Ezra Levant (Rebel News founder) explains how the network launched in 2013 after Sun News’s CRTC-mandated shutdown, using crowdfunding and $53-average donations to bypass government grants and ads. Fight the Fines, started in April 2020, defends over 2,000 people from fines like Calgary pastor Arthur Pavlovsky’s $1K penalty for feeding the homeless. Levant critiques Canada’s Conservative Party—led by figures like Aaron O’Toole—for abandoning conservative values (e.g., opposing carbon taxes or vaccines) while mainstream media and public health officials enforce unchecked policies, comparing it to U.S. resistance under DeSantis. Rebel News stands as a rare independent voice, but growth could require strategic funding to counter globalist threats like the WEF and China’s UN influence. [Automatically generated summary]
Being called the boss man, I just thought of Bruce Springsteen for a second.
Or the wrestler.
That's right.
Thanks for joining me, episode number 50.
Thanks for letting me do this for 50 weeks.
Wow.
It's a crazy amount of time.
Yeah, well, you know what?
I want to salute you on the initiative you took, and I really like the guests you choose.
It's a little bit different than our other Rebel News products.
And I'm actually incredibly impressed with the quality of it.
Like, you've had some amazing guests.
I don't know how you do it, but you're your own producer, am I right?
I basically just sent out the email and hope for the best.
Well, it's worked.
It's worked.
Congratulations.
Thanks for having me on.
No problem, of course.
I think what everybody wants to know as a fan would be, you're at Sun News.
How does Rebel News start?
What spawns the idea?
Well, we certainly didn't want to start it.
We wanted to work for Sun News Forever.
It was a great company owned by Quebecor, which is a major media conglomerate.
So there were 200 people working at Sun News Network.
I would say it was even a little luxurious.
I mean, we had a makeup team.
We had, you know, green room.
We had like a, it was, it was great.
And then they suddenly announced that it was being shut down because of a bad CRTC ruling.
So we all went in to get our severance checks and clean out our desks.
And I said to my little team, you, come to my house.
Let's see if we can replicate, like capture some of the audience and the messaging and the movement that Sun News was.
Sun News was activist in its day.
A little bit like Fox News, a little bit like GB News in the UK.
So eight folks sat around my table and we thought, let's get out of the things that hurt Sun.
Let's get out of the big equipment, heavy equipment, million dollar studios, quarter million dollar cameras.
Let's go simple.
Cell phone camera.
Let's get away from satellite linkups.
Let's do Skype.
Let's have man on the street.
We don't have to have a whole team.
Let's use a different technology, the TriCaster, not a five-person control room.
And most importantly, let's never again allow our destiny to be decided by government bureaucrats at the CRTC.
So that's where the word rebel came from.
We were rebelling against the editorial narrative of the mainstream media, rebelling against the old technology, rebelling against the regulatory power.
It started literally in my living room, the first video, and here we are almost seven years later.
We're coming up on 50 staff.
I'd say we're around a billion views between YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, all the other forums.
We have viewers not just in Canada, but in the UK and Australia, very strong.
And I've had a chance to meet great citizen journalists like yourself.
I think there's only a single person in our entire company with a journalism degree, David Menzies.
Everyone else just has a natural curiosity, and I think that works.
Now, in terms of Rebel News blowing up, when I became a fan, 2016, do you think the culture war, would you say, is a thing that really put it into everybody's living rooms?
Well, 2016 was a magical year because it was the year before YouTube decided to punish conservatives.
It was the year of Trumpism.
Trump himself was a rebel against all the things I talked about, the establishment, the media.
He used the internet to beat his primary rivals and then to beat Hillary, even though she outspent him.
That's why, when Trump shocked everyone, especially the New York Times, that he won, you saw the demonetization and the throttling of conservatives on the internet, which I think in the end helped undo Trump.
But that glorious year, you not only had the most interesting man in the most interesting story in the most interesting country, in the most interesting election, but the medium was still free.
So we zoomed because we were the only Canadians taking our point of view and Americans found us and loved us and we had colorful characters like back in that day we had Gavin McInnes doing humorous videos before he was anathematized and criminalized.
And we really grew our team quickly.
We grew our business model.
That's one more way in which we rebelled.
We don't really make a lot of money in ads these days, almost none.
But through crowdfunding, which is a kind of ad hoc subscription, really, you're not subscribing to something regularly.
You're saying, I like that.
I'll give 10 bucks to that.
Oh, they want to build a new studio.
I'll give 50 bucks to that.
So it's different than a subscription in that you're saying, okay, we got a project.
We want to send Sheila Gunread to report from the Global Warming Conference in Marrakesh, Morocco.
If you support that, help buy your plane ticket.
So it was a very practical, tangible way of crowdfunding.
And here we are.
We built the company based on crowdfunding.
And I think that keeps us honest because if CNN or CBC forgets its audience, it doesn't necessarily mean they're out of business.
In the case of the CBC, it's a state broadcaster.
They're really just operating for one man, Justin Trudeau.
We every day have to listen to our viewers.
If we get it wrong, our viewers will tell us.
And if we still get it wrong, our viewers will not support us.
And we will be out of business very quickly.
So it forces us to keep a certain sense of humility, to listen to our people, not just talk at them.
And the fact that we have thousands of individual donors, our average donor is, I think, about $53.
So that means that there's no one person who can call us up and pull the plug.
When I worked at Sun News, we were owned by Quebec Order, which is owned by a man called Pierre Carl Pellado, who I really admire, by the way, and who I like very much.
But at the end of the day, he was the master of the entire enterprise.
And you had to be careful you couldn't talk about certain subjects that were sensitive to him.
Fair enough.
Here at Rebel News, we have no master.
We have thousands and thousands of stakeholders.
And any one of them, if they get mad at us for something, okay, we'll pay attention, then we'll read their email.
But there's no one donor who's large enough that it would cause us to shift course.
I would much rather have a thousand people giving 50 bucks than one guy giving 50,000 bucks.
I know it sounds counterintuitive because that one check would, oh, that's easy.
I don't have to work anymore.
No.
The effort you make to attract and retain a thousand supporters is such a salutary act.
The things you have to do, the way you have to respect viewers, and that's, you know, you're not just a TV star.
You work in our, we call it community management.
You talk to rebel viewers.
That is the source of our strength if we keep our feet on the ground.
And so many companies have done this now with Patreon and with Subscribestar and locals.
So many people have gone big.
You're a big fan of Tim Dylan.
He's huge just from people wanting to pay to hear him talk.
And I think that's the proof.
And one of the things that the legacy media, I sometimes call the media party, because they have a central message, they have a discipline, they stick together.
It's like a political party, except for you can't vote them out.
I think you see that kind of click.
And I saw recently Tim Dylan was in a bit of a scrap because he's doing so well on Patreon and other people are looking down their nose at him.
No, I think that's a bit of jealousy.
It's either disbelief or jealousy.
I remember when we launched Rebel News and we did our very first crowdfund and I'll tell you, we raised 85,000 in one day.
That's shocking.
And I think we can do it.
Because I, for the first couple of payrolls, I just put everything on my, like I used my severance from Sun News to hire these folks.
I didn't know if it was going to work.
So we did, we just started doing journalism.
We did about 50 videos, and then I sent an email to everyone saying, All right, guys, if you like this, I do need your help.
Please help.
And then we just sent the email and we waited.
85 grand came in, and I knew we would live because that was people's way of saying we value this.
And I remember when we told that, I think it was the McLean's magazine or someone else, they literally refused to believe it.
They said, No, you're getting some grant from some oil company that wants to see you.
Why did they say that?
Because they do not want to believe that we have that kind of purchase with viewers because they know they do not.
And I saw a headline just the other day that Saltwire, which is a bunch of newspapers in Atlantic Canada, took a massive multi-million dollar grant from Trudeau for the media bailout, and they proceeded to lay off over 100 staff.
And see, they keep, if you are, if you work for the mainstream, over 1,500 media companies in Canada have taken that Trudeau bailout.
I didn't even know there were 1,500 media companies.
So they're all failing.
And they think, how can we survive on our own?
Justin Trudeau, please give us more money.
1,500 of them.
Some of them get millions.
The post-media gets $140,000 a week from Trudeau.
So that's a sign of their own lack of confidence.
That's a sign that they've given up any editorial independence if you're working for the man.
That's a sign of decline.
All right, we're going to take welfare, manage to climb.
We don't take a dime from government.
My God, you've got to be confident to do that.
No advertising, no government money.
That's impossible.
It's unpossible.
And when we had that first success, 85 grand in one day, I was blown away.
But no one of our critics would believe it because they know in their bones that if they and boring old McLean's or boring old, I don't know, Toronto Star actually put out a tip jar instead of their viewers, if you really love us, support us.
No one would you pay money to CTV?
Do they really serve you like that?
Well, that's why their Toronto Star had to be bought out.
Like their tip would be the $2 Saturday star or whatever their big thick one is, but that doesn't happen.
Yeah, you know, it's there's a phrase I heard once, grantrepreneurs.
You can be an entrepreneur out there hustling, working, trying things, or you can be a grantrepreneur, gaming the system, trying to figure out just the right words to convince the right bureaucrat to give you money.
You might actually get a lot of money as a grandrepreneur.
I mean, post-media gets millions.
But what if you took that energy and that smarts and that initiative and actually deployed it to figuring out how to work in this internet age?
I actually think being a grandrepreneur is a trap because you're directing your attention, your brilliance, your brainstorming, your hopes to being basically a teeth sucker.
Grantrepreneurs Success Stories00:02:48
That's not a swear.
You said to me before that you have seen the Rebel News cast, let's call it, like Saturday Night Live.
Saturday Night Live, terrible now, by the way, of course.
But because of the new and interesting characters, who's somebody that's left that you're like, I really like, I'm proud of that person, I'm proud of the time we spent together, impressed by what they've done ever since.
Well, there's a lot of examples like that.
And listen, not all our alumni glow under glorious things.
Some of them flame out.
You know, you might be surprised, but the editor-in-chief of Quillette, the Australian magazine, Claire Layman, she was a Rebel News contributor.
I thought she did great.
And because I'm always scanning off on Twitter and social media, who, and I look for someone who is a good communicator, speaks from the heart authentically, and is a citizen journalist trying to fight the world, trying to wrestle the world.
I very, very rarely look at someone who's already in media.
First of all, they've made it.
I probably can't outbid them.
They are probably careful.
If you've got a job with CTV or ABC, you're probably careful, and you would never go to Rabble because that would look bad.
What if you're a citizen journalist?
So Claire Lehman would be an example of that.
I mean, Gavin McInnes went on to big things, and then he just sort of had a lot of political problems.
But there's someone who we really took from semi-obscurity.
And I mean, listen, he was with Weiss and he had some success, but he made hundreds of videos with us, some of which had two, three million views.
Very successful.
You know, sometimes people need our structure to help them succeed.
I'm just trying to think of other examples.
I think we've got a great cast of talent right now.
I look around our company.
We have people in four countries.
And right now, just in terms of outstanding journalism, Avi Yamini in Melbourne, Australia, he's world class.
We've got great Canadians too.
But by coincidence, we have a journalist in the most locked down city in the world.
It's just a coincidence.
And he's doing amazing world-class coverage.
I'm very proud.
You know, the Saturday Night Live analogy is find young talent, teach them a few ways of doing things, and either they stay on or they move on.
I mean, I like to keep in touch with some of our alumni.
Kian Bexti of Calgary is an example.
He's got the counter signal.
He started with us.
It was one of our critics that said we're like the Saturday Night Live of conservative media.
It was Jonathan Goldsby of Canada.
He hates us, but he acknowledges we're talent scouts.
I think I spend an hour a day talent scouting because you always need to add more talent.
Why We Tell Pastor Arthur's Story00:07:24
And someone moves on for a reason.
And there's always someone who is an interesting point of view.
Drea Humphrey.
She was not a professional journalist.
I just saw her doing some basically homemade videos.
And I thought, whoa, she's a good thinker, a good talker.
Tamara Ugalini.
She was a client of our Fight the Fines project.
And I thought, oh my God, who is that?
So smart, so well-informed, articulate battler.
Who's she?
So we find people in the strangest places and we put this motley crew together.
And, you know, in its own funny way, it's worked.
It's worked bloody well.
Avumeny played by Rob Schneider, by the way, I believe, in terms of...
I want to talk about Fight the Fines.
Obviously, it kind of caused a gear shift in the media once all the lockdowns happened.
And everybody was saying, who's going to stand up for our rights?
How important has Fight the Fiance been to you personally?
It's the greatest thing I've ever done in public life.
Let me explain it for the viewers who might not know.
In April of 2020, so very early in the pandemic, not even a month in, I saw a video of a pastor in Calgary who was feeding the homeless.
Literally, it was still snowing in Calgary.
He was feeding the homeless, and a bunch of police came up to this guy, literally giving hot food to homeless people.
The cops came up to this pastor, started pushing him around, and gave him a ticket for what they called an illegal gathering.
And he said, I'm not, this isn't a brave.
This isn't, you know, I'm feeding these hungry people because the city isn't.
They gave him a ticket.
I think it was like a $1,000 ticket.
And I saw that and I saw how they physically pushed this pastor.
That made just some button in me got pushed.
And I had heard of that.
I'd met that pastor before.
I knew him a little bit.
Arthur Pavlovsky is his name.
And I called him up, and I know what he's good at.
He's good at being stubborn.
And he's good at being a pastor.
He's good at feeding the homeless.
But he probably was not good at finding a lawyer and paying for a lawyer.
You know, everyone has their strengths.
So I said, Pastor Arthur, we will get you a lawyer to fight these tickets.
All we need you to do is occasionally talk to us on TV so we can tell the story.
That's how we're going to crowdfund this.
And Fight the Fines was born.
And here we are, a year and a half later, more than 2,000 people we have helped.
People, businesses, churches, hundreds of ordinary people.
And we've spread this to other countries.
There's a homeless man in Australia who's sleeping in his car.
He had nowhere else to sleep.
Cops came, knock, knock, knock.
You're out past curfew.
You gave him a $1,500 fine.
His life savings are $3,000.
He's saving up money to get an apartment.
The cops take half his money, and they didn't give him a place to sleep.
What are you doing?
That's not public health.
That's not public service.
There's no way he could afford a lawyer.
By the way, depending on some of these cases, we've spent in some cases $100,000 defending people, like Pastor Arthur.
They keep coming for him.
But our people love it so much.
You know, Rebel's motto is telling the other side of the story.
But do you ever see that citizen journalist moment where someone is filming something so atrocious and you're really glad they're filming it because otherwise you wouldn't have seen it?
But in the back of your mind, you're thinking, why didn't they do anything about it?
Okay, you're filming it, but that's passive.
Shouldn't you, in the moment, fix the problem?
That's a tough thing to say because you don't know what it's really like there and you're grateful you saw the video.
So we tell the other side of the story every day, but when I saw what they did to Pastor Arthur, I couldn't just be the guy telling the story.
And so we added this whole other side to what we do.
And later, the Democracy Fund, a registered charity, was approved by the Canada Revenue Agency.
So now we can actually give charitable tax receipts for people who donate to those civil liberties.
So we've got Rebel News, which is still telling the other side of the story.
But we've got the Democracy Fund, which fights for civil liberties every day.
It's double the work because there's double the problems out there.
But that's how Fight the Fines grew into these larger projects.
Now, Arthur's story was shared worldwide.
He's got the famous video.
I know the people down at Prager, you shared it, Blaze TV.
There's still the continuum of people that say, well, how come they didn't follow the rules?
How come these churches can't congregate online or outside socially distanced, which they did and got fined for still, by the way, in Ontario?
What do you say to the people who just, you know, say, just follow every rule as it's handed down by the government?
Well, in the case of Arthur Bavlovsky, you're not even going to believe what he was actually sentenced for, what he was actually arrested.
He spent three days in prison for.
And it was because for one hour and 10 minutes, he didn't close his church.
One hour and 10 minutes.
And the order to close his church was given to him in like a plastic bag.
He didn't even open it and read it.
The cops knew who his lawyer was.
Like I say, we had given him a lawyer a year earlier.
So he didn't read the order.
He had no chance to get legal advice.
So the whole thing was a stitch-up, as they say.
And they have hated that guy since the beginning.
So he actually, what he actually went to jail for was the dumbest thing you've ever heard.
But it's exposed, I think, a deep flaw in pandemic law and policy and enforcement.
First of all, okay, I mean, there's a bunch of ways to answer your question.
One is, none of these things were actually debated in parliament.
Many of them weren't even issued by a cabinet minister through some sort of committee.
You know, a cabinet order, there's lawyers that review it.
It's just public health officers, and there's got to be 200 of them.
It's like hornets buzzing around in this country.
Everywhere you look, there's another public health officer.
Every city has one.
Every region has one.
Every province has one.
There's like, oh my God, how many thousands of you are there?
And they just utter something.
And it's different from what they said a week ago.
It'll be different in another week.
And if they say it, is that law?
Or do they have to put up a written press release?
Or does it have to be an order?
Like, it's so, they don't know what they're doing.
The police often have a different set of rules every week or every month.
And how do they enforce it?
And what about exemptions, like for masks?
It's such bad lawmaking, bad law enforcement.
It was terrible when the police got involved to begin.
Since when do police enforce health orders?
Never.
You're sending a SWAT team to take, I mean, let me refer you to the worst moment in that Arthur Pavlovsky.
He had left his church.
They could have picked him up at church.
They know where his house is.
They could have picked him up at his house.
But he was in the car on a road, and they had this whole SWAT team sort of swarm his vehicle on the road like he was some narco-terrorist, pull him out of the car, put him on his knees on the highway.
Cars speeding by.
Why did you put him under the road?
Why didn't you put him off the road?
You put him on the road while cars are speeding by.
Hands above him said, why are you arresting him at all?
You know his lawyer.
We've been paying his lawyer to talk to you cops for a year now.
You wanted the shock and awe moment.
You wanted to humiliate him.
You wanted it to justify your SWAT team budget.
What the actual hell?
Silent Authoritarianism00:05:15
And we've seen the slow authoritarian emergence.
I think a lot of the good cops have either been reassigned or retired.
And I think the worst cops are having the time of their lives.
And everyone's become a bit of a mini-cop, a snitch, an auxiliary, a brown shirt, a mask enforcer.
In Alberta, unvaccinated people are not allowed to meet each other in private.
Not even the Stasi would say that.
And it's all a disgrace.
So it's a very long way of saying we have immoral, unconstitutional laws, but we have judges who accept them.
I think we're in the worst of times.
Every part of society has failed.
Every institution we would count on.
Every government in Canada is for the lockdown.
But so is every opposition party.
Every mainstream media is in favor for it.
Every lawyer, the civil liberties groups are silent.
Every law professor, every institution in society is in support of this lockdown.
It's madness and it's terrifying.
Can we not have some diversity of opinion, for God's sakes?
And I want to ask you about some of, I was going to ask you about the media, but I think I know your answer for a lot of that.
Some of these anti-lockdown groups that we've seen over the last two years now, I think almost, some have been good, some have been bad, colorful leaders across all of them.
You have maybe famously pointed to some that you shouldn't trust in the early going.
How do you think they've affected any of this at all?
I mean, there's famous ones.
We've got the Patrick King guy.
We've got Norm, people that were getting such fanfare, but they didn't really do anything.
What's your opinion on all this?
I think nature abhors a vacuum.
There is such a demand for people to speak up because all these other institutions I just listed have failed.
So people step into the void.
Some of them with good intentions, they just maybe don't have all the tools.
For example, we see a lot of homemade lawyering, like people coming up with legal ideas that sound good, but they're not real.
People googling things on the internet and say, oh, I just have to say I do not consent and they can't seize my business.
I'm sorry, mate.
That's not real law.
So you have some people who are so desperate, they'll cling to it.
Like if you had an uncurable cancer, God forbid, and every doctor said there's nothing we can do, you would, out of desperation, go to alternative medicine.
If that didn't work, you would go to quacks or people selling you some snake oil.
You're so desperate.
And people in our situation in our country, for two years, they're so desperate they don't understand it.
Where is everybody?
Where's the opposition?
Where's the media?
Where's the law?
Where's anything?
Where's the College of Physicians and Surgeons?
Where's anybody?
Oh my God.
And so they'll turn to anyone.
And I see some of that.
You know, Lamont Daigle, who created the line, I think he's a Fed.
I think he's a Fed.
I mean, the Feds are trying to criminalize anti-lockdownists.
And they say as much.
I think Patrick King is an example of a guy who did a little homemade law and loved the media attention.
Chris Skye is a very interesting character.
And I think quite often he's right.
But once in a while it goes too far.
And we've interviewed him a lot.
The reason these people have had success is because others who should be filling those spaces are not.
And I'm not going to trash these guys.
I think there's problems with all three of them.
But at least they have the courage to be contrarian.
It's like that picture of that German rally in the late 30s where every single guy is doing the Sieg Heil except for one guy who's got his arms crossed.
And we all like to think we would be that one guy.
But look around.
We know who's, everyone who thought they would have been speaking out against Hitler in the 30s, we see you now.
And we know you would have been silent and passive.
And that's what's terrifying to me is that phrase, never again.
And I went to Jewish school and I learned about the Holocaust.
And all I can think about, how did they not see it coming?
Why did they not, well, because that's easy to say when we know the end of the story.
We don't know the end of the story, but I know one thing.
No, there's been no countervailing force.
Why wouldn't this go on forever?
Why wouldn't police go even further?
I see in Austria, police are literally demanding papers for people to be out in public.
In Austria, that's so on the nose.
If you had a Hollywood movie, it's a no, that's too much.
That's just too.
No, I mean, all they got to do is check the attic for Jews now.
And they got the full, you know, we got a full circle.
Fight the fines, we won't ask, we will open.
All these have brought people out of the woodworks that maybe wouldn't have been involved in politics or a fan of rebels.
I'm thinking of athletes, musicians, actors.
Anybody surprising reach out to you that you want to share?
Anybody who you're just like, wow, I can't believe this person agrees with me now.
You know, I'm talking to a Hollywood actor.
I didn't know him, but my kids know him.
He's in an international franchise.
I Googled him.
He's bloody famous.
He's been in films that have had enormous viewership.
I don't want to say his name because he hasn't made the decision yet to go rogue.
I'd say he's even bigger than Gina Carrano, who was in the Star Wars movie.
And I was shocked that he called me.
He's a Brit.
I'm not going to say anything more about him.
Pharma's Political Impact00:03:19
How did you, why are you calling me?
Well, because he had seen our videos.
And I'll let him, you know, in fact, I said to him, you got to be careful because you go, you say the wrong word here and you're going to be blackballed, like Gina Carrano was.
But it's not just that.
I see people like Naomi Wolf, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., these are liberals.
I see a lot of liberals and a lot of conservatives finding common ground.
In fact, is it liberal or conservative to say, I don't want the state to work with a big corporation to give it immunity from negligence lawsuits, to forcibly inject people on pain of them being fired, and union bosses are throwing in with the corporate executives.
Like we're helping an Air Canada flight attendant fight her union because the union won't fight Air Canada.
So does that make me a left-winger or a right-winger?
I'm helping this working woman.
She's a working-class woman, flight attendant on her feet all the time.
You know, her union, she's got natural immunity because she recovered from the COVID.
They're saying, take the jab or be fired.
And the union wouldn't help her.
So we took her union to the labor board, and now they're going to grieve it for her.
Okay, am I right-wing now?
I don't know.
I'm working with an NDP-ish lawyer.
I'm working with a left-wing lawyer to help her.
I don't care.
Left-wing, right-wing.
Where's the ACLU?
Where's all the people who said, my body, my choice?
Where's that whole Preuss movement?
Where's the whole privacy?
Where's the whole, it's between me and my doctor, none of your damn business.
Where's the folks on the left who used to be skeptical of big pharma?
That used to be the big, you know, boogeyman for the left, big pharma.
I never really understood it.
But everyone railed about big pharma.
You're bloody cheerleaders for them now.
And my body, my choice?
Where did those people go?
You got to get an injection and then another injection.
Oh, and then there's another injection.
I'm going to call it a booster.
Oh, and then another injection.
And if you don't, oh, your choice.
But we'll fight.
That's not a choice.
It's, you know, that classic mugger's line.
Your money or your life.
Okay, well, that's phrased as a choice, too.
Okay, here's my money.
See, he made the choice, people.
He wasn't forced.
I gave him the choice and he chose it.
That's not a choice.
That's under duress.
And, you know, Godwin's law says whoever first invokes Hitler loses the argument.
But that's a joke.
But what happens when you see those authoritarian instincts reviving?
The Nuremberg Code of informed consent for medical procedures emanated directly from the Nazi doctors, Joseph Mengele and others, who committed atrocities on people without their permission, knowledge, consent, literally torture.
But out of that, the doctors went on trial.
Dr. Brandt, the other doctors, they went on trial for what they did as doctors.
And from that verdict came the 10-point Nuremberg Code, so named because these war criminals, they were doctors.
And it elucidated the doctrine of medical consent, free, informed consent.
You have to let them know what the risks are.
They have to be able to stop at any time.
It's like the 10 commandments of medical consent.
We are violating those.
And so, yes, it is appropriate to say that the Nazis would do that.
You're damn right.
That's why we have those rules and you're breaking those rules.
It's been 80 years, less than 80 years, and you're breaking those rules again.
And in Austria, they're searching in addicts.
Peer Pressure Politics00:12:02
Talk about the left-right dichotomy.
I want to talk to you about the Conservative Party of Canada.
I think a lot of people, Canada, U.S., U.K., Australia, are all discovering that they don't really have an opposition party.
They probably don't have a Conservative Party.
Here in Canada, we are, what, seven provinces, Conservative leadership.
Didn't turn out to be really that way.
What's your thought process on how the Conservative Party should move forward?
New leadership, you know, nuke it from the ground up, completely abandoned it for a different party?
What's your take on that?
Well, federally, I think Aaron O'Toole is untrustworthy and unredeemable.
He said everything that you would want him to say when he was running.
He was against cancel culture.
He was against the carbon tax to bring in a different issue.
He was going to privatize the CBC, which is another issue.
Like, there's a whole suite of things he said.
Tough on China at first, too, yeah.
And he, you know, was nice to Leslie, Lewis, and social conservatives.
And then as soon as he got the vote, he threw all that stuff out.
Now he's pro-carbon tax.
And not just that, if you disagree with him, you're out of the party.
He fired Derek Sloan.
He demoted Leslie Lewis.
She's not even in shadow cabinet.
But put aside the fact that he's paranoid about rivals.
He's just not conservative.
What are the key issues of the day?
Right now, the mandatory vaccines.
He has not opposed them.
He has not opposed the lockdownism on other issues.
He's for the carbon tax.
He's for open borders migration.
His last critic on the internet was for censorship.
In fact, was complaining that Trudeau wasn't going fast enough and hard enough.
I cannot honestly tell you a single thing about Aaron O'Toole that makes him more conservative than Justin Trudeau.
I can't name one.
And I would tell you if I could.
The fact that 30 years ago, Aaron O'Toole was in the military, I find admirable, but that's got nothing to do with his policy positions as a politician today.
At least Justin Trudeau is honest when he says he hates conservative things.
He hates the West.
He hates oil.
He hates this.
At least Trudeau's not lying to you.
So I look to the states, and I know it's possible.
I remember when Ron DeSantis first decided to reject lockdownism, to reject the fear-mongering, to reject anything the public health officer says is true approach.
And for about two full weeks, he was battered and bashed like nothing I've ever seen, but he held the line.
And you know who started?
Families and parents started supporting him.
He's not against the vaccine.
He's taken the vaccine himself and he promotes it.
He made it very widely available.
He just repeatedly says it's everyone's choice.
It's your choice.
It's your personal choice, your family choice.
That's the language of the left, isn't it?
And he held the line, and now Florida has one of the lowest rates of the virus in America, even though it has one of the oldest populations.
And it's free and it's economically free.
And so he, I think, was a role model that if you just show some leadership, why is it so hard for Doug Ford and Jason Kenney to fight against lockdownism?
Well, it's because they've never tried.
Because no one else is leading.
If they were to lead, they would have a tough time at first.
But if they just held the line, I think they could break through.
There's no reason that Alberta couldn't be the Florida of Canada in terms of the free province, the one that's not in, that's taking back power from, that's replacing medical officers with sane ones.
Like Florida has its surgeon general.
He's just not a crazy lockdownist UN talking points reader.
Alas, we don't have a single government or opposition party like Ron DeSantis.
50 states in America, 50 points of view.
10 provinces in Canada, one point of view.
That's a disgrace.
So why this pandering?
It always seems the last two months before an election, they try to reach out for the liberal votes that, in my opinion, are never going to vote for them no matter what.
They think you're evil, bad white supremacists, you name it.
Do they reach out for them for that last desperate vote count, or are they just never the actual conservatives they painted themselves to be?
You know, I have a theory, and I mentioned that Nazi photo of the one guy, not Siege Heiling.
What I've learned in the seven years of the boss of Rebel News is that you can teach someone how to hold a camera.
That's pretty easy.
I think you can teach people how to ask questions.
I mean, you need a natural curiosity, but we all know how to ask questions.
The one essential characteristic that is indispensable to be a rebel news journalist is: are you willing to incur the disapproval of your peers?
And by peers, I mean other journalists, other people in the political media class.
That is the hardest thing in the world to break peer pressure.
If you're in a scrum and everyone's asking lobby-dubby questions of a politician and you ask a bloody tough one, not unfair, not mean, but a tough one.
You'll see the politician's smile immediately turn to a frown.
You'll hear the other journalists go, why are you ruining our narrative?
Why are you asking that question, you right-winger?
So you'll immediately and forever be marginalized.
That is extremely painful socially, psychically.
But that is how you do journalism.
And I think that that same peer pressure that applies to journalists, it applies to politicians.
If you care about what the media says about you, about what the political media industrial complex says about you, you will never be anything other than a cookie cutter like we see now.
It is a rare politician who is able to fight the bad guys without caring what they say about him.
Ron DeSantis is successful without reason.
Same with Governor Abbott of Texas.
We don't have any of that in Canada either in the media or in the political class.
Rex Murphy and Conrad Black, and I think I've just named every conservative journalist in this country.
Anthony Fury's good.
There's a few good guys at the sun, Joe Warmington.
Everyone else is part of the mob.
And you know what?
There's just, last point.
To me, it was a revelation where in the 2019 election, it fell to an American magazine, I think it was Time magazine, to publish the photos of Justin Trudeau and Blackface, an American magazine.
And the guy who gave it to the Americans did so because no Canadians would run with it.
But what was equally interesting was that within hours of Time magazine publishing it, all the Canadian media published those and their own that they had been sitting on.
Global News, I think, was one that had the video.
Yeah, and then there was another one and then another one.
And so it's not that they were beaten to the punch by Time.
They had these in their pocket for months, years, and they self-censored because they agreed with Trudeau.
They didn't want to have that moment of breaking peer pressure.
They didn't want to be in his bad books.
They didn't want to affect themselves in a regulatory hearing or a grant hearing.
I often learn more about Justin Trudeau by reading the Daily Mail in London than by reading the Globe and Mail in Toronto.
And there's something wrong when you have in your possession blackface pictures of Trudeau and you say, nah, that's not newsworthy.
We'll bury them.
We'll cover up.
Oh, someone in America broke, beat us to it.
All right, fine, put it out there.
That was the moment that I think showed the true nature of Canadian media.
And that's the peer pressure that no one wants to buck.
What do you see as the move going forward?
Are we looking ahead from when all the tyranny, we'll call it, is over?
Are we going to have Rebel News movies?
Are we going to have a turning point USA Canada?
What's the Ezra's, I don't know, five-year plan, 100-year plan?
What's the next power move, Ezra?
Well, I really like Rebel News, and I think we're covering a lot of bases.
It would be hard to make it grow bigger without sort of adding some more managers and layers because we have so many journalists.
Just our story meetings go on for a long time.
And to grow to a bigger size, we probably need some outside investors.
I mean, I say we started Rebel News literally around my table.
I got a severance from Sun News, and I used that just to pay people until the crowdfunding came in.
Over the years, we've taken a few small loans from friends, but we've really never been a company in the sense that we took out a bank loan or we sold shares.
We had a bank loan that we paid off.
We had a few loans, a few hundred thousand dollars here and there.
But for a company with almost 50 employees, we never really had any external dough.
We sort of ate what we killed, as they say.
But if we're going to kick it up to a new level, maybe we need to do what a lot of companies do once they're past their startup stage.
Maybe they need to go public in some way.
And what I mean by that is allow outside people to say, all right, well, we'll let you manage things, come up with a business plan, and we'll invest.
We'll take a sliver of the company, and in return, we'll give you some dough to grow faster than you can organically.
Like, Rebel News will keep plugging away incrementally, but if someone's, if we raised, I don't know, a million bucks, two million bucks, we could grow things faster and we can bring in teammates that we maybe couldn't afford on our own.
So I think, I mean, I have nothing to announce at this stage, but ideally the next step for Rebel News is to become a little bit more businesslike to keep our editorial flavor unique.
We must never touch that.
That is the secret to our success.
If we ever changed our editorial approach, telling the other side of the story, we would be out of business in two weeks because our viewers would say, oh, we don't need you.
We already got the CBC.
But if we can keep our editorial flavor and crowdfund or raise funds like a real business does to grow this thing, maybe we could be a rival to the dying media.
Let post-media and let the star mooch for a living off Trudeau.
If we have the same number of viewers through the support of our audience, isn't that better?
And if we can raise funds with no political strings attached.
So that may be the next chapter.
I don't have anything to announce yet, but it's been something I've been thinking about.
Rebel News movie, everybody.
Rob Schneider, Tom Cruise is me.
Okay, last question, Ezra.
That was supposed to be funny.
Last question for the audience.
Who's running the show?
International Monetary Fund, Klaus Schwab, just Justin Trudeau and his friends?
Who's, in your opinion, one minute or less is running the show these days?
Well, definitely not Trudeau.
He's an order taker, not an order maker.
I think the World Economic Forum is a terrible place.
I don't know if you know this, but Christy Freeland is a director of the World Economic Forum.
How's that even allowed?
You're a director of an extremist lobby group while you're in cabinet?
Isn't that a conflict?
I don't know if you know this, but Freeland was George Soros' official biographer.
When they first met, Trudeau, Soros, and Freeland, they were at Davos of the World Economic Forum.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
I don't believe in it.
I don't think you should be.
I think the worst stories are out there in the open that are being ignored.
I tell, whenever our people get a little too caught up in some dramatic theory, I say, whoa, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes.
The crazy stuff is out in the open.
Don't make something up.
Davos is real.
World Economic Forum is real.
Davos Real Talk00:01:28
The people who meet in that room and hatch their plan.
Bill Gates is real.
Don't make something up.
Quote what he says.
He says it.
Anthony Fauci, he says it.
Just report the stuff that the other media doesn't or tell the other side of the story.
So in a very lengthy answer to your short question, I think the World Economic Forum and aspects of the United Nations, which has been colonized by China, China now controls five different commissions of the UN, including the World Health Commission, World Health Organization.
I think China and other globalists who love China, I really think that that's the dominant force against the free West.
And I'm scared about it because I think Chinese communism and globalism is on the rise.
And this pandemic was turned into an opportunity for them.
I agree.
And I'll keep it at that.
All the power that they always wanted, all the money they always wanted.
And then, you know, can't take it away from them or else, you know, you're a bigot, racist, et cetera, et cetera.
Thanks a lot for joining me as Rob Lavancho every night on Rebel News Plus.
And then we're going to have some things to come.
Investors.
I see it as almost barstool sports of the news world, Ezra.
Might have the investors coming in there, but nobody's ever going to change you or I. That's what I love about this company.
Nobody tells you what to do.
It's as long as you're trying to do your best, tell the truth, and tell the other side of the story, it usually works out.
Right on.
All right.
See you guys again next week.
Thanks for watching.
Grow things faster and we can bring in teammates that we maybe couldn't afford on our own.