Ezra Levant exposes Harsha Walia, BC Civil Liberties Association’s executive director, for refusing to retract her "burn it all down" tweet amid church arsons, framing opposition as a distraction while pushing anti-police and targeted rhetoric against conservatives, Zionists, and churches. He demands the rescission of their $380,000 grant after Rebel News funds allegedly reached them via the BC Law Foundation. Levant also critiques Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg for aligning with China’s CCP, citing Musk’s conflicting "bless America" and pro-CCP posts, while billionaire Charlie Munger praises China’s financial system despite its crackdowns. Historically comparing China’s post-Olympics aggression to pre-WWII Japan and Nazi Germany, Levant warns of rising imperialism, urging U.S. leaders like Pompeo or Trump to counter it amid bipartisan recognition of the threat. Meanwhile, he condemns statue removals and political persecution in Canada, including Maxime Bernier’s arrest and Brian Pallister’s alleged targeting of pastors. [Automatically generated summary]
Head of BC Civil Liberties Cheers Church Burnings00:14:19
Hello my rebels, just a crazy thing.
The head of the BC Civil Liberties Association is cheering on the burning of Catholic churches.
I can't believe it.
But instead of, you know, expressing regret, she's doubling down.
I'll prove it to you.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of these podcasts.
Plus, you get video versions of David Menzie's show, Sheila Gunn Reed's show, Andrew Chapineau's show, so much stuff.
and the knowledge that you are supporting Rebel News because we don't take a dime from the government.
Just go to RebelNews.com and click subscribe eight bucks a month.
That's a bargain.
Okay, here's today's show.
Tonight, a civil liberties leader calls for the burning of more churches.
It's July 5th, and this is the Azra 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 water house just because it's my bloody right to do so.
Hey, did you see that absolutely terrible fire in Lytton, a village in the BC interior?
Seeing the flames engulf this little village and the people fleeing for their lives reminded me of what Fort McMurray looked like in 2016 when a wildfire consumed so much of that city and forced the entire evacuation of the city, almost 100,000 people.
It was a miracle.
No one died in Fort McMurray.
The news says that two people are presumed dead in Lytton and that the number could be higher.
People left so quickly, it's uncertain if people are missing or just they moved out.
Let me quote two interesting sentences from this story on Global News.
Forensic team arrives in Lytton, BC.
Investigation into deadly wildfire gears up.
So a forensic team is there.
An investigation into the cause and human cost of a devastation, devastating wildfire in Lytton, B.C. appeared ready to begin Saturday as RCMP forensic teams arrived at the village.
The human cost, they'll be looking for casualties, but also what caused it.
It was a village.
It was not a forest.
It was not a campground.
A campground might have had a campfire, a forest, well, fire there might be caused by lightning, or maybe from sparks from a train passing through.
But this is fire in a town.
Here's another line from the story.
Lytton First Nation acting chief John Hogan told Global News on Saturday that members of the community were spread as wide as the lower mainland, Squamish, Kamloops, and Kelowna.
For many, it's traumatic.
They still haven't been able to really wrap their head around that they have no home to go back to, he said.
So just to be clear, that's the chief of an Indian band.
I call Lytton a village.
It's pretty tiny, 250 people.
But around the town are different First Nations, about 800 people.
So it's a lot smaller than Fort McMurray was.
But let me read just two more sentences about Lytton from that same story.
An estimated 90% of the structures in the community were destroyed by the fire, which broke out sometime before 6 p.m. Wednesday.
On Friday, operators of the Lytton Chinese History Museum, which focuses on the contributions of thousands of Chinese miners, railway workers, merchants, and farmers, confirmed the structure had burned to the ground.
Isn't that a shame?
And isn't that interesting?
Very diverse community, First Nations, Chinese History Museum.
I learned that Lytton calls itself Canada's hotspot because for whatever reason it is the place that often has the highest temperature in the country.
And it actually did last week, again, it so happens, a new record.
So things were really dry and hot out there.
So was this fire natural?
As fires often are.
In the hot spot of the country, was it natural?
Or was it what Drea saw when she was visiting other First Nations communities in the BC interior just days earlier?
In this heat wave, in this dry weather, arsonists torching churches as an act of political revenge and terrorism was it that.
Drea even mentioned that in her report, eerily prescient.
Arson is always terrible, but imagine arson when the whole area is dry as kindling.
Behind me is what's left of St. Gregory's Church.
The church is attached to a small grave site on the Asoyu Indian ban.
It's the second church to be left in shambles.
From the looks of what's inside the church and the rubble, it doesn't appear like this church was being actually used other than, like I said, being attached to this small grave site.
But what's different about this location is just how in the middle of nowhere it is.
And not just the middle of nowhere, the middle of a desert.
I don't know if you guys know this, but BC has had issue after issue with fires.
If this is proven to be arson, what type of sick individual or individual set fire to a place like this where no one's going to catch it?
It's a miracle it was caught.
How many lives could have been ruined because of that action?
So is that what happened in Lytton, a First Nations area?
The yellow pages say there are four churches in that town.
Was one of them torched by an arsonist, but instead of just burning the church, it burned the whole village and killed two people, maybe more?
Is that what happened?
I don't know.
And frankly, if it were what happened, I don't know if we'd find out.
Some crimes were just not allowed to know.
Does anyone know what that mass shooting was all about in Las Vegas four years ago?
You know, the largest mass shooting in U.S. history, 60 dead, nearly 1,000 injured.
That guy holed up in a casino hotel.
You know, they still haven't released a motive on that one, which means they never will.
I don't know why, but it doesn't build trust in the system, does it?
Well, if it turns out that this fire that consumed a whole village and killed two people was by anti-church arsonists, I don't know if you're going to hear about it from Trudeau's RCMP because he's spent a fair bit of time whipping up anger at these churches, hasn't he?
And not much time raging against hate crimes or terrorism or arson as he likely would have done if they were Muslim mosques or Jewish synods.
I wonder if we'll ever really know what started the fire.
But here's what we do know.
The same day as the fire, a woman named Harsha Walia was responding to a news report about other church fires.
You see that?
It's a story in Vice News about two more Catholic churches being torched in Canada.
And she replies, burn it all down.
Pretty simple, four words.
You don't need any more words when you're that plain spoken.
What does she want?
To burn it down.
How much of it?
All of it.
What?
Churches, Christians, Catholics, society, whatever, burn it all down.
Okay, but Harsha Walia is the executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association.
I'm not kidding.
Here's what the BC Civil Liberties Association says about itself.
The BC Civil Liberties Association is the oldest and most active civil liberties and human rights group in Canada.
I don't think that's true.
The BCCLA has been actively advancing human rights and civil liberties through litigation, law reform, community-based legal advocacy, and public engagement and education for the last half century.
And they're a registered charity, of course, and they're supposed to do good things, to use the law to help people, to protect people, to fight against harm using the law.
And there's Harshawalia, not just some staffer, not just some intern.
She's the boss.
She's the executive director.
She's the head of the civil liberties agency, activists for all of BC.
She runs a charity by that name, and she is calling for hate crimes, for arson, really for terrorism.
It's been almost a week and not a word from the BCCLA about this.
I checked, no apology, no retraction, no announcement that Harshawalia is taking some time off for personal reasons, none of that, not a peep.
I tweeted that shocking juxtaposition, her insane call for hate crimes, next to her civil liberties bio, and she has now made her Twitter account private so you can't see it, but I actually can.
I've been following her on Twitter for a while because she's so out there, so I'm not locked out.
And I've got to say, far from being repentant, she's indignant.
She hasn't had second thoughts about her tweet.
It's still up, and she's raging about anyone who's upset by her call to burn it all down.
Look my Twitter after receiving over 200 trolling messages in response to a tweet one week ago.
I've been reported and tagged into Vancouver police through RCMP CSIS, CBSA, employer, provincial, and federal government, and with dozens of calls for me to be charged for terrorism and hate crime.
Yeah, I mean, look at her tweet again.
She refers to a news report of churches being torched, arson, and she says, burn it all down.
Not a lot of wiggle room there.
But I'm serious.
She says, no, no, responding to reports about arson with burn it all down doesn't actually mean burn it all down.
Let it burn, burn it down, is expression of rage and sadness that many survivors in the downtown east side whom I have spoken with are saying, though not universally.
And I recognize there is nuance that tweet doesn't capture, nor was it intended to, and tweet is mine, just providing context.
What?
DTE side, that's the downtown east side.
That's a rough part of Vancouver.
Lots of homeless people, so many people drunk or on drugs, very dangerous place.
I think it's the worst few blocks anywhere in Canada.
So she's blaming someone in the downtown East Side for putting that phrase into her head.
I don't even, I just have never seen such a pitiful excuse.
Then she says, thank you for care, everyone.
I have been informed there are police complaints being filed against me, which is beyond words.
But this is a moment for solidarity with Indigenous nations and not ridiculous Twitter trying to derail and distract from real issues.
Come what may, we will win.
It's beyond words that you've been reported.
You react to churches being burned out of political hatred with the phrase, burn it all down.
And you're surprised that people are reporting it to the police.
We will win.
Who's we?
Win what?
The arsonists or something?
And then she writes, the first person to tweet referenced my position on abolishing police.
Then cops, conservatives, Zionists, they're the worst, and right-wing pundits, they're the super worst, piled on with their scores to settle.
This is both personal and also a distraction from staying focused on justice and accountability for survivors.
What's in Zionist bid?
How did that sneak in there?
Scores to settle?
She just raged against churches, said burn them all down.
And she's talking about other people settling scores.
By the way, does a single word I've read from her sound like she actually spends a minute of her day on civil liberties work?
I don't know if there's a single civil liberties thing they have ever done over there.
We have over 1,800 lockdown cases.
We're fighting for citizens across Canada, probably close to 100 cases in BC, maybe more.
We take people of every religious and racial and political stripe, but she's raging on about Jews or Zionists or whatever.
What are you doing?
This would make me chuckle.
This guy said, wow.
And Walia is a representative of BC Civil Liberties who sits on many government committees.
Yeah, pretty crazy.
And she writes back, here is the president of Vancouver Police Union and the BC Police Association trying to intimidate me.
For 15 years, before I had the support I do now, people have thought that reporting me to employers or funders or the state will make a difference.
Jokes on you, Ralph.
Trying to intimidate you.
He didn't say anything other than he was shocked by you.
Jokes on you, Ralph?
What joke?
But that funders thing got me thinking.
Who funds the BC Civil Liberties Association?
I know who funds our civil liberties project, thousands of ordinary people with small donations.
So I looked at the BCCLA's financial statement, and last year they received a $380,000 grant from something called the BC Law Foundation.
What's the BC Law Foundation?
Well, it's a public interest foundation that tries to improve the law, but it gets its money in a weird way.
I actually don't like how it gets its money.
When a client of a lawyer gives their lawyer some money to hold for them, for a purchase, in trust for something, whatever.
It earns a tiny bit of interest, right?
Well, and this is the weird part, and I think it's kind of grifting.
They take that.
The BC Law Foundation just takes the interest from all that money for everyone.
They just take it.
They don't ask you.
And then they spend it on their do-gooderies, some of which is good, but much of which is just hard left-wing ideology.
Like I say, they don't raise the money voluntarily.
They just take it from clients.
China's Money Game00:15:43
Just take it.
Can you imagine any other profession saying, oh, yeah, you had some interest coming to you, but we'll just pocket that.
Thanks.
Well, guess what?
We here at Rebel News have lots of legal work in BC.
So the Law Foundation's grant to the BCCLA includes some of our money.
Some of our rebel money is being spent on the salary for Harshawalia, that weird hater, anti-Zionist, anti-police, anti-church cheerleader.
Now, look, I'm not for prosecuting hate speech, but I'm going to guess that Harshawalia is at least against her list of enemies, conservatives, Jews, churches, whatever.
I think she's absolutely over the line of the left's hate speech test.
I mean, imagine if she was talking that way about mosques, burn them all down.
But I do object to my own money being used to whip up religious bigotry and to call for criminal violence, even if she says she didn't mean it.
So I asked our lawyers to draft a letter to the BC Law Foundation, not as just some busybody meddler, but literally as someone whose own money has been taken from me and given to this race-baiting, arson-cheering nut bar.
I want my money back.
And frankly, if the BC Law Foundation has any morals, which is an open question, they should rescind their $380,000 grant to the BCCLA.
That's not censorship.
That's just stopping to give free money to a crazy violence cheerleader.
I mean, she says she's got more funding than ever.
Unfortunately, I believe her.
Fine.
So let her raise her own money from George Soros or woke white leftists who hate the church because of daddy issues or whatever.
Fine.
Just stop using my money, okay?
If you want to see our lawyer's letter, go to findthearsonists.com.
We've posted it there.
Stay with us for a moment.
Well, yesterday was the 4th of July.
I enjoyed seeing one of the world's richest men, Mark Zuckerberg, on some sort of surfing device carrying the American flag.
It was so good.
At first, I thought it was photoshopped or one of those deep fakes.
You know, I think it's the most pro-American thing Zuckerberg has done in a long time.
Other billionaires had their tweets too.
Here's Elon Musk showing himself as a young man saying, bless America.
Doesn't he look good there?
I really like that photo.
But I saw what Elon Musk was saying in Chinese at the same time.
And that's when I realized that I was easily fooled.
See, while in English he was saying, bless America, this is Elon Musk's Chinese language social media page.
Because you understand, Twitter is banned in China.
Now, you may not speak Chinese, but I think you can understand what that is in the top left.
That hammer and sickle and the number 100.
That is Elon Musk.
At the same time as he's saying, Bless America, is blessing the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party.
He's not saying I love China.
And there's a lot to love about China.
The people, the food, the history, the archaeology, the culture.
No, no, no.
He is specifically saying he loves the Chinese Communist Party.
He's not alone.
Every big business is getting in on it.
Nike said they are a Chinese company and they stand with the Communist Party of China.
I'm worried about it.
When billionaires go that way, you know they'll pull the culture with them.
Joining us now to talk about the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party is our friend Gordon G. Chang, author and commentator.
His new article in Newsweek is called China's Communist Party at 100, No More Foreign Rescues.
Gordon, great to see you again.
And by the way, folks, if you're not following Gordon, please do that right now on Twitter at Gordon G. Chang.
You'll learn more about China than you will anywhere else, Gordon.
I'm afraid of the fact that the leaders of the West are so clearly allying themselves or at least hedging their bets with China.
Elon Musk, Nike, all the big brands, should I be worried?
You definitely should be worried, Ezra.
What we are seeing is that American elites, business, political, aligning themselves with the China's Communist Party against Americans.
And it's not just the CEO of Nike and not just Elon Musk.
You have, for instance, Charlie Munger, the number two at Berkshire Hathaway, in that infamous interview with CNBC saying, oh, you know, he would like to have China's financial system in the U.S.
So really what there is on display is this unabashed cravenness right now.
And that means we don't have anybody defending our society against a malicious Chinese regime.
Yeah.
You know, that Charlie Munger interview was shocking.
I didn't know what he looked like.
I mean, we all know Warren Buffett as the friendly face of Berkshire Hathaway, but Charlie Munger is his right-hand man.
Let me just play a quick clip of that to show people.
He wasn't just saying he wanted the Chinese financial system.
He was approving of their kidnapping of China's Elon Musk, a multi-billionaire named Jack Ma.
He said he was pleased with it.
Take a look at this crazy interview.
Charlie, you said Communist China is doing all the things that we should be doing right now.
And I can't help but think of what they're doing.
That amuses me.
What about what they've done to Jack Ma?
He's kind of disappeared.
Well, yes, but Jack Ma is one of the swangers.
So they just cut his, they said, the hell with you.
He basically gave a speech when he said to a one-party state, well, you guys are a bunch of jerks.
You don't know what you're doing, and I know what I'm doing, and I'm going to do it better.
And he was going to wade into banking and no rules and just do whatever he pleased.
He also brought it up.
The Chinese communists did the right thing.
They just called in Jack Ma and say, you aren't going to do it, sonny.
And I wish we had a, I don't want all of the Chinese system, but I certainly would like to have the financial part of it in my own country.
I mean, I can't believe he said that and that that is just normal discourse.
That would have been like 50 years ago.
I think if a tycoon in America would speak that way about the Soviet Union, they would be marginalized in polite company.
But Charlie Munger is probably saluted as a farsighted captain of industry.
Yes, and that's really throughout the corporate suites.
So this is not just an isolated interview.
We're seeing so many instances of this.
You know, business is amoral.
They're just there to make money.
It's really up to Americans expressing themselves at the ballot box to make sure that companies cannot do this anymore.
And this really is going to be important for us to cut those economic ties with China because China exploits every point of contact with our society.
They're overwhelming us.
The FBI is overwhelmed.
Local law enforcement is overwhelmed.
Governments are overwhelmed.
And we need to cut those ties until we can be sure that we can manage this unrelenting and malicious assault from Beijing.
Yeah.
Now, I just read your essay in Newsweek, and I'm always thrilled to see you published there because I know they have, I mean, they're a legacy media.
They have a long-standing reputation.
They have a large readership.
And I'm so pleased your message is getting out.
You talk about the 100-year anniversary of the Communist Party.
You have a few points that I had sort of forgotten, that it was the West itself that bailed out the Communist Party in key moments.
After Chaneman Square, it was George H.W. Bush who sort of let China come back into the brotherhood of nations.
Clinton, with a trade deal 20-odd years ago, that really put China on the path for economic dominance.
China may not be quite as strong as it looks, and the West may be giving it too much help.
So I found little glimmers of hope in your article.
What do you think of that?
I do hope that there are glimmers.
The problem is that we have an administration in Washington, and we certainly got one in Ottawa that would like to help the Communist Party.
And so right now, we Americans have got to prevent our president from doing what he would like to do, which is to establish and deepen economic relations.
Now, Biden has done some good things on China, but nonetheless, he hasn't gone far enough, especially considering the situation that we now face, because China's assaults on us has gotten worse and worse over time because they're testing the new president, and Biden is not doing the things that are necessary at this particular moment.
You know, it's interesting up here in Canada, Gordon.
Of course, the two Michaels, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, they were kidnapped.
It's almost 950 days ago.
And you would think that that would have started to unravel the diplomatic ties between the two countries.
I think it has on the Chinese side, they're getting more and more voluble against Canada.
I haven't seen anything in return.
Let me show you something that was tweeted by an official Chinese, I think he's a consul in South America, so I don't know why they're using him to do this, but this is a cartoon he tweeted against Justin Trudeau.
It's a terrible picture of Trudeau saying, we killed your men, we stole your land, we killed your men, we buried your child.
Let's reconcile.
And he's holding some feathers as if he's talking to Aboriginal people.
In Canada, right now we're dealing with some tough issues about our history involving First Nations.
And for a Chinese government to publish this cartoon that is so clearly an attack, and Li Yang is the name of the diplomat, and he says, do you think your so-called reconciliation is worth showing off?
That's from a diplomat, Gordon.
That's from a diplomat.
And we're just taking it.
We're just rolling over.
Well, and also, you know, you go back to China's former diplomat to Canada, who actually talked about white supremacy as really being the motivation for holding Meng Wangzhou, the Huawei CFO, who is now subject to extradition proceedings because the U.S. Justice Department wants her.
And so basically, China is trying to stir racial division in Canada, as it's trying to do in the United States and around the world.
And as we see Beijing's propaganda, it is starting to resemble that of Japan's before the Second World War.
Japan had this whole notion of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, tried to divide Asia along racial lines.
Well, China's trying to do the same thing right now, and it is malicious beyond belief.
And we don't see pushback on the part of the Biden administration, and we don't see pushback on the part of Justin Trudeau.
Yeah.
Well, you know, when you refer to Japan's once imperial ambitions in the region, you make me remember the Olympics in Berlin in 1936 on the eve of war.
It was a source of prestige for Hitler to show off not only his infrastructure, his giant stadiums, but he wanted to have, you know, sports victories.
I feel like we're in that same place again.
China wants to show off not only that it can win, but it has these amazing airports and railways and stadiums, things that the West can only look at and say, wow, I wish ours was that nice.
And to show to their own people, look, the whole world comes on bended knee to us.
We can't be as bad as our critics would say.
I'm worried that, you know, the third part of that is, well, you know, three years later, Germany attacked Poland.
Are you worried that China might do something rash with regards to Taiwan, perhaps, or do something military that moves from just propaganda and asymmetrical war to actually a kinetic war?
Well, they did that last year, Ezra.
In May, Chinese troops moved in force below the line of actual control into Indian-controlled territory.
And on the night of June 15th, in a surprise attack, killed 20 Indian soldiers.
You know, you talk about the Olympics.
Got to remember that before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, there was a lot of people who were saying, oh, you know, China puts on the Olympics.
It'll integrate into the world.
It will become a responsible stakeholder.
And after the 2008 Olympics, China's behavior rapidly deteriorated because they believed that they had got the legitimization from the world and that no one would oppose them.
So yes, we've got to be very concerned that after the Winter Olympics next year, Beijing is going to do something even more dangerous than they did after 2008.
Let me ask you one more question that's sort of out of the blue.
So if nothing comes to mind, don't worry about it.
But I remember you and I would talk when Donald Trump was president, and he didn't get everything right, but he had some good instincts on China.
He's gone, and I think the jury's still out on Joe Biden.
Is there anyone else in the political sphere that you think is strong and hopeful on China?
Anyone in the United States or frankly in other countries that we can look to maybe for leadership on how to check China's military and political ambitions?
Well, one person in the U.S. who has political ambitions going forward is Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State.
Also, you know, Donald Trump has four more years of eligibility as president under the U.S. Constitution.
So he might come back.
I think across the American political spectrum, both parties, you're starting to see people are beginning to understand the fundamental nature of China's challenge.
I don't think they're all the way there yet, but we're moving in that direction.
And we've got to move fast because we have, as we started out by talking, we've got a business class, a financial class, Walmart, Wall Street, that are willing to do—actually, they're more loyal to Beijing than they are to Washington.
Yeah, I think you're right.
And I tell you, it was seeing those two faces of Elon Musk that really broke my heart.
I was sort of a fan of his.
I liked the fact that he was audacious and a little bit quirky, but now I feel sort of like I was tricked by him.
I was only reading what he wanted me to read and not his other stuff.
Listen, Gordon, it's great to catch up with you.
And let me just one more time recommend your new article in Newsweek.
The headline is China's Communist Party at 100, No More Foreign Rescues.
And of course, you can follow Gordon at Gordon G. Chang on Twitter.
Take care, my friend.
Thanks for your time today.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
All right, there you have it, Gordon Chang.
Stay with us.
Premiers And Persecution00:01:41
Hey, welcome back on my show on Friday on statues being torn down.
Joel writes, Queen Victoria ended slavery.
So they tear down the statue of her?
Yeah, I mean, slavery, in fact, in Canada, the slave trade was abolished in the 1790s, if I recall.
Even before Queen Victoria, I mean, she spent decades literally leading a naval battle against slave ships.
The British Empire redeemed every slave in the empire.
I mean, what the Emancipation Proclamation did decades later, the British Empire did.
So I don't think that the people who were tearing down statues were particularly philosophical or educated about it.
I think they just want to smash every symbol of society.
They don't care who.
One writes, the police stood back and allowed this.
Yeah, oh, allowed it.
In fact, they tasered the one guy who was protesting against it.
Brian writes, imagine if these people were shaking hands or hugging.
They'd be fined and arrested for sure.
Well, yeah, and that's not just speculation.
Maxime Bernier went to Manitoba for a small political meeting.
He was arrested and jailed and told to leave town.
There are Christian pastors who are being persecuted and prosecuted right now by Brian Pallister.
It took him a day to make a public statement.
And he said, oh, we're going to prosecute people, but he, of course, hasn't done so.
He's one of the worst premiers.
But as soon as I say that, I think of the other premiers who are even worse.
It's terrible.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.