Ezra Levant announces Rebel News’ hiring of eight staff—three reporters (Ottawa, China-focused, UK) and four business roles (events, campaigns, development, outreach)—to secure crowdfunding-driven sustainability amid Trudeau’s potential re-election. He critiques Biden’s verbal gaffes (e.g., "four-year-old boy crossing at a red light") and media’s selective scrutiny, contrasting with Trump’s faster appointments despite opposition, while questioning whether Trumpism can survive without him. The episode ties financial independence to exposing deep-state biases, like the FBI’s political bias or Fauci’s gain-of-function research evasions, framing Rebel News’ expansion as essential for countering establishment narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm not going to talk about a political news item.
I'm going to tell you a bit of a Rebel News plan for our own company.
We're actually hiring seven or eight new positions.
We just updated our RebelNews.com slash careers page.
And frankly, I'm hoping that someone listening to this podcast says, hey, that could be me.
Some of these positions are at our Toronto headquarters.
Others are located in Ottawa.
London, England, and one can be pretty much anywhere.
So do me a favor and listen to this podcast.
It's a little bit longer than normal because I go through each of the positions and I really would appreciate your help to, you know, pass us around, tell someone about it.
Maybe it's you or maybe it's someone you know.
All the job descriptions can be seen at rebelnews.com slash careers or listen to this podcast as I tell you about them.
Here's the podcast.
Tonight, Rebel News is hiring eight new staff.
Maybe you might be one of them or know someone.
It's July 22nd and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a 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 buy a publisher is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Well, I gave you a Rebel News update a few weeks ago telling you my thoughts on our editorial focus for the months and years ahead.
I think it's clear that we're going to continue our civil liberties focus with the vaccine passports now becoming a reality.
That's going to be both a news story and a civil liberties battle.
Of course, the election is coming sooner than we think.
And I'm worried that Justin Trudeau will win again with a greater majority and he'll proceed on some of his more outrageous attacks against our norms in Canada, including freedom of speech.
In my report to you, I also alluded to some business ideas, including a possible IPO.
And by the way, I got some emails from viewers interested in that.
I'm sorry I haven't written back to everyone yet.
But one of the questions when you're looking to raise funds in a public offering is what would we use the money for?
Would we turn Rebel News into a real business, not just a cause that we love?
How do we businessify what's really a project of the heart?
Well, I think we have to be more businesslike in the staff we have.
I love all the reporters we have.
I love all the people who follow their heart.
But we probably need to add to that people who, you know, make money to help pay the bills.
You know, the same.
You can't save the world if you can't make the rent.
Now, we are looking to hire some new reporters too.
And we put the new reporters we're looking for plus the new business positions all on one website.
And I'd like to encourage you to go there to rebelnews.com slash careers and look at that job description for those different positions.
Actually, I think it adds up to eight different positions.
And maybe you're someone who might apply or maybe you know someone.
Some of those jobs have to be here at our Toronto head office.
It's just too integrated with the rest of our team.
But other jobs can be around the country or even in other countries.
So please go to rebelnews.com slash careers.
And I'm going to put this monologue outside the paywall too.
I'm going to email it around in the hope that I can encourage people to apply.
Because I think finding people who believe in Rebel News and our mission and our project and have business talent, it's trickier than you think.
It's hard to hire for anyone.
But for Rebel News, we want people who believe in our project and won't be politically scared of affiliating with us in this era of cancel culture.
So as you can see, on that careers page, we are hiring for three new reporting positions.
And frankly, we've been looking to fill these positions for a while.
So this isn't new to you.
You may have heard me talk about these before.
We're looking to hire a reporter full-time in Ottawa.
Now, that's not as important as it would have been in the before times because parliament doesn't meet as often or as freely as it does before.
So much is just decided by public health officers without debate, let alone votes.
But we still believe it's important to have a reporter on the ground in Ottawa all the time.
In the last six months, we've hired reporters in Quebec, and it's been wonderful.
Alexa Lavois does reports in both English and French, and Yankee Pollock has been more active there too.
Plus, we've sent reporters there from Toronto.
I'd like to have a permanent force in Ottawa.
Do you know someone who would fill that position?
If so, have them apply.
We're also looking for a China affairs reporter.
I think I've told you that before.
That's someone who is probably a Chinese person themselves because they would need to know the Chinese language to read Chinese language media and social media in this country to report on China's influence in our own country, on universities, in politics, and to look at the battles between communist China and democracy activists, whether they're Hong Kong democracy activists, Uyghur Muslims, or Tibetans.
I think that's a very important story.
But I think the key asset, the key characteristic in that reporter, besides loving freedom and being a skeptic of the Chinese Communist Party, is to know the Chinese language, because that's where this battle is happening.
If you know someone who fits the bill, let us know.
I would love to have a China affairs reporter.
And finally, in the United Kingdom, it's been so hard for us to cover those stories because we can't travel there freely because of the quarantines.
If you know someone in the UK, please let me know.
But those are reporting jobs.
And again, I love those.
That's the heart of what Rebel does, our journalism.
Those are not going to be money-making projects.
Those are cost centers.
We are going to pay our reporters and pay their expenses to travel around.
They're not going to be selling ads.
They might talk about crowdfunding campaigns sometimes, but I don't expect reporters to make money in particular.
But that's what we have to do as a business if we're going to be perpetually successful.
We're so grateful to our crowdfunding supporters and to you who watch my show every night and Sheila and David and Andrew's show weekly.
Your subscription of $8 a month means a lot too.
But as I was thinking about the proposed IPO, I was thinking, what would a real business do with the Rebel?
Well, they'd probably put in parts of the company whose job is to be a profit center so that we can afford to hire all these great reporters to be more business-like.
Now, the problem is we don't have other Canadian role models in this media political space, as they say.
We have some allies, that's for sure, some friends, our friends at TNC.news, TrueNorth.
They're probably the closest thing we have to a buddy.
They're smaller than us and they're less activist than us, but they have a similar model based on subscriptions and donations, and we admire them.
But I think our scale and our scope and our ambitions are a little bit different and in some ways a little bit larger.
We just don't have someone we can look up to as a model.
I'm not going to look to post media.
That's what I would look to if I wanted to be a government grifter getting a bailout.
We can't look to the TV companies.
For a while, Sun News was amazing, but that was killed by the CRTC.
Who do we have to look to for inspiration as a business model?
There's a lot of great American examples, whether it's The Blaze or Daily Wire, but they have something we don't.
They have the American scale market.
I mean, they have 10 times as many people and probably 20 times as many conservatives.
If we were naturally an American company, if we had an American history and American reporters, we would surely be successful because just add a zero to all our revenues, but our costs wouldn't particularly be bigger.
We would have the same, I mean, we have about 31 staff right now, about a third of whom are on air.
That would be enough to cover America well, and we would just have 10 times to market.
So one of the things about being a Canadian conservative, besides being attacked all the time for having different opinions, is that we have a smaller market to support us.
So we don't really have American examples.
So I've tried to think, what would a real business do to be more sustainable, not just to be crowdfunding?
And I thought of four positions that we could hire, and this would be a use of funds when we, God willing, do a public offering.
Four business positions.
You wouldn't necessarily see these people on TV.
They certainly wouldn't be journalists running out to cover stories.
But each of them not only would bring more value to Rebel News, but to Rebel News viewers, and would help us secure revenue streams so we could continue to grow on the passion side, on the content side.
Again, we will never take a dime from Trudeau, so we've got to be creative.
Let me list for you four or five positions that we have put on our careers page today.
The first one I think by far is the funnest one.
It's our events coordinator.
We haven't really had events in two years because of the lockdowns.
We had one book event for China virus in the Edmonton area in the middle of the pandemic before the lockdowns really clamped down.
It's sort of incredible to think about it, that we had an event at a restaurant and everyone was fine.
And then the lockdowns came extremely heavy after that.
But I want to get back into the events business big time.
As you know, in the before times, Rebel News had these big day-long conferences.
Typically on a Saturday, we would have a big auditorium and we would have like a Canadian version of what they have in the States called CPAC, the Conservative Public Political Action Committee.
We would have a day-long, we called them Rebel Live, where we would have some of our favorite speakers, not only our own Rebel talent, but some of our favorite guests.
In past years, we've had quite some big names.
I mean, Jordan Peterson, before he was big globally, he was big at Rebel Live.
Even Doug Ford, before he became a liberal, when he was still a conservative, he spoke at Rebel Live.
We've had some great speakers and great events in Toronto and Calgary.
And I would hope to revive those two cities at least, and perhaps more.
Our events coordinator would run those.
Also would run our cruise.
Remember, we had a cruise before.
That was canceled again because of the pandemic.
I'd like to start that again.
Book launches and book talks around the country.
And also events for people who are subscribers or producers club members.
There's so many events I could think of.
Frankly, to have them all across Canada, perhaps in the US and maybe the UK too, maybe even an Australia event.
We have so many supporters down there.
I think for sure that's a full-time position, events coordinator.
And if I had to describe what an events coordinator would look like, it's probably your stereotypical wedding planner, someone who loves details, is excited to book venues, thinks about every little thing, shows up there, makes sure everyone's in their places.
You can see our detailed job description at rebel.com slash careers.
I think being the events coordinator is probably one of the funnest jobs at Rebel News.
Plus, you'll get to go to the events.
Now you'll be working, but some of them are pretty fun.
Like I say, those of you who've been on Rebel Cruises before know that it's just a little bit of work and a lot of play.
So that's a great job.
And I'm really looking forward to seeing the applicants for that.
Why is that important to Rebel News?
It serves our viewers.
It gives our viewers a connection with the Rebel talent on TV.
And financially, it helps our company be strong because these events make money.
So these aren't just things I want to do for the moral of it.
These are things that I believe will make Rebel News a stronger business.
Now, we'll have to go out there and hustle and work, but that's much better than getting on bended knee for Trudeau's bailout, don't you think?
The next position we're hiring for is called Campaigns Manager.
Again, you can read the details at rebelnews.com slash careers.
A campaign is what we call any one of our projects.
Usually we have a vanity website like, you know, free savearthur.com or shamanchandreau.com.
Or we have actually more than 100, actually several hundred little campaigns like that.
And a campaign can be as simple as having a petition that we would deliver to that person we're petitioning to crowdfunding for a poll or helping someone with a lawyer or renting a Jumbotron truck or putting up a still billboard on the side of the highway.
There's about 10 different things that we've done over the years that we call campaigns.
But that whole project, there's lots of little pieces, setting up the little microsite, getting the domain name.
If it's renting a truck or hiring a lawyer or fixing a problem, there's lots of things to do very quickly.
A campaigns manager probably has some experience in politics because you've got to move very quickly, get things done, just blaze a trail because time is of the essence.
And you have to be thinking about, well, what's the end product here?
I think it's similar to political work.
It is a campaign.
It's just not a campaign for a political party.
It's a campaign for Rebel News.
We've even had lawn sign campaigns, right?
For Sheila Gunread's book, The Destroyers about the Alberta NDP and my own book, where we had lawn signs for the Lobranos.
The third job I'm going to tell you about is director of development.
Hiring an Outreach Coordinator00:14:17
That's a fancy way of saying someone in charge of thanking our donors.
Now, the average donor to Rebel News, I haven't checked lately, but last I checked, it was around $63.
That's very generous.
And there's a lot of people who chip in.
And I tell you, that's generous because, you know, you don't actually have to donate anything to Rebel News.
You have to pay $8 a month to get a subscription to my show.
But the rest of our videos are free.
So it's pretty incredible that someone would voluntarily give us money when 90% of our content is free.
You don't have to give us anything.
So thank you to them.
But we actually have some donors who give 10 times that and the odd donor who gives 100 times that.
We have people we call producers club subscribers.
They don't just give $8 a month.
They give $250 a year.
How do we properly say thank you to all these people?
I have to admit, if I look back over the last six years, the one thing I've done most poorly, and I'm just confessing it to you, is I haven't properly thanked people.
And I have my excuses that I'm so busy doing other things, but that's not a good excuse because if people voluntarily give $63 or $630, they deserve to be recognized.
The director of development is basically VP thank you in the company.
We've done some of it.
We have plaques on the wall of our boardroom for people who made significant donations to help us pay down our debt last year.
We have countless bricks on the wall with little messages.
And I got to tell you, I read those every day.
It's really the only thing on our walls.
So little things like this, but also, you know, constant updates for donors, maybe an annual impact report, just showing people what we've done with their donations, little get-togethers in different towns, a thank you for donors.
Some of that stuff stopped because of the pandemic, but that's not an excuse for not thanking people through other ways, whether it's a private thank you video or a thank you mailing.
So the director of development is someone who likes to talk to people on the phone and in person, is warm and friendly, and from a business point of view, will hopefully turn one-time donors into repeat donors, because ideally, Rebel News can perpetuate itself in the future and even grow.
A director of development is someone who takes care of details when I didn't say thank you when I should have.
They say thank you all the time and get me to say thank you.
The next position I'd like to tell you about is called Outreach Coordinator.
It's basically someone to spread the word about Rebel News.
My view is that we've really spent very little money marketing or advertising Rebel News over the last six years.
And the main reason for that is we just haven't had the money.
And if we had the money, I'd rather spend it on hiring a reporter or when bumps in the road happen, like a week or so ago, our key piece of hardware called the TriCaster, it's just the brand name of this basically a fancy computer that combines the video and the Skype calls and the graphics.
It's the system that puts the show together.
After six years, it just broke down.
It was actually conking out on the air in one hour, went down three times.
We knew we had to replace it.
38 grand.
So if you were to say, Ezra, do you want to spend 38 grand advertising the Rebel or 38 grand fixing the hardware?
Well, we have to fix the hardware.
We have to get new computers because our computers are so old.
That was my excuse for not spending money marketing and advertising the Rebel before.
And I felt okay with that because the number one way Rebel News spread was through word of mouth, peer-to-peer sharing, people sharing our videos, sharing our emails, sharing our Facebook, because our content was so interesting, people passed it around voluntarily.
We didn't have to pay for that.
I'm not proposing to getting into spending ad money, but that outreach coordinator, here's what that position does.
Every day we produce, let's say, 10 videos here at Rebel News.
Now, I think they're all good and they're all interesting.
Otherwise, we wouldn't make them.
But if there's a video that's of particular interest, for example, to Christian broadcasters, when we cover the stories about Christian pastors being jailed, maybe that's a story that we can call up some Christian radio station or Christian TV show and say, hey, we're not a Christian outlet ourselves at Rebel News, but we're sympathetic to Christians and the persecution of Christians.
Like, for example, when I went on Tucker Carlson's show the other day to talk about the 40 odd churches that were torched in Canada.
Getting on Tucker Carlson's show, getting on Glenn Beck's The Blaze, getting on not just American shows, but the other day I was on Richard Surrett's radio show in Mississauga.
I think we need a person all day looking at what our most interesting videos are and saying, that's an oil and gas story.
Let's see if we can get that picked up by some oil and gas media.
That's a story about military and defense issues.
So it's getting other people to pick up Rebel News stories with credit to us, to interview our Rebel talent, get Drea on TV, get Sheila, get Andrew Chapatos just did a show the other day.
So what I'm talking about is not paying for ads, but getting our talent on other networks, including American and Australian and British networks.
I was on GB News the other day in the UK to spread the word about Rebel.
I think that's actually a better expenditure, hiring a full-time staffer to do nothing but pitching Rebel stories to other media.
We also, I think, need to make our internship program year-round.
I'm really excited by what our interns have done.
I don't know if you know this, but our head of video, Efron Monsanto, started as an intern right out of school.
In fact, I think he was actually still in school when he started with us.
And now he's our boss of video.
And he brought other classmates with him, including Mocha Bazirgan, our chief videographer, and Lincoln Jay.
So I think it's great to get interns because they haven't been steered wrong by other media.
I would much rather hire a really bright student right out of school who's got the skills and hasn't been warped yet by, like I wouldn't want to hire someone who worked at the CBC for 10 years.
I'd have 10 years worth of unlearning bad habits to do.
So I think a real gateway to young talent is by having an internship program where they can see our style, putter around here, do odd things, run out with the camera, you know, just errands really, starting at the ground floor.
And if they're as talented as Efron and Mocha and Lincoln, they'll rise very quickly.
And I think that can be a great source of new talent, either on the TV side or the editing side or the behind the scenes side.
So I want to make our internship program year-round.
There are other things that I would like to do on a business side.
I think we do need to do better marketing for the show and not just outreach, as I described.
I think we need to increase subscriptions for the paywall shows.
I think that's how Americans like Blaze TV do it.
They just have a ton of subscriptions.
Like I said, though, they have 10 times the market.
There's creative ways of doing it.
There are other conservative groups in Canada.
Maybe we give them a commission for affiliate marketing.
If they sell a subscription on their website for a Rebel News premium subscription to Rebel News Plus, maybe we give them a payment.
There's a lot of businessy things that I think we need to do.
And here's the thing.
Today's show feels a little weird because I'm not railing against, you know, a vaccine passport discrimination or I'm not complaining about censorship plans by Trudeau or Joe Biden.
I'm not talking about the things that make us passionate.
I'm talking about the business plan that finances the passion projects because you can't save the world if you can't pay the rent.
At Rebel News, we've been lucky in that we've had thousands of grassroots crowdfunders pay our rent for us while we were out slaying dragons.
And I want that to keep going on.
But I think that with these positions I've just outlined, that we can actually make Rebel News stronger.
I started by talking about the reporting positions in Ottawa, in the United Kingdom, if we can, and the China Affairs Report.
I think those are great and important roles, and I want to do them.
That won't actually make us any money, if anything.
It's going to cost us money.
But the other positions I've outlined, that's new.
An events coordinator to really get us going again so we can interact with our viewers, get people face time with the talent they like, and all of those events make money.
A campaigns manager to help us do more little crowdfunded projects which do make money for us through our terms of service.
A director of development, or vp thank you, as I call them, to help me stay in touch with the most generous of our patrons, who I frankly should thank more often and should be kept in the loop, not just donate and sit back and watch, but donate and be thanked and be told what's going on on the inside.
An outreach coordinator to spread the word about Rebel NEWS, including to American outlets, and an internship program in-house to get talent in.
If you know of someone who fits these jobs, have them go to Rebelnews.com.
Slash careers now.
I have to tell you most of them are here in Toronto and I apologize for that.
Believe me, I live here.
I know how bad it is in the most locked down city in the world.
According to the BBC.
It's a politically correct city with terrible traffic, high crime, a shooting every other day.
It's just a really rough place.
I think all the all the ills of California are happening here in Toronto, and for some of the same reasons.
So I apologize that we have to have at least four or five of those positions based here in Toronto.
But let me tell you, on the plus side you get to work with some of the most interesting warmest funniest, funnest people around.
There's a real sense of purpose here.
Plus, we have excellent snacks.
So i'd encourage you or someone you know, to apply for those Toronto positions.
Um, there is one more job I want to mention, and it's not a rebel news job, it's a job with our friends at the Democracy FUND, and if you go to the Democracyfund.ca slash jobs, you'll see the job description for a project manager.
As you know, that's an arm's length charity with its own board of directors and its own mandate that helps with the Fight, The Fines project and other civil liberties work.
The Democracy FUND is hiring a project manager to oversee that civil liberties work, the Civil Liberties Litigation, civil Liberties Education because no one else is doing that in Canada, plus other projects that you can see on the Democracy FUND website.
So if you would rather be in the charitable sector rather than the rebel news journalism sector, that's a job too, boy.
That's a lot of jobs and you might be thinking, how are you going to pay for those jobs?
Well, that's a good question but, as you can see, at least four of those jobs we hope and we plan will actually pay for the other stuff.
Our events won't just be fun, they'll be a source of funds.
Our campaigns won't just be interesting, they'll be a way we pay the bills.
Our promoting of our stories will spread the word for free about rebel news to save us advertising money.
Our internship will help us recruit talent.
I believe that these are things that a real business would do.
Sometimes I daydream what would happen if Rebel News merged with a real media company, was taken over.
What would they do to businessify what's become a project that we love?
How would they bring their hard nose or hard, you know, as my old boss Preston Manning would always say, soft heart, hard head.
We've got the soft heart.
We love these passionate projects.
But if someone with a hard head, a hard nose, you know, sharp pencil came along and took over Rebel News, what would they do to make us financially stronger?
It was with that thought project, that thought experiment, that I came up with these positions.
We know about some of them already because we've done events and cruises and stuff before and they're great.
We once made $100,000 from a cruise.
And I mean, people say, well, that's just a luxurious getaway.
No, it's what pays the freight for the Rebel.
We can hire two reporters.
That one cruise, besides being super fun, can pay for two whole reporters.
So maybe we should do two cruises a year.
Maybe we should do more Rebel lives across the country.
So what I've just presented to you is actually a kind of a business plan.
Also, I think it's going to give you Rebel viewers a lot of fun things to do and places to go and people to meet.
And I didn't even talk about the Rebel store where we have more shirts and other cool stuff almost every day.
Well, there you have it.
I didn't talk about Trudeau much today.
I didn't talk about Joe Biden.
I didn't talk about the news of the day.
I just spoke to you a little bit about my thinking for what Rebel News has to do in the months and years ahead to become a durable, sustainable business, whether or not we stay private as we are, or if we want to really expand and do a public offering where we would actually sell shares to people who want to stake in us.
We're six years old now.
We've had our ups and downs, but I think we've been on a real tear for a couple years now.
We've had success after success.
I'm trying to think a little bit more business-like because I hope Rebel News endures for a very long time.
White House Honeymoon Over?00:14:33
We're in for a lot of battles politically and journalistically.
And the number one requirement to win those battles is that we're still around fighting every day.
We've got to make our payroll.
We've got to make our rent.
That's why we're hiring these business positions.
If you know a talented person, or if that person is you, go to rebelnews.com slash careers and get in touch with us.
I'm going to put this video on YouTube, Odyssey, superyu.net, and Rumble.
I'm going to email it out to all our friends because I want to meet some of the most talented people around to come and help us.
I hope to work with you soon.
Stay with us.
more happy.
Welcome back.
Well, CNN hosted a town hall-style interview with President Joe Biden.
I thought it was odd that the room was half empty.
I don't know, maybe they didn't try to fill it.
You would think that a convention-style town hall-style meeting with the president would be full.
It wasn't.
It was, I don't know, modestly interesting, but I thought what was much more interesting than the content of what Joe Biden said was how he said it, or more precisely, how he didn't say it, how he forgot what he was trying to say, how he lost track of where he was going.
The Republican National Committee war room put together what they call a 49-second compendium of the worst of.
And yes, they were cherry-picking it out of a longer event.
But I ask you, if this had been Donald Trump, if this had been a conservative of getting on in age in his upper 70s, would he have been given a pass?
I have to tell you, watching this compilation, this short summary of last night, I can't imagine how the top story emerging from the evening isn't Biden's mental health.
Take a look.
I mean, everybody thought I was a little nuts is, in fact, it's going to be.
What can a kid say?
You got the vaccination?
Or, you know.
Whether those aliens are here or not.
We know that this virus is in fact going to be.
Or she, what could they do?
Portman is a congressman from this area.
Xi Jinping in China.
He's a bright and really tough guy.
Over 600,000 people out there signing out 6 million people.
Whether or not there were, there's a man on the moon or whatever, you know, something.
Four years old, would you see a red light cross the street?
Whoa.
Boy.
You are, why can't the.
That was edited for humorous effect.
I watched actually longer excerpts directly.
And actually, the unedited version was more worrisome to me.
Listen, we're having a little bit of fun, but it's actually a deadly serious point.
Ronald Reagan was savaged for his later term, later years when he had onset of Alzheimer's.
No such discussion seems to be permitted in the mainstream meeting about Joe Biden.
Well, let's move away from his style and talk about his substance.
And to do that, let's bring in our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Joel, great to see you.
Maybe that exaggerates his cognitive decline.
But I actually think it happens more often than it doesn't happen.
And you have strange things like either the shouting outbursts or the whispering.
I think it's troublesome.
And I'm having a little bit of fun at his expense, but I actually think there's a real issue there.
Do you think so?
There is a real issue, although if you read the transcript of the whole town hall, he does seem to be able to string concepts together.
He's out of touch in general, like much of his party is out of touch.
I mean, when you look at the substance of his answers, they're not more out of touch than the Democrats' policies on a number of other things.
You can get more articulate Democrats, but basically the policies are just as out of whack.
I will say that you don't have to go back to Ronald Reagan to find a press corps that was very concerned about the president's mental state.
They were constantly questioning Trump's mental ability, and they insisted on cognitive tests.
Remember, he had to roll out the White House position, who's now a member of Congress, by the way, but they had to roll out the White House position to talk about how Trump had scored on a cognitive test.
And people made fun of Trump for giving people the details of the cognitive test.
It was something like woman, man, camera, whatever, whatever it was.
I can't remember.
But that became a punchline among Democrats who took it for granted that Trump was crazy.
And yet we're not allowed to talk about Biden's possible cognitive decline.
It's not even something people make fun of on Saturday Night Live.
They have been very hands-off with the new president.
And he doesn't come across very well.
In some of those sequences, for example, the joke about the four-year-old boy crossing at a red light, Biden was talking about how absurd it was to have someone cross on a red light.
So he was saying that's something you shouldn't do.
And of course, the little highlight reel presented it as if it was something he said you should do.
It was a little weird, though.
And he does come up with these strange examples from the recesses of his memory.
He calls children, you know, little Johnny and that sort of thing.
And it's just weird.
So he does seem to be losing his grip a little bit.
Although I think in terms of his relation to his party's policy, he's still very much aware of what the policy is.
It's just that the policy is so bizarre.
Take, for example, his response to a restaurant owner who said, what about the labor shortage?
And Joe Biden said, well, maybe people have just left your industry for more lucrative industries.
And that's basically the democratic position.
I mean, they don't really care about small business.
They want this $15 an hour minimum wage, and they're not so concerned about the restaurant industry or other industries that might have tight margins.
So Biden sort of says the quiet part out loud.
I mean, he says that, you know, well, we don't really care about your industry.
And that was very dissatisfying, not just to the restaurant owner, but to some of the journalists who brought it up again at the White House press briefing and said, look, this wasn't a good answer.
But that's the answer his party is giving.
They're just not concerned about people who invest in businesses, grow businesses, create jobs for other people.
They think jobs come from the moon, to use another Biden reference, the man on the moon, and they can just set wages wherever they want to.
And, you know, it's going to be fine.
And so Biden is a little odd when he tries to explain these policies, but that's partly because the policies are so crazy.
If my math is right, we're six months in to Biden's presidency, the inauguration, of course, being in mid-January.
So six months, it's time to fill most of the appointments, set his high priorities, start a few, make a name for himself.
He's no longer in a, quote, honeymoon, although in my view, the media honeymoon for Democrats is perpetual.
Is it too early?
And maybe it's not.
Is it too early to get a sense of how the midterm elections in 2022 might go?
That they might be a reaction to Biden, a pulling back, or an endorsement, an enthusiastic endorsement of them.
I mean, I'm watching from a foreign country and through the filter of the media.
I'm not on the ground there.
How do you think the midterms are shaping up?
I know it's still 18 months away for that, but what would you think?
The conventional wisdom right now is that Republicans will win the House back and fall short of winning the Senate back.
It might be very much like the first midterms of the Trump administration, where there's so much dissatisfaction within the country with the direction of how Nancy Pelosi is leading.
It was a different problem under Trump.
You had Paul Ryan not exactly leading the Republican-led House anywhere in particular.
He got the tax cuts done, but very little else.
With Pelosi, she's leading the country into a dangerously radical path, and people are reacting against it.
But there are also some technical reasons she's going to lose seats.
Republicans control the redistricting process in many states, for example.
Democrats did not do well in the 2020 elections at the legislative level, at the state level.
So they are going to lose control of the map.
You could even just redraw the district lines and cost the Democrats control of the House without even having an election, or before having an election, and then you have the election, and Democrats are really not doing very well.
The Senate's a little tougher map for Republicans this year.
So I think the Senate's conventional wisdom anyways that the Senate will remain in Democratic hands, although barely.
Look, I think the Biden administration is running out of steam.
The big picture is they don't have much left in the tank.
You talk about a honeymoon period.
Donald Trump had no honeymoon, and he filled several key appointments a lot more quickly than Biden is doing.
And Biden has everybody on board to pass pretty much anybody he wants.
Right now, there's an eco-terrorist, I'm not kidding, a former eco-terrorist, someone who was a sort of unindicted witness, but who was participating in some of this eco-terrorism in the 1990s.
She's a nominee, a legitimate nominee for the Bureau of Land Management, which is one of the largest land management agencies in the world.
It manages enormous tracts of land in the American West.
And she hasn't been withdrawn.
She's in front of a Senate committee right now, and there are Democrats who say they're going to support her.
And that's the kind of friendly audience they have in Congress, where even an eco-terrorist is a possible nominee.
I mean, it's awful, but they have so much support in Congress they can do whatever they want, and yet he's slow filling these posts.
We heard yesterday that reassuring news that the Biden administration is going to fill the post of a monitor of anti-Semitism.
So they're going to have an anti-Semitism monitor, don't worry, in just a few weeks.
Not like the problem is urgent or anything.
I mean, we've only been seeing anti-Semitic attacks on the streets of the country for the last several weeks.
Take your time, guys.
You know, no big rush.
So they're just taking an awfully long time to fill a lot of important positions.
They were caught flat-footed in the war between Israel and Hamas.
They didn't have an Israeli ambassador in May.
Trump had one in March, and that was despite congressional opposition.
For all the opposition Trump had and all the nominees that Chuck Schumer held up and refused to allow to go through, Trump was quicker, actually, in filling some of these positions than Biden did.
And it's striking because Trump got negative press all the time for how long he was supposedly taking on filling all these roles.
What you're seeing is Biden's agenda grinding to a halt.
There's not a lot of enthusiasm.
He may get this infrastructure deal done, but it failed a key vote this week.
They're going to have another chance at it, but there isn't much left that this administration can do.
They've lost that honeymoon edge, and I think they've lost it permanently.
They may get an infrastructure deal done, but it's going to be with a lot of hair pulling and arm twisting and so forth.
And he's not really leading the country anywhere the country wants to go.
So I think the midterm is looking pretty bad for Democrats.
Although, again, I think the Republicans, at least according to the conventional wisdom, are going to fall short in the Senate.
Now, I see little clips posted on Twitter of exchanges in the White House press briefing room.
And I think there's one reporter from Fox.
Is his name Steve Ducey?
Am I getting the name right there?
He's Steve Ducey's son.
He's Peter Ducey.
Peter Ducey, thank you.
I'm sorry.
I'm not very familiar with him, but he seems to put questions fairly well, fairly thoughtfully.
And he actually gets asked fairly often.
I think he's much more substantive and much more polite than, say, Jim Acosta, who was Trump's main antagonist, that Trump just loved to call upon.
There was some strange symbiosis there.
But other than Ducey, is the rest of the press gallery engaging in any skeptical or critical or even curious journalism?
Obviously not the war on Trump style journalism that we had until six months ago.
But is there, I see Glenn Greenwald, an independent journalist.
I see a few independent journalists like that.
But are there any institutional legacy media news agencies?
Obviously, Breitbart's the exception.
Is anyone holding Biden to account journalistically?
Or is it just the media party, as I sometimes call it?
No, nobody's really holding him accountable.
I mean, you have Peter Ducey, who's become a fixture in the White House briefing room.
So she calls on him because I think it would look bad if she didn't.
But she really bristles at it.
She doesn't like him.
It's clear she doesn't like his questions, even though they're straightforward.
Now, there have been a few mainstream outlets that have asked some more challenging questions this week because, well, maybe because they feel personally threatened.
With a COVID outbreak at the White House, they're not being told how many people are affected in the White House.
They're not being told who is affected.
Remember, the Biden administration was going to handle coronavirus so much more responsibly.
They weren't going to be reckless like Trump walking around outside without a mask.
They weren't going to let this sort of super spreader event happen at the White House.
Now they've got a COVID outbreak at the White House after they met with these Texas Democrats who ran away from their state and got COVID.
And they're not revealing anything to the press.
The press is going to work every day in the White House.
And I think they're worried about their own personal safety.
And there's nobody else wearing masks in the briefing room, really.
So there have been a few extra more pressing questions this week about that issue.
But in general, no, nobody's holding the Biden administration accountable on issues that are important to the national audience, important to the general public.
Basically Peter Ducey and Breitbart and a couple other people.
Occasionally, you get a good question in from someone else, but most journalists see their job as trying to further the agenda of the Biden administration, seeing where they can be helpful and maybe speaking for the left-wing grassroots.
You know, the Yamishi Alsendor, who is the journalist for PBS, often asks questions that attempt to enforce the left-wing line, as do several other journalists.
Now, if you have a genuine leftist asking a tough question, that can also be entertaining because sometimes left and right converge.
You mentioned Glenn Greenwald, who, while I disagree with a lot of his views, has substantive criticisms of the media and of the administration that I think are worth listening to and that conservatives can agree on.
But in general, there is no process of holding Biden accountable.
I mean, the reporting is largely of the quality of talking about how many scoops of ice giving me a - yeah.
I don't want to keep you too much longer, but I have a few more things I wouldn't mind bouncing off you.
I saw this exchange between Senator Rand Paul, who I really, my admiration for him, grows every year.
Fauci vs. Rand Paul: Gain of Function Research00:05:52
Him versus Anthony Fauci about gain of function research, which is a strange way of saying biological warfare.
I think that really is a fancy way of saying take a virus and add new functions to it that it didn't have in nature.
I just want to show you this exchange.
I thought Rand Paul came out the better of it.
How is Fauci regarded in America?
Is he discredited?
Is he a polarizing figure?
Has he become a liability, or is he a saint, a secular saint to the left?
Here's that exchange.
Dr. Fauci, as you are aware, it is a crime to lie to Congress.
Section 1001 of the U.S. Criminal Code creates a felony and a five-year penalty for lying to Congress.
On your last trip to our committee on May 11th, you stated that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And yet, gain of function research was done entirely in the Wuhan Institute by Dr. Xi and was funded by the NIH.
I'd like to ask unanimous consent to insert into the record the Wuhan Virology paper entitled Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-RELED Coronaviruses.
Please deliver a copy of the journal article to Dr. Fauci.
In this paper, Dr. Xi credits the NIH and lists the actual number of the grant that she was given by the NIH.
In this paper, she took two bat coronavirus genes, spike genes, and combined them with a SARS-related backbone to create new viruses that are not found in nature.
These lab-created viruses were then shown to replicate in humans.
These experiments combine genetic information from different coronaviruses that infect animals but not humans to create novel artificial viruses able to infect human cells.
Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the function of infecting humans.
This research fits the definition of the research that the NIH said was subject to the pause in 2014 to 2017, a pause in funding on gain of function.
But the NIH failed to recognize this, defines it a way, and it never came under any scrutiny.
Dr. Richard E. Bright, a molecular biologist from Rutgers, described this research in Wuhan as: the Wuhan lab used NIH funding to construct novel, chimeric, SARS-related coronaviruses able to infect human cells and laboratory animals.
This is high-risk research that creates new potential pandemic pathogens, potential pandemic pathogens that exist only in the lab, not in nature.
This research matches, these are Dr. Ebright's words, this research matches, indeed epitomizes the definition of gain of function research, done entirely in Wuhan, for which there was supposed to be a federal pause.
Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain of function research in Wuhan?
Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress.
Microphone back.
Your microphone.
Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement.
What do you make of that?
Is Fauci still helping the Dems?
Do they still love him?
The Democrats and the establishment media love Anthony Fauci.
Conservatives hate him because they don't like the fact that he turned on Trump.
They don't like the fact that he spends all his time in the media when he's supposed to be running the coronavirus response.
And they don't like the fact that his advice has been called on to justify all of the restrictions, the mask mandates, etc.
Now, the question of gain of function research, I was reading into this a year ago, or more than a year ago, the start of the pandemic.
And there were experiments being done where they would add spiked proteins to a virus.
The spiked protein basically is the active part of the virus.
And it's a legitimate field of research, not just for biological warfare, but to test the effects of a virus and to study how it operates.
There was a point at which Fauci, as the director of some of the funding for this research, instituted a pause in gain of function experiments because they were concerned about the ethical problems of security at the labs.
What happens if a virus escapes a lab?
You could have a pandemic.
So they suspended, or they were supposed to have suspended, gain of function research for several years until some of these ethical concerns were ironed out.
They then resumed it.
So it is an area of research that is active and ongoing.
But I think the question here was, why did this particular study at Wuhan that was published, why did that go along?
Why did that get published?
Why was that study continuing during the pause, during the period where there wasn't supposed to be gain of function research?
And Fauci's answer is, well, we studied that particular experiment before we funded it, and we determined that it wasn't gain of function.
And Rand Paul described the experiment and said, this is gain of function research.
There's no difference between this and ordinary gain of function research.
So Fauci's position is that what was being done in Wuhan, basically creating new coronaviruses, wasn't gain of function research.
And Dr. Paul is saying, yes, it is.
And you're just pretending it isn't because the National Institutes of Health wanted to continue funding this research without going through the normal oversight process.
DeSantis vs. Trump Narrative00:03:07
So it's a bit of an obscure debate, but what people don't like on the right, and if you could summarize all the things they don't like about Fauci, is that he ignores political and economic considerations.
He was once in an exchange with Jim Jordan, Representative Jim Jordan, and Jordan asked Fauci about liberty and the compromises to personal liberty, religious freedom, freedom of speech and assembly that come from some of these restrictions from coronavirus.
And Fauci said point blank, he doesn't care about that.
That's not his job.
But Fauci doesn't think it should be anybody else's job either.
He only cares about the public health question, how many lives can we save?
That's obviously a legitimate question, but there are also questions about at what cost and cost in terms of economics and cost in terms of liberty.
And all of those decision makers were in the same room under Trump.
Trump balanced those people out against one another.
And with Biden, I think Fauci's been given free reign to sort of declare what will be the gospel.
And it's all about eliminating the risk of any kind of transmission.
And so he's a target for conservatives because he's kind of arrogated for himself a political authority that people think is unchecked and ought to be checked.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
Last question.
I appreciate you stinking around so long.
Donald Trump issues the odd press statement, and it's covered by the Trump base.
Of course, it's censored on all social media.
He gave a speech, like he gives speeches that are in that Trump style, and he can still fill a room or even a stadium.
But I wonder if Trumpism is proceeding without him, especially in the manifestation of Ron DeSantis.
I've seen some straw polls by Republicans saying who they're hoping runs next time.
And Trump still does very well, usually comes in first.
But DeSantis is very close after him.
And I look at DeSantis increasingly as someone who has many of the assets of Trump, but without some of the flaws, and someone who's a generation younger, who's running a state very successfully, an important state, a battleground state.
And although I believe that Donald Trump was unfairly dealt with, I feel like perhaps it's time to pass the baton to the Trumpist, who's not Trump, but is Trumpian, if I can make a whole bunch of words.
What do you think?
I don't know that we're there yet.
I think the straw poll at CPAC in Florida showed DeSantis doing very well, second place to Trump, as you mentioned, not too far behind.
But the recent CPAC straw poll in Texas showed Trump far, far ahead of DeSantis and the rest of the field.
I don't know if the rest of the conservative movement is sold on DeSantis.
And frankly, I don't know that DeSantis is yet a national opposition figure.
Trump is still the most important opposition leader in America.
And it's up to him, really, whether he cedes his place to another candidate or not.
I think the disadvantage of having Trump as a candidate in 2024 is it will largely be about the 2020 election.
Election Fraud Narratives00:03:06
He'll be talking about election fraud and so forth.
And I'm not sure the country really cares anymore.
However, that could also be an advantage.
Whatever you think of Trump's claims, and they could all be empty or bogus, they are a strong unifying theme in the same way that Biden's hoaxes were a unifying theme.
I'm not comparing Trump's message to that because Biden was making things up out of whole cloth.
And I do think there are reasons to believe there were problems in the 2020 election.
But what Biden teaches is that you just need sort of a narrative that describes the world as you see it.
And there can be problems with the narrative.
There can even be severe factual problems with the narrative.
But Trump has a strong narrative in complaining about the election, even though the evidence isn't yet there for any kind of fraud that would have changed the outcome.
The idea that things were rigged against him, I think, is one people find compelling.
I think that's probably true.
Joel, great to see you.
I hear the phone is ringing.
Our time is up.
Thanks for joining us today, my friend.
Thank you.
There you have it.
Joel Pollock Sr., editor-at-large at breitbart.com.
Boy, so many topics south of the board.
It was great to catch up.
Stay with us more.
Hey, welcome back on my show.
Last night, Lane writes, Ezra, did we see an investigation into SNC Lavaland?
No.
Did we see an investigation into WEE scandal?
No.
Should the non-political appointed commission of the RCMP conduct said investigations?
Yes.
So to answer your question, the FBI political bias is already here and led by the PM appointed commissioner of the RCMP.
I think you're so right.
At least in the United States, they have something called an inspector general.
It's sort of like our Auditor General, but I think they have a far wider scope.
The FBI is an inspector general.
All the government agencies, it's basically a fraud hunter, a reviewer, an auditor of every agency.
I don't think we have that in Canada.
Our Auditor General has far more limited powers, far more limited budget.
And, you know, investigations can be killed with a phone call by the prime minister's office, or a justice minister can be turfed for not bending the knee as in SNC Lab.
And I'm afraid that we have just as corrupt a system in Canada as they do in the United States, but we just don't know about it.
There's less chance to catch it and less chance to stop it.
Iverson says the FBI has investigated itself and found nothing wrong.
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, all the deep state agencies, the alphabet soup of FBI and CIA and NSA, they all seem to be in it together.
The permanent, as Eisenhower called it, industrial military complex, they're there, whether it's Trump or Biden or Clinton or whomever, they're there permanently.
And I think they're friends socially.
They share an ideology and a self-preservation.
We have the same thing in Canada.
It's a little bit scary.
Eisenhower's Warning00:01:23
And if Eisenhower himself warned about it more than 50 years ago, imagine how bad it is now.
Well, folks, that's the show for today.
What do you think of my long-winded call for businessy positions at Rebel News?
I always like to hire more reporters, and I do want to hire someone on the China beat, on the Ottawa parliamentary beat, I think that's important, and someone in the UK that's sort of a wish or a dream of mine.
But really, those business positions, although like events are really fun, the purpose is to raise more dough so we can do the journalism.
I don't know.
I think we have to do that because in my mind, I think if a real grown-up were to run Rebel News with making a profit as their central goal, what would they do?
And I think these are some of the answers.
Well, shouldn't we do them too?
We should do all the heart stuff, the emotional stuff, the stuff we love and are passionate about.
We should do the freedom fighting, but we also have to make sure we pay the bills.
So I hope that someone out there says that's a job for me and applies.
And you never know, it might be you.
That's our show for today.
I'm going to be away tomorrow on a very special reporting project.
So my friend David Menzies will be hosting the Ezra Land Show in my absence.
But we'll have a big report when I return in a few days.
Until then, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.