this highlight reel that our editors have put together in honor of our birthday.
Good night.
Rebel Media is new news.
Listen to them.
CBC, shame on you!
We came here to meet the leader of Rebel Media.
I follow him on Facebook.
He's a great guy.
You're a real media.
Well, I love the Rebel, right?
I love you.
Oh, yes.
I'd like to thank everybody that stood behind me for this, especially Rebel News, of course.
And you, Sheila.
You're my hero now.
I really am a supporter of Rebel.
I like Rebel.
I see what they had to offer some of the issues.
I wanted to meet Israel and I don't want to use you as well.
Sometimes the prosecution, the Crown, will back down.
It's much easier to prosecute people who are not represented by lawyers or have the backing of Rebel News.
I love Rebel Media.
You show both sides of the story.
You don't just show one side.
You show the truth.
You show what Canadians need to hear.
It's not going to cost you a penny.
We are going to crowdfund this through our fightthefines.com website.
What do you think of that offer, my friend?
Oh, I am so much obliged.
That is like, that is the greatest thing.
I cannot thank you guys enough.
And like you said, you know, it's not about the money here.
It's about letting people know you can't be doing stuff like this.
This is this is not Animal Farm here.
This is not 1984.
We cannot just tear rights away from people whenever it's convenient.
And we're going to fight for some justice for you.
What do you think about that?
That's amazing.
The best news I've heard all week.
Thank you so much.
Okay, then.
I really appreciate you guys.
And thank you, David, for coming over.
And it was a pleasure having you in my home.
I appreciate it just for the simple fact that I can't afford to have a lawyer, but if I had to go to court by myself, I'd still take them on.
I thank you so much for reporting this.
Like, Rebel, you're the best.
I thank you, Sarah Miller, for covering the case, for taking the case.
That's our lawyer that was provided by the Rebel News.
Thank you so much.
You all have been helpful.
You spread the news.
You let the people know what's going on.
And, you know, that's power.
When the people know what's going on, that's a powerful thing because it puts the government at check.
It's not just someone that no one knows about.
You brought this whole case into the public eyes.
And the public should know about what's going on in their own country.