David Menzies and Mark Moreno critique unelected public health officials—like Toronto’s Dr. Teresa Tam, Dr. David Williams, and Dr. Barbara Yaffe—who shut down businesses (e.g., Adamson’s BBQ) without evidence, worsening COVID infections and economic collapse, with $100B+ in lost revenue. Moreno debunks methane claims from beef critics, linking climate policies to Al Gore’s profit-driven fake meat push and UN’s "Great Reset" agenda, including Medina’s praise for lockdowns as eco-friendly. Both warn of expanding government control, citing "you will own nothing and you'll be happy," and call for resistance against unaccountable mandates reshaping society under corporate and activist influence. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, how is it that we came to be living in a doctatorship?
I'll have the answer to that.
I'm David Menzies 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 others is because it's my bloody right to do so.
The other day I was driving down Young Street in what used to be Canada's most bustling and vibrant metropolis.
Alas, the streets of Toronto could make for a backdrop for the latest episode of The Walking Dead.
The theaters are closed, the boutiques are closed, the cinemas are closed, the restaurants are closed.
Well, the sit-down restaurants are.
You can always purchase your food curbside.
Oh, how divine.
And then you can just stand there sitting, chomping into your cheeseburger in single-degree weather, trying not to turn your jacket into a food-stained tablecloth.
Ah, such lovely ambience, no?
Oh, and if you need to answer the call of nature, folks, good luck for your safety.
You see, virtually all the bathrooms are closed because we all know that pandemic or not, it's so much more hygienic if one tinkles in a dark alley instead of a well-lit washroom.
Never forget to pack that hand sanitizer.
But the thing is, it soon dawned on me that without the cinemas and the theaters and the shops and the sit-down restaurants, really, what is a city other than just a chunk of sterile real estate occupied by so much concrete, glass and steel?
You know, years ago, there used to be a pinball arcade near Young and Dundas that had an illuminated sign that proclaimed, Young Street is Fun Street.
Not anymore.
But the thing is, how did we get here?
How did fun, and for that matter, normalcy, end up on the endangered species list?
How did a pandemic with a global death toll that resembles a really bad flu season put us in a predicament in which lives are being ruined, millions remain unemployed, and thousands of businesses have been shuttered?
And oh, by the way, so many of those businesses, they are not coming back whenever life resumes in the post-pandemic era, whenever that will be.
How Did We Get Here?00:08:33
Alas, a key catalyst for the non-medical misery this pandemic has spawned is a new kind of unelected, non-accountable politician.
It sounds like I am describing a dictator, but I call them doctators because these tyrants tend to have medical degrees and they know best.
Just ask them.
But when the smoke settles and the dust clears and COVID-19 is a long-forgotten nightmare fading away in the rearview mirror of history, one thing is certain.
We must have inquiries as to how it is that public health officers got to wield such incredible power.
Like the power to shut down and lock down and change locks on businesses and even sick the riot police on eateries and churches and gymnasiums, even though there is virtually no evidence that these places are super spreader crucibles.
And who exactly are these medical health brainiacs?
Well, there's Dr. Teresa Tam, someone who refers to pregnant women as pregnant people, someone who supports the idea of people wearing ankle bracelets on their legs, you know, so that she can keep track of you.
Yeah, Big Tam is watching you.
Meanwhile, in Ontario, do you feel comfortable that the province's two top docs, Dr. David Williams and Dr. Barbara Yaffe, have such incredible arbitrary powers to influence our lives in such an oppressive fashion?
I sure don't.
I mean, remember that hot mic moment for the ages that occurred back in December?
I don't know why I bring all these papers.
I never look at them.
When you're giving numbers, I do.
I go, oh, oh, oh, oh, did you really say that?
I just say whatever they write down for me.
I hate to be rude here, but who is they exactly?
I thought Williams and Yaffe were they.
Is they the World Health Organization?
Is they some gaggle of federal bureaucrats?
I suppose we'll never find out for sure.
But hey, doctor knows best.
But there's the thing.
Public health officers should be advisors to the various governments, not the actual decision makers in the government.
But that's what these doctors have evolved into today.
Indeed, there's a perverse symbionic relationship recurring right now.
These doctors are becoming drunk with powers they never dreamed they could ever have.
Meanwhile, the actual people in power, be it the prime minister or the premiers or the mayors, well, they're happy to pass the buck to these MDs as a way to embrace CYA, you know, cover your collective asses.
Case in point, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, back in 2018 when Premier Ford was merely Mr. Ford, he ran on an election slogan of for the people and also Ontario open for business.
No, I swear, folks, I'm sure there was some archival footage of this somewhere.
But now that Doug Ford is the man in charge, he says he is beholden to the medical health officers when it comes to making decisions like opening the restaurants and the theaters and the shops and the sporting arenas.
Geez, you can't even play golf in Ontario these days.
Think about that.
If you had to design a sport that would be tailor-made for a pandemic, it would be golf.
It's non-contact.
It's played outside upon hundreds and hundreds of acres of land.
Social distancing is incredibly easy.
So what's the problem?
But alas, Premier Cherry Cheesecake keeps saying he needs the green light from the likes of Drs. William and Yaffe.
Does he really?
Ford is the Premier.
He's Ontario's big boss man.
Why is he now akin to Linus, that kid from Peanuts, waiting in the pumpkin patch for the arrival of the great pumpkin?
But Ford said something very telling a few months back when questioned why he's so beholden to these non-elected, unaccountable directors of health.
I'm going to be very frank.
There's no politician in this country who's going to disagree with their chief medical officer.
They just aren't going to do it.
They might as well throw a rope around their neck and jump off a bridge.
They're done.
I'm telling you the facts.
It's very simple.
Eureka.
So bending the knee to the health bureaucrats, this isn't about leadership.
Rather, when Doug hides behind the skirt of Dr. Yaffe, this is all about Premier Ford saying, well, if I had my way, folks, gosh darn it, I'd reopen the economy in a heartbeat, folks, believe me.
But they won't let me, gosh darn it.
You know, Doug is terrified that if he did open up the economy, you know, if he was indeed for the people, and if he did make Ontario open for business and that action resulted in COVID cases increasing, well, Doug would be wearing the goat horns.
How much easier is it for Premier Ford to say, well, folks, you can't blame me.
I was just following orders.
The orders from our medical health directors, that is.
Pathetic.
And it's even more pathetic, given that locking down the economy clearly does not work.
Positive cases abound, yet the response to this failure by the Ford PCs is to further lock down the economy and to further extend the lockdown period.
Is that not the definition of insanity?
Meanwhile, in Toronto, I now refer to John Torrey as Deputy Mayor.
Clearly, the real mayor is Dr. Eileen Davila, Hogtown's medical officer of health.
Remember back in late November when Adam Skelly of Adamson's BBQ had the temerity to open his restaurant?
Well, faster than you could say, Cruella de Villa.
All the Queen's horses and all the Queen's men were sent in to forcibly shut down the restaurateur and deliver a clear, stern message to all other entrepreneurs that if you have the temerity to reopen your businesses, how do you like being on the six o'clock news?
How do you like being arrested and handcuffed?
How do you like being shoved into a police cruiser?
You've eaten it up!
Where's he going?
Shame on you!
Shame on you!
Shame on these police!
Shame on these police!
Look the way they've started now!
You're a hero, Adam!
Come on, you guys!
Move back!
And make no mistake, that was Dr. Davila's signature on those closure orders for Adamson's BBQ.
No common cook is going to defy Toronto's Khaleesi.
It's downright despicable.
Doctors and health bureaucrats, hey, I grant you this, they are smart, educated people, but they are not gods in charge of running the economy and for that matter, society at large.
Their role is to advise those who have been elected not to rule via medical degree and decree.
So enough is enough already.
When this Wuhan virus shakedown finally comes to a merciful end, society can never again be put in such an awful position.
If chief medical officers want to rule, then fine, run for office.
And if our current elected officials are so lacking in testicular fortitude that they must forever pass the buck to medical bureaucrats because they are too terrified of being blamed for positive case counts, well then resign and be gone.
Climate vs. Lockdowns00:12:09
More than ever, we need leaders today, not a pride full of cowardly lions being led around by their noses by those who have absolutely no mandate to be the decision makers in the first place.
Stay with us for more.
Now, we've heard for decades that sustaining cattle farming and beef production, there is such a huge environmental toll on the planet for us to enjoy meat outright.
Is there any scientific validity to that, Mark?
I mean, there's certainly a toll locally, not in terms of the methane.
There's two different issues here.
And this actually applies, David, to any kind of energy source, first of all, or any kind of source of food or energy.
And that would be if you're near any kind of production of energy, typically there's some kind of disruption to your world, whether you're near windmills listening to the sound or chopping up birds, whether you're near solar panels where they spread them all over the place and they harm endangered desert tortoises or other things of the land, or whether you're living near a coal mine or whether you're living near, I guess, nuclear, there's no issue except the fear factor for some people.
But essentially with a farm, yeah, you can have farm runoffs, a lot of local impacts, but that's not what they're basing this on.
They're basing the ending meat and they're also pushing insects, which we can get to in a minute.
But they're pushing it all on methane.
And they're trying to say that methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
And this is really deadly.
And the methane explosion from cows burping and farting and et cetera.
The problem is, and I have this in my book, Green Fraud, my new book out.
If you go into it and you talk to the scientists, you look at the peer-reviewed literature, methane is called the irrelevant greenhouse gas.
It is not going to cause any significant warming.
It already is essentially petered itself out as a warming.
So all of these are just scary predictions based on bad science.
And even the mainstream scientists will acknowledge this on the climate change side.
So this is based on not on science of fear of climate.
It's based on an imposition on trying to change our lifestyles.
And a lot of this is the animal rights movement, which just doesn't think it's right for humans to eat any animals.
You know, that's very interesting because I know even hardcore vegans don't give a second thought to eradicating insects that might eat their precious vegetables.
So it depends on where you are on the evolutionary scale when it comes to a life form to cherish and a life form to exterminate.
But I think right off the homper, Mark, when you said that Al Gore, the moment you said Al Gore, even before you got to the other part of the sentence, hoping to become the first fake meat billionaire, I mean, that name just gets my spidey senses tingling right off the bat.
We know from an inconvenient truth that made him a multi-millionaire several times over.
Several of those theories have been completely debunked.
So I would say if Al Gore is saying something, I tend to believe the exact opposite.
Absolutely.
And Gore getting involved tells you not only that a partisan political figure is involved that's going to polarize it, make it even more political, but it also tells you there must be money involved because Al Gore, as we know, was only worth about a million dollars when he left the vice presidency in 2001.
And Shazam, within 10 years, he's worth $100 million.
And then he was on a quest to, you know, be, you know, when he sold Al Jazeera, when he sold his TV network to Al Jazeera, the oil-soaked country that bought it, he was on his quest to being the first global warming, the climate billionaire.
So he's got his quest is to be a billionaire no matter how he gets there.
If he has to use CO2 scare or if he has to use fake meat, his name always pops up.
Whether it's on the climate scare, he had a PowerPoint with all these different companies and who to invest into.
And guess what?
Obama's elected in 2008.
And all those companies that Al Gore had been touting on his PowerPoint for years suddenly became the recipient of all this federal largesse.
Ever heard of lobbyists in Washington?
Is how it works.
Same with the fake meat, what he's doing here.
But the sinister part of this fake meat thing is what they're going to do is drive up the cost of meat, make it very expensive.
The UN climate chief has said she wants meat eaters to be treated like smokers used to be in restaurants, have their own sections set off.
And they also are openly talking now about not just veganism, but the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Hollywood actresses, and climate activists are pushing eating bugs.
And even the Washington Post had a whole thing about eating cicadas, which are going to be coming here on the East Coast in America, you know, the 17, I guess every 17 years.
All these different recipes.
They are pushing bug eating to save the planet, insects.
Well, on the plus side, Mark, to be fair, I heard insects have a lot of protein.
Well, they actually do, yes.
You know, I eat a lot of shellfish, so I look at a crab, a lobster, you start thinking, these look like spiders.
So I guess there's some relation.
But again, people can eat insects.
I'm sure they're harmless.
But it's a question of, they always say, like, you have a choice.
You don't have a choice.
You know, just look at the lockdowns.
Mask made.
Do you have a choice not to wear a mask on an airplane?
No.
So whatever they desire is not about giving you choices.
That's what you need to understand about the whole climate great reset agenda.
It's about forcing you to do what they think is best for the planet.
And that's what's so scary.
I have no problem with people want to eat insects.
What makes me nervous is when they want to ban meat and start mandating insect eating and shoving it down your throat the way they shove lockdowns at us.
And you know, Mark, I think you're on to a really important point here.
The progressive left for decades has been saying when it comes to the abortion debate, my body, my choice.
And what could be more personal than food that you ingest?
And suddenly, whether it's that or vaccines or wearing the masks, et cetera, the idea of my body, my choice, that is out the window.
That does not compute.
Why is hypocrisy here?
On the same line, David, think about this.
They used to have the progressive left rail on big corporations, breaking them up, stopping this.
And now they're silent.
You know why?
Because they've taken over corporate America.
Corporate America serves at the behest of woke activists, anything they want.
So therefore, they're no longer critical because they're in charge of it.
So this really wasn't about their world.
This was about progressives empowering themselves.
Once they have the power, they're as power mad hungry as anyone they've ever accused of.
And that's what we're facing right now.
Whether it's on COVID lockdowns, vaccines, mandates, climate, you know, they're going after the internal combustion engine.
They want to ban automobiles.
We had Democratic candidates running for president who wanted to get rid of private car ownership and instead only allow roving fleets of electric rental cars.
This is where we're headed.
Absolutely amazing.
And I know one other thing you wanted to talk about, Mark, quickly, and that is Monica Medina.
She's the nominee of President Biden for, I'm just trying to struggle with what her title will be.
Assistant Secretary for Bureau of the Oceans.
It's a bureaucratic, you know, mid-level position, but it's telling that she is one of the key activists morphing COVID and climate and basically saying the environmental upside to these endless lockdowns has been, quote, a marked improvement in our environment as a result of the massive shutdown.
So we have Biden administration officials who are openly praising lockdowns as a great environmental policy.
That's scary.
And Mark, it is, it's terrifying because the last time we spoke, I believe the subject matter, I think it was, might have been extinction rebellion, those people clamoring for a complete COVID-style lockdown every two years because the reduction in carbon emissions, it's kind of a booster shot for the planet.
Now, these are just environmental cranks.
I mean, who cares what they say?
But somebody in the administration who has this mindset that lockdowns are good, lockdowns are favorable for the environment.
Oh, yeah, your business is going under.
Oh, yeah, you're unemployed.
But think of the greenness.
I think that is downright terrifying that this person comes from that school of thought.
Well, she does, and she's got company.
I mean, first of all, the UN climate chief, Christina Figueres, the former chief, has said the same thing.
Essentially, the environment benefited.
John Kerry has said the solution to COVID and climate, their parallels are screaming at us.
And he's talked openly about the Great Reset.
So many Biden administration officials are right there.
Of course, Biden calls it build back better.
He doesn't use the phrase great reset that the World Economic Forum has done.
But it's the same thing.
And it's a simple concept.
You crush the existing order with these lockdowns.
And people say, oh, well, why would they do it?
They're going on to crushing small business.
Guess what?
That's what they want.
The more small businesses are crushed, the more all you're left with are big retail national chains and corporations, which are beholden to woke activists, vaccine passport regulations.
The small mom and pops don't exist.
You are much greatly weakened and destroyed.
And that's what they're looking for.
Then they can get everyone hooked on universal basic income.
And then, you know, we're already having a problem here in the United States where they can't find, employers can't find enough people because the COVID benefits of unemployment are so great that they take a pay cut to get an actual job.
But this is all great because in the vision of the great reset, where you collectivize everything and you nationalize everything, the government is going to be your source of income anyway.
Remember, you will own nothing and you'll be happy.
That's the motto of the Great Reset.
And COVID lockdowns have accelerated that.
And also, of course, they're going to be morphing it with climate lockdowns.
Absolutely incredible.
And we've discussed this before.
Really, Mark, the green movement is really the red movement with a different color, isn't it?
It truly is.
And they are emboldened like they've never been.
And the forces of freedom, if we can call them that, the resistance, as they said in France.
Uh-oh, did I just make a Nazi analogy?
Sorry, but resistance.
But the resistance is, and we're very, you know, it's a very weakened state.
We lack leadership, but all we have really is our mass resistance.
And that's what I urge everyone to do across the world.
Resist these lockdowns.
Oh, 100%.
And Mark, we got to wrap it here.
But before we go, I see there's a poster of your wonderful book, Green Fraud, subtitled Why the Green New Deal is Even Worse Than You Think.
In 20 seconds, for those in our audience who haven't bought your book already, what is this book all about?
This book lays out how the Green New Deal is not about climate or environment.
It is about controlling you, and it is about taking over society using a climate scare.
I devote two chapters on the COVID-climate connection, getting into the Great Reset.
I also talk about children indoctrination, how identity politics has taken over, all the wackiness.
This book is an A to Z compendium, very readable, and I tried to make it entertaining and fun.
Fantastic.
And it's a wonderful book, Mark.
And all I got to say is we are in crazy times right now.
The only question is, are we at peak crazy yet?
Stay tuned.
I'm sure there's something in the newspaper tomorrow that will outdo everything that we've discussed tonight.
That's the way we roll.
Mark, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you, David.
And that was Mark Moreno in Washington, D.C. of climate depot.com.