Ezra Levant critiques Maryam Monsef’s "Taliban brothers" remark, exposing alleged lies in her immigration application as an Iranian refugee misrepresented as Afghan, while dismissing Trudeau’s feminist foreign policy as hollow amid the Taliban’s swift oppression. He contrasts Biden’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal—abandoning Bagram airbase, leaving allies behind, and losing $85B worth of equipment—with Trump’s negotiated exit, calling it evidence of U.S. decline under weak leadership. Levant questions media "accountability journalism," suggesting it’s politically motivated rather than principled, as journalists pivot from supporting Biden to probing failures ahead of 2022 elections, while Trudeau’s priorities remained domestic despite global crises. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I'm going to take one more crack of the Maryam Monsef Taliban Brothers video.
I mean we already talked about how absurd it was, but today I want to look at the Globe and Mail and what they said about it because it was obviously her mess and Trudeau's mess, but now it's the Globe's mess.
And I'll explain to you why and what they got wrong.
Let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebel News Plus.
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I've mentioned it the past few days, but during the duration of the federal election, we are giving away the video version of this podcast, which we normally charge eight bucks a month for.
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And I think you'll get a real kick out of the video side of things.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, what is Miriam Monsef's Taliban Brothers comment?
Teach us about the media.
It's August 26th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
Miriam Monsef's Taliban Brothers Comment00:13:45
The only thing I have to say is government.
But why?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Hello, and before I start our monologue about Maryam Monsef and the Globe and Mail, let me just say thanks to you for your amazing generosity for our FightVaccinePassports.com project.
When last I checked, we had raised over $125,000 in less than a day.
I'm very excited about that.
I mean, it's a terrible situation we're in, but I feel great that you believe in it.
Our first client, I think, is perfect.
I mean, it's tragic, the situation, but it's perfect legally speaking.
What I mean by that is she's such a sympathetic client who did everything right, who said, sure, I'll take Moderna, took it, was devastated by an allergic reaction.
Her doctor says there's no way you can take the second jab.
So she's not a malingerer.
She's not a faker.
She's a perfect citizen, a model citizen who cannot take the vaccine.
And yet you have the most atrocious, odious government vaccine mandate that basically is going to turn her into a prisoner in her own home.
So the facts are so strong, and the law is strong, especially because it's a government ban.
I believe that we have a very strong case there.
And my goal is to find 20 strong strategic cases.
It's not a mass project like we did with Fight the Flines, where we literally took everyone, because really fighting a fine is a smaller enterprise than a large constitutional challenge.
So thanks for your support.
I really feel like we can make a difference in this battle.
But I don't want to get my hopes too high because as our producer Justin said to me just earlier today, has there been a judge in Canada that has done anything meaningful to stop the erosion of our civil liberties?
I was watching the movie True Grit the other day and there was a scene where an outlaw says, someone says, well, get you a good lawyer.
He says, I don't need a good lawyer.
I need a good judge.
And I think in Canada, we need a good judge.
All right, that's a little thank you to you.
So I really appreciate that.
We'll do our best.
And I know our lawyers will too.
I want to talk to you about something we discussed earlier this week.
It was Maryam Monsef's bizarre comment, a scripted comment.
Take a look at this.
She's reading from notes, calling the Taliban our brothers, the Taliban, which is a terrorist group.
Take a look.
I want to take this opportunity to speak to our brothers, the Taliban.
We call on you to ensure the safe and secure passage.
of any individual in Afghanistan out of the country.
She was reading that from notes and it came out that she has used that exact same phrase before.
So this was not just something that popped into her mind.
You know, she doesn't do a lot of her own writing.
She's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
So all of her speeches are written by staff, probably in this case, by civil servants.
So there must have been a bunch of eyes on that.
The actual writer, the editor, the press officer, like probably, I don't know, as many as 10 people would have seen that phrase, our brothers, the Taliban.
And they all said, yeah, that's their thinking in not only the Foreign Affairs Ministry, but in the Ministry of Women's and Gender Equality, the Ministry of Women and Gender Equality.
That's who Maryam Monseff is.
So she said it before, and this is her view.
I want to explain why I think it's just so incredible.
But I want to do so by showing you the reaction to that video by a senior international correspondent for the Global Mail.
His name is Mark McKinnon.
And a lot of people have mocked this, but really the elite of our media, Mark McKinnon, like it doesn't get a higher hype than him at the newspaper of record.
Here's what he said.
Let me show you his tweet.
Dear Canada.
I love that.
It's very condescending.
Dear Canada.
I mean, come on, Canada.
You're so precious.
Let me send you a little update.
Dear Canada.
Maryam Monsev decided to make a plea directly to the Taliban.
Is that what this is?
Do unveiled women speaking English at a Canadian press conference?
Is that a direct plea to the Taliban?
Calling on them to allow safe passage to the airport.
Is that who we have negotiating with the Taliban, a women's equality minister based in Canada?
We're not having, I don't know, our military or our spy agencies or our diplomats.
We're doing it in Canada in English on a like just this is incredible.
Let me get through it.
Calling on them to allow safe passage to the airport.
She's using the language that she, as an Afghan Canadian, feels would be most effective.
Can we please do the politics on point scoring later?
Dear Canada, you're so naive.
I mean, come on, this was sophisticated.
Our brothers, that's how you do it.
Yeah.
No, I mean, there's so many, I don't know how you can jam so many errors in one short tweet.
Let's go through some of them.
The first one just gets me every time.
She's not an Afghan Canadian.
And McKinnon's colleague at the Global Mail is the one who broke that shocking news.
You see, her whole life, she played the Afghan card.
I'm a young Afghan woman.
Talk to me about Afghanistan.
Barack Obama even mentioned her when he came to visit Parliament in Canada.
That's her storyline.
The whole thing was fake.
She was from Iran.
She and her whole family lied on their immigration and refugee application because they knew that saying they were Afghans would get them in as opposed to saying if they were Iranian.
Here's Bob Fife when he began to unravel her lies.
So you were born in Afghanistan, correct?
I believe I was.
So she's not an Afghan Canadian.
She's an imposter.
It's atrocious to me that she remains in cabinet after having a fraudulent immigration application.
Frankly, I don't even know if she should be a citizen.
She got here through lying.
But the next, and I mentioned this earlier, communicating with the Taliban.
I mean, we know that she wasn't.
She was communicating to Canadian voters.
I don't think the Taliban would really pay attention to any woman, let alone an unveiled woman speaking English in Canada.
But the fact that the Globe and Male, their senior international correspondent, says that was going on, what does that say about his sophistication?
Does he really think the Taliban over there in Kabul are scrolling on Twitter in English, in Canada, seeing what the Minister of Women and Gender Equality has to say to them and gives that any weight?
Does Mark McKinnon, who the Globe and Male relies on for their foreign policy guidance, does he really believe that?
I think he does.
She's using that language that she thinks is most effective.
Yeah, it's not culturally effective.
It's not culturally appropriate.
And we know that because an actual Afghan refugee woman named Zahra Sultani said at great length in an explanatory column in the Toronto Sun, there is no context whatsoever that you would call a murderous terrorist group our brothers.
None at all.
Here's her calling in the Toronto Sun.
I don't know why Mark McKinnon won't respect an actual Afghan refugee.
I think his liberal partisanship is shining through.
There's a bigger issue, though, and that is feminism on the world stage.
Justin Trudeau went to the World Economic Forum, which is the biggest meaning of billionaires and investors and industrialists.
It's very politically correct.
Lots of globalists say there's a lot of things wrong with it.
But it really is a chance to talk about your country.
And Justin Trudeau went there, and what he wanted to talk about was not our energy resources, not our economic plans or trade deals.
He wanted to talk about feminism.
Remember this?
Incredibly proud to have a partner in my wife Sophie who is extremely committed to women and girls' issues.
But she took me aside a few months ago and said, okay, it's great that you're engaged and modeling to your daughter, that you want her empowered and everything, but you need to take as much effort to talk to your sons, my eight-year-old boy and my two-year-old's still a little young still, about how he treats women and how he is going to be growing up to be a feminist just like dad.
And by the way, we shouldn't be afraid of the word feminist.
Men and women should use it to describe themselves anytime they want.
Obviously, that's fake.
The thing about male feminists is the louder they talk about feminism, the more, I think, the pattern shows, they're trying to hide other things.
I mean, Gian Gameshi of the CBC, who was revealed to be sexually harassing, sexually assaulting countless women, he was a gender studies grad in college.
Now, obviously, it was partly because he'd be the only guy in a room full of women, but it was also to head off criticism that he's sexist.
I can't be sexist.
I'm a feminist.
I take gender studies.
Think of the worst sexist and even rapists in the world.
Think of Harvey Weinstein from Hollywood.
He was the biggest feminist you can find, and he was raping and imposing himself on women and even children in Hollywood to let them be in his movies.
He was atrocious, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton himself, the feminist icon, serial sexual harasser, incredibly accused of rape.
When you see a male feminist who won't shut up about male feminism, it's a preemptive strike at people looking too carefully about their own background.
And indeed, one case came out when Trudeau sexually assaulted a young woman named Rose Knight in Creston, B.C.
But of course, he just said she experienced it differently.
Remember that?
I was fairly confident.
I was very confident that I hadn't acted in a way that I felt was in any way inappropriate.
But like I said, part of the lesson that we all have to learn through this is respecting that the same interactions can be felt very differently by different people going through them.
And we have to respect that.
I apologize in the moment.
I certainly feel that if, again, I don't want to speak for her.
I don't want to presume how she feels now.
I haven't reached out to her.
No one on my team has reached out to her.
We don't think that would be appropriate at all.
So I'm responsible for my side of the interaction, which certainly, as I said, I don't feel was in any way untoward.
But at the same time, this lesson that we are learning in, and I'll be blunt about it, often a man experiences an interaction as being benign or not inappropriate, and a woman, particularly in a professional context, can experience it differently.
And we have to respect that.
So I'm telling you what you already know about male feminists.
It's fake.
But the thing is, Trudeau said our whole foreign policy was about feminism.
It was our economy.
Everything was going to be a gender analysis.
Even pipeline projects would be submitted, subjected to a gender analysis.
And Afghanistan was his keynote feminist project.
He was going to pour endless amounts of money into women and girls and sexual freedom in Afghanistan.
It was proof that he was as woke as he said he was.
And here you have the most misogynist, violent terrorist group in the world, the Taliban, who hours after taking Kabul were forcing women back into veils, painting over any ads that showed unveiled women.
This was a shocking moment for his alleged worldview of feminism.
And he sends out his women's minister, and the first thing she said is not a condemnation of them, but to call them her brothers.
Don't you see my point?
It's a fake minister who's a fake feminist in a fake feminist department, a fake foreign policy, and a fake newspaper in the form of the Global Mail that doesn't know any of these things.
And that to me is in some ways the most interesting part.
We know that Justin Trudeau is a fake.
But the Global Mail is supposed to be on guard.
They're supposed to be a watchdog.
They say they're the newspaper of record.
And Mark McKinnon is supposedly their global affairs expert who has spent time in the Middle East.
And he got every fact here wrong.
And we're supposed to take their word for anything?
I find that incredible, how easily fooled he was.
Was it fooled or was he fooling himself in service to the Liberal Party, which is a major, of course, the Trudeau government gives major amounts of bailout money to the Global Mail.
We'll talk more about these issues with Ben Weingarten next, but let me point out that Justin Trudeau, while Kabul is under disasters, while women's rights are being set back 1,400 years in that place, Trudeau's silent.
20 Years Of Afghan Withdrawal Disgrace00:10:25
He doesn't have time for any of that stuff.
He chose an early election.
That's what's important to him.
Stay with us.
Our interview with Ben is next.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans have said for many years that it is their goal to withdraw from Afghanistan, a war that is now at the 20-year mark, by some measures the longest war in American history.
Donald Trump received flack from negotiating with the Taliban as he negotiated with North Korea's tyrant.
But he was careful in those negotiations.
If the Taliban were to attack Americans, he would call off the negotiations and drop the Moab, mother of all bombs on them, to show that while he was negotiating an exit, it was to be done on his terms.
Joseph Biden took over as president, changed the rollout, the withdrawal deadline to September 11th, a terrible day for the United States, a day that you wouldn't think would be commemorated as the day America would leave Afghanistan.
But the haste and the lack of planning and the mismanagement of that exit has been nothing short of disastrous.
If you recall the exit from Saigon when America fled South Vietnam, the images of people desperate to get into the helicopters on the roof of the embassy have come to be a symbol of American defeat and overstretch and frankly bad planning.
Well, the images out of Afghanistan these past weeks have been far, far worse.
Giving up the Bagram airbase to force everyone, civilian and military alike, citizen and Afghan ally alike, to go to the Kabul International Airport, surrounded by a ring of Taliban, has been a disaster.
And then on top of those disasters today, car bombs, killing at least 11 Americans, Marines mainly, an absolute disaster.
And last I saw, President Joe Biden did not intend to make any public appearance, any press conference or any speech.
Joining us now with the latest, and we're recording this in the mid-afternoon.
This story may change in the hours ahead, is our friend Ben Weingarten, senior contributor at thefederalist and newsweek.com.
Ben, welcome to the program.
Have I more or less accurately summarized what's been going on in Afghanistan, not just today, but in recent weeks?
I think you've captured the disgrace, the cataclysm that we've seen unfolding before our very eyes.
And I think ultimately what in the immediate term this all comes down to is utter incompetence.
I would put it this way.
If you wanted to endanger the maximum number of American lives on the ground in Afghanistan and then slap Americans in the face by making it clear that you have a plan to evacuate Afghans, some percentage of whom assisted in our efforts there with no plan to evacuate Americans after leaving behind hundreds of millions, if not billions of worth of taxpayer dollar funded weaponry and equipment, leaving that airbase,
essentially evacuating the military before you evacuate civilians.
You couldn't have done this in a more disastrous, dangerous, and disgraceful way.
And our adversaries clearly neither fear nor respect us.
The fundamental difference at the end of the day between Trump and Biden is that, to your point, our adversaries knew that Donald Trump would go in and decapitate them if they dared threaten Americans in any one of these sorts of circumstances.
And he could point to real proof, real deterrent proof, in the way of the assassination of Qasem Soleimane in the crushing of ISIS with maximum speed.
Now that deterrent is completely gone.
And what you're seeing is an absolutely outrageous and disastrous decision, which completely dishonors the lives of the fallen in Afghanistan.
The hundreds of millions of Americans who have been supporting this mission, in effect, for two decades, and then the fall on 9-11.
And I couldn't be more angry about it, livid about it, personally.
I don't know how you couldn't be viscerally impacted by this if you were around on September 11th, and even if you weren't, to have witnessed this being the legacy 20 years on.
Yeah.
Of course, Canada did not participate in the Iraq war, but Canada did have an outsized force for our small country in Afghanistan, patrolling some of the hardest places.
And 158 Canadians were killed in service in Afghanistan.
Stephen Harper brought the troops home from Afghanistan in 2014, but the sacrifice of blood and treasure made by Canadians remains.
And to see the place names that we've learned fall to the Taliban, but now they're not riding horses with muskets.
Now they have first-rate American military equipment, including aircraft, including helicopters, including sophisticated weapon systems.
I saw that Donald Trump told Hugh Hewitt that one of the things the general said is it was cheaper to leave the American equipment in Afghanistan than take it home.
I'm sure that's true.
But how on earth?
I mean, even I know that's dumb, Ben, and I'm not a soldier.
And you also know that you wouldn't leave Bagram behind before you evacuated every single one of your citizens and your allies and partners as well.
There's the level of the disgrace that was the trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives sacrificed on an ever-shifting mission, which started out as a reasonable one and a prudent one, a logical one, which was pursue those responsible for attacking us on 9-11, wherever they are, and hold those accountable who are harboring them as well,
and use crippling force as fast as possible.
That's a reasonable response.
That's a narrow, national interest-oriented mission.
The mission was not to bring gender studies to Kabul University.
And the fact that trillions of dollars were spent and thousands of lives were lost, including, of course, bribing the worst kinds of warlords, turning the other way on all manner of, frankly, barbaric and stomach-turning practices, which we said essentially we can't talk about out of political correctness.
And now, when you see the national security apparatus in America firmly focused on white rage and wokeism and claiming that patriotic Americans potentially posed a real threat, you know, there was just a terror bulletin put out by the Department of Homeland Security.
And if you look at the ranking of threats going towards 9-11, the first thing they talk about was anti-government, domestic violent extremists, including those who are going to try to exploit potential coronavirus lockdowns and other policies and use that as justification for attacking.
And then number two, we're jihadists.
It's just an absolute disgrace and an outrage.
And on one level, there's the incompetence involved with this withdrawal, really a surrender effectively by President Biden and a surrender with thousands of Americans behind enemy lines and others, of course, as well.
And then you have the corruption and the asinine mission itself, of which no post-mortem has been done, but for which heads, every single head involved at a senior level, ought to roll, which is why were we trying to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in the first place?
And really, this should be the death knell for the America-last Wilsonian progressive project of trying to turn Sharia primitive bastions into Western Jeffersonian democracies.
And also just the rank corruption involved in the billions of dollars wasted trying to bribe warlords.
Just on every single level, it's a catastrophe.
And I just, I can't even contain myself.
I'm seething with it in particular because, again, I look at this all in context of this was originally a response to 9-11.
And we have so dishonored, this president in particular, has so dishonored, and others as well, the lives of those lost.
You know, you make me recall that when the Falkland Islands were seized by Argentina, the defense minister of the day, I'm going from memory here, Ben, the British defense minister resigned, saying, I ought to have known.
I didn't.
This disaster is on me.
And you don't see that kind of responsible government often.
I mean, and you could understand why perhaps he was caught off guard.
Leaving a country that you have controlled for 20 years is not something that ought to happen to catch you off guard.
You've had total control of the country for 20 years.
You've had Trump's negotiated plan and then your own negotiated plan.
So there is no excuse that perhaps the defense minister of the UK had some 40 odd years ago.
General Milley and some of the other generals, you mentioned White Rage, they're assigning readings in critical race theory.
I see General Milley's latest project is to mandate COVID vaccines for all the young men in the military, even though young men are the virus does not hassle them in any way.
He's so busy on these other projects that he hasn't done the one thing he sort of meant to do.
Not a drop of compunction from anyone of the permanent, well, what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex.
Not a shred of responsibility, accountability, no recognition that they screwed up or, you know, let alone done something like the British defense minister resign.
Yeah, and in every single respect, this is a repudiation of their policy.
Accountability Journalism Emerges00:15:28
To those who said, well, you know, we need to stay in Afghanistan in effect in perpetuity.
To your point, after 20 years and 300,000 plus troops trained and a purported government stood up, if it fell within days to the tribal Sharia-based Taliban jihadist group, then what the hell were we doing for those 20 years?
And that's why I say I really feel so deeply for, again, the families of those who lost their loved ones on 9-11 and those who lost their lives on 9-11, and then the troops who were put into this position of essentially being armed social workers and trying to engage in a woke, politically correct nation-building project there and for nothing, for ultimately our enemies taking right back over.
So again, to those who would say, well, we need it to stay in perpetuity, if it fell within days, how could you possibly justify what you were doing there?
At the same time, withdrawing was right.
The way in which we withdrew was the absolute most disastrous way possible.
So it's compounding one error with another cataclysmic error.
And now we are going to see, I believe, disastrously, arguably the greatest hostage crisis in American history.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing.
I mean, it's not just Afghans who worked with America.
I mean, I pointed out the other day, the average age in Afghanistan is younger than 20.
So half of Afghans have lived their entire lives under some sort of American or NATO governance.
And quite a few of them would have, you know, enjoyed it or at least enjoyed the economic prosperity that came from it, if not the cultural attempts to transform the country.
But there must have been in that country thousands of local people who genuinely assisted America in meaningful ways.
But put aside that, all the American contractors, all the American NGOs, like that's, I think, what you're talking about mainly, is the American military is left the Bagram air base, is getting out quickly on a deadline.
Not every American is out of that country and the keys have been handed over to the Taliban.
That's what's incredible.
I mean, what's the estimate on the number of actual American nationals?
I'm not talking about friendly Afghans, but Americans.
How many Americans do you think are left in Afghanistan?
I've read reported numbers of over 10,000, 15,000, et cetera.
And the administration, of course, talks about how many thousands of people have been evacuated, but it never does the breakdown by country.
And it has not given an honest and forthright answer as to how many Americans are there.
And that leads to the question, do they not know or do they not want us to know?
And by the way, you know, just to go back, you discussed, for example, the weaponry and the technology, et cetera, that was left behind.
We also left behind substantial troves of intelligence and technology biometric information on individuals, which in the Taliban's hands or in various jihadist groups that are likely to overrun the country now's hands, that will be used to target Americans and our allies and partners.
So in every single respect, it's a disaster.
But yeah, my first starting point is in a situation like this, if you were a commander-in-chief, your first job, your first job for any elected official in any country is to defend the life and whim of your citizens.
And that did not seem to be the first priority of the administration from the start of this unfolding disaster.
And I've said it before, impeachment and removal itself is almost too lenient a remedy for what's transpired here.
There needs to be a rolling of the heads across the board at the senior levels of pretty much every agency involved with this cataclysm.
And then there needs to be a real post-mortem investigation into the myriad ways this went wrong.
And by the way, Seegar, the special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction, has been putting out reports on the disaster that is Afghanistan for years.
But to your point, no one has paid a price for it.
And if no one pays a price for it, then we are bound to have infinitely worse cataclysms down the road.
I thought one of the most interesting moments was when the Taliban said, hey, Americans, you are done on August 31st.
That is your deadline.
And Biden agreed to it.
The CIA boss went over there, met and agreed to it.
And I just, I think back to the last president, Donald Trump, who was criticized for his brash tweets.
By the way, I think his brash tweets had a tremendous effect in terms of foreign policy.
First of all, they scared foreign leaders because they realized that he was that Trump, if he got on the wrong side of Trump, he would do things.
He wasn't just a creature of a slow bureaucratic deep state.
Second of all, he just cut through the diplomatic talk and just said things that I think he was effective actually on Twitter, even though it upset the sensibilities of some folks.
But I just try and think, if Donald Trump had some terrorist leader, because the Taliban is still on the official list of terrorist groups, both in the United States and Canada and other countries.
If the head of the Taliban had given an order to Donald Trump, even if Trump agreed to it, just the optics of him taking an order from the Taliban would have made him reject that.
I mean, Trump was sort of funny in that I would describe his approach as tit-for-tat.
If you were friendly towards him, he would be gushing towards you.
It was almost an asymmetrical tit-for-tat.
You say something friendly to him, he loves you.
He loves you.
Great guy.
But you do anything negative to him, and he comes out brawling at you.
And believe it or not, that worked because at least there was a formula that you could follow to know how to get along.
Some Taliban thug says, Trump, you're out of here on AUG 31.
Trump, just to prove he's the top dog, would smash a bunch of stuff.
But Biden said, oh, okay, that's fine by me.
Have I missed it?
Is that deadline still on?
Is the Taliban calling the shots?
In effect, that's certainly the optics.
And President Biden has given no indication to suggest otherwise.
And to your point, the Taliban would never issue an order to President Trump, de facto or du jour.
It would never happen because they knew who the top dog was.
And this is in a region of the world and among a culture where the strong course rules.
That is the rule there.
It's more like it's the state of nature, essentially.
And to your point, and I interviewed President Trump a couple months ago in connection with a book I'm working on on U.S.-China policy.
And he talked about his interactions with foreign leaders, adversaries and allies.
And the clear sense that I got walking away from that is he rattled other leaders because he spoke in non-diplomatic ease and he was blunt and straightforward.
He was unpredictable as a consequence of both the rhetoric and the actions that were considered.
And again, the proof was into pudding in the way of posing a credible deterrent.
Donald Trump didn't want to use force unless he absolutely had to.
But if he felt that he absolutely had to, he would use overwhelming force as swiftly as possible to send a message, you better not mess with America.
And that is the peace through strength, what I would call sort of a Gene Kirkpatrickian foreign policy, which does not mean nation building and occupying countries in perpetuity, but rather being so strong and showing such a willingness to use overwhelming force swiftly and indiscriminately if you felt threatened that that deterrent alone would prevent you from having to engage in missions that ultimately would lead to mission creep and would sap you of your morale,
blood, and treasure as a nation.
And we are seeing the exact opposite now.
It's not only the exact opposite in the way of an America last type of foreign policy that essentially is affirmative action for our worst adversaries, but it's even worse because it's complete weakness.
It's the emperor has no clothes, a paper tiger sort of power.
And that means danger for freedom in America and everywhere in the world.
Well, I'm excited to hear you have a new book coming out, and the fact that you interviewed the former President Trump is very interesting to me.
Let me ask you, I've started to see some journalists in what I call the media party, the pro-Democrat, soft left, mainstream media, who heretofore have been almost cheerleaders.
I've started to see some of them, in the face of this appalling Afghan exit, be critical and ask questions that I would almost say is accountability journalism, certainly not in the attack dog way that they treated Trump every day.
But I am seeing cracks in the unity in the media party.
What do you say about that?
Do you think that the American media has been more accurate and more fair and more balanced in its coverage of Biden?
Or do you think I'm just looking for examples of that and generally they're whitewashing the disaster here?
How would you rate the media these past few weeks?
I think, well, I don't really want to speculate as to what the intent is behind it.
I think it's very clear that the media has asked more pointed questions than they've ever asked the president, particularly while he was hermetically sealed as a candidate.
And then I guess in the first six month honeymoon period of sorts, he and those around him have been called to the mat for essentially being absent during the middle of a crisis where he was on vacation and Jen Psaki was on vacation and others as this calamity was unfolding.
And then, yes, they have been asked pointed questions about Americans being left behind and how were you not prepared for this?
And how was the intelligence so wrong?
Or how did the military get their assessment so wrong as to how quickly the country might fall to the Taliban?
And it's almost cringeworthy, of course, when they go back and they point to the president talking about almost explicitly, we're not going to have a Saigon moment here.
We're not going to have people leaving on helicopters and the like.
And the administration simply can't defend what's happening.
And the media, which generally speaking, the corporate media, serves as the communications arm, I would argue, for the ruling class writ large and this administration or this president, who I've argued is sort of an avatar for the ruling class, even they can't defend it on the merits.
Now, again, what is their intent?
I don't want to speculate too much except to say that I think they know this is a political disaster.
I mean, they should ask these questions on the merits as journalists, holding the powerful to account, which they so rarely do.
So I guess we should acknowledge that and appreciate that for once the media is acting like real journalists.
That said, is it rooted in actually the merits or is it rooted in the fact that they know this is a political disaster and they need to act this way because there's an unfolding political calamity potentially in 2022?
And beyond, is it that the call has gone out that they ought to turn on President Biden and this will allow for his quick exit a year in or less and that you can justify essentially shunting President Biden aside now that he serves his useful purpose of knocking off President Trump?
Who knows?
But all I can say is, yes, the media is acting like real journalists to an extent.
And it's heartening to see, although I have my doubts about how genuine it is.
Well, you know, you've been very generous with your time.
I just have, yeah, I have five questions written down here, but I'm just going to choose one.
Often in a political crisis, the boss says, well, I have to offer up a scapegoat of some size.
It could be a top general.
There would be some justice there.
It could be a top aide.
You know, who would the scapegoat be?
And if it's not someone to put the blame on, is it Biden himself?
And that's, I think, what you're suggesting.
Would he be the scapegoat that the party would really choose to get rid of him?
He's obviously got some cognitive challenges.
He's obviously weak and not sharp.
Put Kamala Harris in there, give her a couple of years to get her C legs and run her next time, because I think Biden's getting worse as the months go by.
I guess the question is, does Joe Biden choose a scapegoat first or does he become the scapegoat?
What do you think?
Good question.
I suspect that another head rolls before President Biden's head rolls.
But that said, I do think reading between the tea leaves that the writing probably is on the wall and it's a question of when, not if, for his presidency.
And we've talked about this before.
I think it's always been the plan probably for him not to go through this full term.
And I think it's very clear he does not seem fit to get through this first term or this first year, frankly, on the basis of this disaster, in my opinion.
That said, I think that the writing has sort of been on the wall in the near term for maybe the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I've seen rumblings about the Secretary of Defense, but it seems like he's trying to take precautions potentially in his rhetoric and what's being put out to protect himself in this disaster.
So we'll have to see.
If I was a betting man, I'd probably bet on the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the first head to roll.
But that's to be determined.
And we'll see how awful things get in the near term, unfortunately.
And that's why I really set the politics aside in this.
This is a disaster for the country, and it doesn't matter your political stripes.
And ultimately, again, I think it's a disaster for the world because if there's the appearance or an actuality that America is in chaos, it's weak, it's not respected, it doesn't show the deterrent strength that it ought to, then evil worldwide will be on the march.
And unfortunately, I felt that that was the case and the way this administration would respond, just in the way or the reaction that would exist just on the pasis of the administration bending over backwards to get back into an Iran deal and appeasing Iran.
And of course, the China ties of this administration and the weakness that President Biden and those around him have shown throughout their careers.
I think that was self-evident from the start.
And now you're just seeing a microcosm of the disaster and the fact that our adversaries neither fear nor respect us.
And that's bad for every freedom-loving person on the earth.
It's terribly depressing, Ben.
Whenever we talk, I get so depressed, but it's because you're spitting straight facts and we have to hear it.
I want to close by telling our viewers, most of whom are Canadians, that although we've been talking about this in the American context, and that makes sense for all the reasons above, I should remind you that on the day Kandahar fell, sorry, pardon me, Kabul fell, the Afghan capital, the day it fell, instead of meeting with his top aides and military advisors and foreign affairs and diplomats, instead of focusing on getting the Canadians out of Kabul,
Tax Receipts and Donations00:03:12
Justin Trudeau walked over to the Governor General's house and asked her to call an election.
On the day of the crisis, Trudeau said, no, I want to choose to have an election, a discretionary choice, just two years into my term.
I want to let you know that's what Canada did.
Ben Weingarten, great to see you again.
Thanks for all your time and all your smarts.
Hope to talk to you again soon.
Thanks so much for having me.
Really appreciate it.
All right, there you have it.
Ben is the senior contributor at the Federalists and for Newsweek.com.
Stay with us more.
Hey, welcome back.
I appreciate your support for our fight vaccinepassports.com.
Some comments about that show last night.
JMART writes, yes, well done, Rebel News, for standing up for the rights of all Canadians.
Thank you.
Well, yeah, you know what?
I remember it wasn't long ago.
I mean, I'm not that old.
I remember when the liberals said they were the party or the Charter of Rights, they were the party for human rights.
What about minority rights?
What about disabled rights?
What about conscientious objectives?
That was the liberal thing.
And the bad guys were conservatives.
You know, you may be a minority.
You may be an unpopular minority, but you have rights.
And forcing people to undergo a medical procedure, an injection that they do not consent to freely, and putting extreme pressure on them, you'll lose your job if you don't do it.
You won't be able to finish your university degree if you don't do it.
That's atrocious and it's unethical.
Don't liberals get that?
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Well, thank you very much.
I'm amazed by the generosity of the donations.
Of course, you will get a charitable tax receipt for that, which I'm very glad about.
That's the Democracy Fund, which, as you know, is an arm's-length charity registered by the Canada Revenue Agency.
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It doesn't even come to Rebel News.
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I like to think of it that way.
Give it to fightvaccinepassports.com instead of to Trudeau.
That's a better use of your money.
Thank you for those who have donated and keep your eyes peeled.
I was talking to the lawyers this morning.
I think we will have a second client as soon as today or tomorrow.
I don't want to get ahead of things.
I'm always bugging our lawyers.
I'm calling them probably four times a day because I just can't tell you how urgent this is.
So anyways, thank you for your support and I'll keep you posted on how it goes.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rubble World headquarters to you at home, good night.