Ezra Levant exposes Justin Trudeau’s $61M pre-election media subsidies—funding Chickadee ($1.35M), Reader’s Digest ($1.5M), and others—while accusing the government of secrecy, suggesting recipients may soften coverage of Trudeau’s opponents. Drew Holden reveals media double standards, like uncritical support for Andrew Cuomo despite nursing home deaths and $110K from Harvey Weinstein, while outlets like NPR censored Hunter Biden’s laptop story as "Russian disinformation." Rebel News, fully viewer-funded, has expanded its staff, contrasting with perceived government-dependent media hypocrisy. [Automatically generated summary]
A $61 million emergency payment to the media was rushed out by Trudeau and Stephen Gilbo right before the election.
Isn't that incredible?
They paid a $61 million bribe to reporters, but that's not even the story.
The story is they're keeping the names of the reporters secret.
They made a secret payment to reporters on the eve of the election.
What do you think about that?
I'll tell you what I think.
That's ahead.
Let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus first, though.
It's eight bucks a month, no big deal.
Go to RebelNews.com, click subscribe.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, why is Trudeau keeping his list of media subsidy recipients a secret?
It's August 12th, and this is the Astrom Event 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 for why I'm sure it's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Things are upside down these days, a moral inversion to kind of madness.
I saw a story about someone who freaked out in a store because they were pressured to put a mask on and they didn't want to.
It's just some random story.
I don't know the facts, but I can guess it's the stress.
It's the shocking, demoralizing stress of not recognizing not only your own country, but your own city, your own neighborhood, your own stores you go to, your own friends, your own family, your whole world.
What it is to be a person anymore.
A couple years ago, I visited Tommy Robinson in prison a few times.
And as a visitor to a prison, I had to follow rules.
It was a very strict prison.
I had to be inspected and handled and have my privacy violated.
And that's just as a visitor, obviously.
They looked in my mouth.
They had dogs sniff me just for a few hours while I was a visitor.
It was alienating and destabilizing for a few hours, a small taste of what it would be like to be a prisoner all the time.
But I knew I would be out for sure in an hour or so.
So it's more of a curiosity, an uncomfortable but rare and anomalous experience that I could talk about later from comfort and safety.
I knew it had an end date, an end time.
I feel like that prison experience all the time now, and of course, mine was very mild and very short just as a visitor.
I feel like what I saw and what I experienced in those hours has been extrapolated to the whole world, to all of our lives.
I mean, we did nothing wrong.
And we had no due process.
We had no court, no parliament, no debate, no vote.
And then suddenly we're ruled by people we never heard of before, public health high priests with bizarre demands of us that are instantly law, like some mad king issuing edicts.
And they seem to change their views about things without explanation or logic and expect us to forget that.
Like in the novel 1984 where Winston Smith, the hero, would simply change an old headline in a newspaper and throw out the original so you never could check what actually did happen before.
It's madness.
It's so psychologically shocking that many weaker people have embraced it as a form of Stockholm Syndrome.
They can't make sense of it.
They know they can't defeat it or make it stop.
So they cast their lot in with it, like a hostage realizing that their only hope is to side with the hostage taker as everything else is doomed.
So perhaps joining the devil will save you from him.
I never watched that anti-Trump show called The Handmaid's Tale.
It was meant to be a commentary on Trump.
The show's creator said so, which is odd because there's a lot of misogyny that really is in the world, but I can't think of any that came from Trump during his time as president.
I see it coming from Iran, for example.
I can actually see it coming from radical transgender activists too, if you want to talk about women's rights and women's spaces.
But not from the Christian right.
You know that Margaret Atwood, who wrote the original novel some 40 odd years ago, she said she was actually basing the concept loosely on the revolution in Iran and its anti-women Islamic tenets, but she lacked the courage to criticize Islam, so she made the tyrants American conservative Christians.
I didn't watch the show, but I saw a few clips of it online here and there.
And one theme, and I appreciated this, was how the Puritans who ran this diabolical world never believed in it themselves and were hypocrites in every way.
Everything they banned for ordinary people, they indulged in for themselves, sex, liquor, drugs, banned books, whatever.
I think that's a commentary on any Puritan society, any authoritarian society, the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party.
They don't follow the rules they impose on the little people.
Saudi billionaire princes love liquor that's banned officially in the country.
I mentioned this because in our new tyranny, our new authoritarian world that happened so quickly, that happened without a battle, without a vote, without a choice, without a question, it just happened from within.
But strangely, it happened from within everywhere at the same time.
That's odd, isn't it?
And it was just done.
And at first, people signed up for the hygiene revolution.
They wore their masks and socially distanced, and they followed the rules.
But two weeks to flatten the curve, like my very short prison visit, you'll be done very soon, just stay with it.
Two weeks to flatten the curve, it's now almost two years to do what?
The curve is more than flattened.
It's over.
How did the goal move from flatten the curve, which just means stop hospitals from being overwhelmed at once, and they never were.
How do we move from that to mask rules, to travel quarantines and COVID jails, to forced vaccines, which is where we are now, all without a question, without asking us, without our consent.
And more and more to see, like in the Handmaid's Tale, like in the Soviet or Islamic tyrannies, to see the ruling classes, the elites break their rules with impunity and laugh about it.
We all saw the elite of the elite partying with Barack Obama for his 60th birthday.
No masks, no social distancing.
John Kerry, the climate czar, flew in on his private jet.
Of course he did.
Less cool, less elite, less stylist, less impressive, but just as authoritarian.
A Canadian cabinet minister, Catherine McKenna, used taxpayers' dollars to jet to Nineveh last week.
That's quite a flight.
To take photo ops of herself, but look at that.
No masks, no quarantines, no social distancing.
Even though Nineveh, the territory, has special rules for people flying in from the South.
A liberal cabinet minister flies in for pre-campaign photo ops and breaks the 14-day quarantine and mask rules and publishes photos of herself breaking the rules just to let you know.
She's in the ruling class and you're not.
So here we are in an upside-down world and they'll tell you that you're crazy, that you're the conspiracy theorist, that you shouldn't be asking any questions.
Liberal Photo Ops Break Rules00:14:58
You'll be banned if you do.
It's up to upside down.
It's that moral inversion.
Why do we rely, who do we rely on, to tell us the truth about him?
We used to rely on reporters.
We still have a few good reporters in Canada, sometimes Evan Solomon, the CTV, asks surprising questions of cabinet ministers.
Steve Chase of the Globe and Mail is strong on covering China's evil.
Don't ever let me say that reporters are 100% corrupt, but I'll say that 90% of them don't dare challenge power.
They don't dare color outside the lines, challenge the powers to be.
They're incurious, or they've taught themselves nothing good comes from curiosity.
They killed the cat.
And they're not brave lions.
They're more little house cats.
And what little curiosity or skepticism or sense of speaking truth to power there is, well, it's being drummed out of them by plain old cash.
Just money.
Look at this.
Here's Andrew Coyne of the National Post at the time, ripping the proposed media bailout.
Back in 2019, he wrote this.
Of course, he took the bailout.
So did the Global Mail, where he now works.
What a laugh to see this criticism in the CBC again from a couple years ago.
They received $1.5 billion a year from the government.
They were saying, we don't like the media bailout.
Look at this one here.
Journalists question it.
Yeah.
Then they all took it.
Every journalist in that story took the bailout.
Here's Bob Cox from the Winnipeg Free Press, who lied, sorry, pardon me, who led the charge for the bailout, and was first in line at the trough.
Cox said revenue in the Winnipeg Free Press had fallen over 30% since mid-March, and he's heard revenue dropping 40% elsewhere in the industry.
Unless you're a company that relies entirely on readers-free revenue, you're in a lot of trouble, he said.
Yeah, if your readers don't like you anymore, they don't trust you anymore, that's a sign that maybe you're doing things wrong.
How about listen to your readers and respect them instead of just asking Trudeau for a bailout because your own readers don't like you anymore?
Well, here we are two years later, and it's the eve of the next election where a key issue is Trudeau's banned planned censorship of the internet.
I say it's a key issue because it is for me, but the Conservative Party of Canada hasn't mentioned it once.
Neither Aaron O'Toole nor his spokesman on the issue, Alain Reyes.
Come to think of it, I haven't heard O'Toole oppose a vaccine passport either, have you?
Or come to think of it, the lockdowns, have you?
In fact, O'Toole sounds more terrified of the virus than anyone else these days.
Canadians are worried about a fourth wave of COVID-19.
The dangerous Delta variant is here, and we have to be ready.
Now is not the time for an election.
We can all wait and go to the polls when it's safe.
We need to focus on health and well-being, securing our economic future, and fighting COVID-19 together.
My wife and I had COVID.
Like many families, we want to get past this pandemic.
But let's pull together for one more fight.
Let's beat COVID-19 and have an election when it's safe.
Yeah, not sure what O'Toole thinks the key issue in this campaign is at all.
But Trudeau's taking no chances.
He's bribing the media again right before the election, but this time he's making it secret.
Not even kidding.
Take a look at this from Blacklock's reporter.
Now the subsidies are secret.
Heritage Minister Stephen Gilbo's department refuses to name publishers awarded nearly $61 million in pre-election emergency relief.
The grants were to ensure readers receive timely information they require from the government, Gilbo wrote in a letter to MPs: quote, these measures demonstrate the government's commitment to both a robust, diverse, and sustainable news ecosystem and ensuring Canadians can receive the timely information they require from the government, Gilboner wrote in a July 21 letter to the Commons Heritage Committee.
The letter did not elaborate on links between subsidies and coverage of cabinet announcements.
Did you get that?
If Trudeau didn't pay reporters a $61 million payout, they might not report on what the government's doing.
So it's an emergency.
Better get them that money quick before the election, or they might not cover the news.
Really?
Do you mean they might not report friendly enough?
Is that what you meant to say?
Or they might not report pro-liberal enough.
What you meant to say.
You really think that reporters who are working right now, writing stories for the news right now, you really think they wouldn't cover this election, cover the news right now, unless you gave me a $61 million bonus right now before the election.
Is that what you're saying?
But here's the most interesting part: staff would not answer repeated requests for names of publishers and the amounts they received under the ad hoc program called Emergency Support for Cultural Industries.
Why is it secret?
Well, because we're in upside-down times.
In the before times, the media rooted out government secrets.
Today, media bailouts by government are the secret.
So, why would the media expose themselves?
In the past, corrupt businessmen would secretly pay politicians to get their way.
Now, politicians secretly pay money to corrupt businessmen to get their way because those businessmen are the owners of the mainstream media.
It's the government paying the bribes now.
That's upside down.
This article in Black's Locks does name some names, no newspapers, but a list of magazines that took other cash.
It includes children's magazines like Chickadee, which got $1.35 million.
I wonder how that will politicize that children's mag.
I bet it will.
It's quite something.
Pacific Yachting Magazine got $250,000.
I have to say it like that.
Because if you've got a yacht, you probably need working men and women to subsidize your yachting magazine.
I'm serious.
The gossip rag Frank Magazine got $110,000.
Let me guess.
Fewer gossip items about Trudeau, more about his opponents.
Just going to guess.
$1.5 million to the publisher of Reader's Digest.
$1.2 million to McLean's magazine.
A million to Chatelaine.
$570,000 to Toronto Life.
That explains a lot, doesn't it?
But that's chicken feed compared to $61 million in emergency pre-election spending to reporters covering the election.
You know, in the past, this would be a scandal, and a dozen journalists would have dug into this story, but they're the ones who are being hidden here.
The only way we found out about this was through Blacklocks Reporter, one of the few companies that's not on the take.
We're in upside-down times, aren't we?
Stay with us for more.
Hey, welcome back.
I thought my prediction was pretty solid last week when I said Andrew Cuomo will brazen it out.
He will not resign.
I mean, look around.
The Democrat governor of Virginia was caught in blackface, or was it a Klan outfit or both?
And he just said, no, I'm not resigning.
What are you going to do about it?
The media huffed and puffed for a day or so, and he's still governor.
I mean, look at Bill Clinton, credibly accused of rape.
But put that aside, he was on Jeffrey Epstein's plane to Lolita Island.
Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile procurer.
He's still a grand old man of the Democrat Party.
I thought for sure Andrew Cuomo would survive.
But alas, shortly after I said that, he announced he was going to resign when even Joe Biden, the president, started to raise an eyebrow.
How is it that he didn't survive?
What did the media, who defended him for so long, say about it?
Joining us to talk about these things is Drew Holden, a freelance columnist, including in places like the Washington Post and New York Times, and a former congressional staffer.
Great to meet you, Drew.
It's nice to meet you.
I follow you on Twitter.
Tell us a little bit about yourself before we talk about Andrew Cuomo.
Where did you come from?
I follow you on Twitter.
I find it very interesting.
How would you describe yourself to our viewers?
Yeah, I appreciate that, Ezra, and happy to hear that you enjoy it.
I, you know, I've been doing this thing now for maybe about a year and a half where I've been trying to chronicle the things that people generally, but particularly Democrats and folks in the media, say that just isn't true, right?
Either things that we knew at the time weren't true or things that are hypocritical or maybe look unserious in retrospect.
As you mentioned, I used to work in Congress.
I've been doing some freelance writing since then, and it's picked up a little bit of steam, right?
I think folks are, there wasn't really anyone who's kind of going back and digging up the old takes.
The media has this ability since they're kind of, they're the fact checkers.
They're the first draft of history, right?
And so they have this ability, I think, to kind of say whatever they'd like.
The news moves on and no one kind of digs and picks up the pieces of where things were.
And so I've been putting those things out there.
I've been doing it in columns.
I've been doing it on Twitter with some threads.
And yeah, I mean, I think folks are interested to know what was said back then.
And I basically have a ton of receipts kicking around on my phone and on my computer that are bad takes or takes that I think will eventually go bad.
And unfortunately, everything that happened with Cuomo is a kind of a masterclass in how to talk about someone when he's flying high.
That looks really bad when a lot of the truth that we probably should have known in advance starts to come to light.
Yeah.
Well, I think there's a difference because occasionally Republicans are stars for a moment.
They're having a great week, great month.
And I don't see the same erotic affection as, and I say erotic on purpose.
I mean, the phrase Cuomosexual, how ironic that is in retrospect.
You had serious journalists from serious news outlets talking in romantic terms about Cuomo.
You had lesser serious journalists like Trevor Noah of Late Night TV calling himself a Cuomosexual, talking about Tinder.
But even if the language wasn't erotic, they gave this guy an Emmy for crying out loud.
No Republican, even on his best day, gets this kind of slavish treatment.
It seems pretty obviously one-sided to me.
What do you think?
Yeah, I would agree with that.
I mean, I think some of it with Cuomo, it really was outlandish, right?
And obviously, he has since come under a lot of scrutiny and a lot of criticism, even from voices within his own party about the way he handled coronavirus.
But I think when the sexual harassment allegations started to come up, you look back at some of this language and you're right.
I mean, the LA Times had a serious, earnest piece about Cuomo himself embracing the term Cuomosexual, that he thought it was great and valuable and good.
It wasn't just late night hosts who were bantering this kind of language around.
And I just, I can't, even in plumbing the depths of history, I can't find examples of where anything close to that comes up for Republicans.
There are certainly Republicans who are cheered among the Republican base, right?
We saw this with Trump, I think, in terms that were certainly pretty outlandish from time to time.
But to have these reputable news outlets talking with just such glowing, unbelievable affection about someone who their primary job, right?
This is one of the most powerful men in America that they're covering.
Their primary job is to be an accountability mechanism.
And rather than even pretending to try and be an accountability mechanism for this guy, it's the sort of things that I'm sure his own press team would have been embarrassed to put out there.
Yeah.
You know, you mentioned a couple of things that I think are important.
The first is Cuomo made a move early in coronavirus to send people with the virus into long-term care homes, nursing homes that absolutely and inextricably led to the death of thousands of people.
And that was not a secret that was known.
It was public information for a year.
That was never picked up.
I mean, look at the war on Ron DeSantis now.
So I think that people knew there were weaknesses in Andrew Cuomo.
I even think that his approach to women hitting on them all the time, I think that was an open secret in Albany, just like with Harvey Weinstein.
Everyone knew that he was handsy and gropey and that he had the casting couch.
I don't think these things were secret.
I think it's just the Democrat powers that be decided they could no longer be a dam holding back this river because they weren't.
These weren't sudden revelations, were they?
No, they weren't at all.
And so to break them out a little bit, you know, I'm reminded of an interview that, or I guess a press pool that Cuomo did back in 2017.
This is right when the Me Too movement is starting to gather steam.
All of the allegations of Weinstein have just come out.
And a female reporter asks if Cuomo is going to do anything to try and clean up Albany, to try and clean up these Albany or New York City, right?
These men who hold positions of power in government and beyond who are abusing women.
And he said to her that her question was an insult to women.
And this is 2017, right?
And then I think that the real kicker for me, though, the thing that really gets me is shortly thereafter, a lot of Democrats started to return money that had been given by Harvey Weinstein, right?
He's this big Democrat bundler.
He's raised a lot of money for a lot of candidates, running for president all the way on down.
And the last national level figure to return that money is Andrew Cuomo.
He had received $110,000 from Harvey Weinstein and Harvey Weinstein's company.
And he balked when originally the allegations came out.
He said, no, I'm keeping the money.
He was the last one with any kind of national profile to give back that money.
And so you would think, right, these stories, we've known about Cuomo's personal antics.
We've known about how awful of an office environment he's run for years, right?
This is an open secret.
And people, when everything was breaking out with the coronavirus, this was part of the coverage, right?
The Washington Post had a story about how Cuomo's Cuomo's kind of domineering personality is finally coming to benefit the people of New York.
NPR had a piece that said that his micromanagement and his open hostility to some of his employees, these are actually really good things in a moment of crisis.
Everyone knew who Andrew Cuomo was.
We might be able to dither a little bit about the specifics, but I don't think any of these revelations are out of, you know, out of being in line with his character.
What's interesting is how he co-opted so many feminist advocates, like the leader of the Times Up Me Too movement, actually came to his aid.
I mean, they knew who he was and they went into defense mode for him, knowing who he was.
Now, I'm not accusing him of rape.
I mean, his defense was, I've always been handsy, everybody knows.
Left Defense Tactics00:03:27
But the fact that the absolute social arbiters of what you can and can't do to women, the most Puritan don't touch Me Too, Time's Up folks, they went to battle for him to discredit his accusers.
That says more than anything, I think.
I think so, too.
And you make a really important point there.
It wasn't just that they came to Cuomo's defense and said, ah, you know, this guy, he's touchy.
He's Italian, I think was some of the defense.
And a Navarro from CNN, when these allegations first surfaced, had said, you know, I've met him many times.
And like many people in Miami, he greets you with a hug and a kiss.
There was some of that defense, but I think what's really egregious about the Times Up defense was they went out of their way to work with Andrew Cuomo and his team to smear his accusers, to drag her name through the mud, to discredit her, right?
The Cuomo team leaked her personnel file, both to members of the media and to the team at Times Up and said, have at it.
I mean, it's picturesque of the sorts of things that these organizations, they purport to be fighting against.
And yet they were guarding the ramparts for a guy like Cuomo after he had been credibly accused and using all of the tactics of all of the people they're saying that they've been fighting against all this time from Harvey Weinstein on down.
I got one last question for you, Drew.
It's nice to talk with you, and I really recommend your Twitter feed to folks watching.
It's Drew Holden 360.
Is that where you are on Twitter?
That's right, sir.
Yep.
All my writing finds its way there.
It's a great feed to follow for those who like especially American political cultural commentary.
I have the same feeling about free speech activists on the left as with anti-misogyny activists on the left.
The left really made a name for itself in Berkeley and in the 60s and 70s as the free speech people.
But now that there is censorship of conservatives, whether it's big tech or activists like Rand Paul, the U.S. Senator had his YouTube account suspended the other day.
The left is silent.
And again, with the Me Too feminist movement, the left is silent or even helping Kuomu.
And I don't know, did the left ever really believe in those things or was it just a tactical tool to put the Republicans on the back foot?
I'd like to think that some liberals actually hold those values dear, but it seems to me that it's really just a trick or a tool to use in a particular transaction against Republicans.
You know, I think I want to have that same hope that you do.
I want to be able to say that, yes, there are earnest and committed traditional liberals who are still fighting these sorts of fights.
There certainly are some of them.
But when you look at the institution of the Democratic Party, and then particularly in the American press, right, that the corporate media, you do see this real rush and drive to censorship.
I mean, I think probably the most egregious example that I can remember is the story about Hunter Biden's laptop, right?
Originally, we're told there are all these kind of NATS tech folks who come out of the woodwork to say, it's Russian disinformation.
Don't touch it.
Don't touch it.
And it becomes kind of a media rights issue, right?
The Post is saying, no, no, we verified this.
This is important information.
We need to get it out there to people.
And you saw, and then they get taken off of Twitter.
They get taken off of Facebook.
You can't even share the link on DMs and Twitter.
And rather than guard this sacred notion of the press and their ability to reach the people, the rest of corporate media attacked the Post, right?
There's an NPR piece.
NPR didn't cover it.
Why The Post Stands Firm00:01:49
And I got a bunch of questions about why they weren't talking about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Their PR office actually put out an article about why they didn't want to be telling information that wasn't actual news, that weren't real stories, to their listeners and to their viewers.
They had a piece explaining why they were engaging in censorship.
I mean, it really does boggle the mind, I think, when you think about the ideals of free speech.
And unfortunately, I think what we've seen in the last couple of years, certainly in the 2020 election, it's a huge cudgel.
It's a really, really effective weapon to be able to take and use against your enemies.
And unfortunately, I think a lot of the powerful voices on the left are waking up to that.
Yeah.
Drew Holden, great to talk with you.
Thanks for your time.
Pleasure's mine, sir.
Thank you.
Right on.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
Hey, welcome back on my show.
Last night, Josie writes, I'm so grateful for all Rebel News has done during this time of COVID madness.
I cannot watch 6 o'clock news on TV or listen to talk radio anymore.
I think people are waking up to their misinformation.
I hope they're tuning in to your show.
And it's always intelligent and thought-provoking.
Well, that's a very nice compliment.
Thank you very much.
You know, I was just working on another video, and I should have it out tomorrow.
We have doubled the number of journalists working for us in the past year.
It's incredible.
There's so many stories to tell on any given day.
There's so much news out there.
And I'm just so glad that our viewers support it.
Remember, I said earlier, Bob Cox of the Winnipeg Free Press said, our viewers don't support us anymore.
Trudeau, give us money.
You know, he didn't even think of fixing his broken relationship with his viewers and readers.
We are 100% viewer and reader supported.
So it's very encouraging that we've had what success we have.