Ezra Levant critiques David Frum’s shift from anti-big-government conservative to vaccine mandate advocate, questioning peer pressure over ideology after Frum’s Obamacare support. Frum’s recent tweets label anti-vaxxers a "malignant minority," echoing Nazi rhetoric, and propose hospital triage favoring vaccinated patients—suggesting forced medical procedures and segregation. Frum’s elite D.C. ties and sister Linda’s Conservative loyalty contrast with his radical proposals, raising concerns about extremist language in public health debates. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I have sort of a personal story about someone who used to be a friend of mine.
I haven't talked to him in over a decade, so I can't say he's still a friend.
I'm talking about David Frum, and he was sort of the original Never Trumper.
He was a never Republican 20 years ago before it was cool.
But he's just been given her on Twitter.
And I want to analyze a series of tweets he made.
I don't know, maybe it's too much for personal indulgence, but I think there's a public interest in him.
Before I do that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, should we call people unclean if they don't get a vaccination?
It's December 14th, 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.
The only thing I have to say is government.
But why?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
I have a bit of a personal story today.
David Frum's Shift00:12:16
It's fused with the news.
I don't know.
You'll have to tell me if you think it's not appropriate.
I used to be friends with David Frum.
I'm talking about back in the 90s.
He was a Canadian who went to the United States to the finest schools there.
And then to follow his ambitions, he wrote a series of books about politics with names like Dead Right.
I was in law school and he was a rising star amongst conservative pundits.
It didn't surprise me when he was hired as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
And it especially didn't surprise me when he came up with the phrase the axis of evil for Bush to use to describe the enemies during the Gulf War.
Alas, David's wife was proud of him and let the world know that he had written that iconic phrase.
And whether or not it was related, David was soon no longer working at the White House as a speechwriter.
I think speechwriters for politicians have to be very discreet.
It takes away from the key man if you know that the words were written by someone else.
It makes a politician look more like an actor reading lines written by someone else, which has some truth to it, except that actors are told to read their lines and are fired if they don't, whereas politicians can and should get help marshaling their ideas and arguments.
But at the end of the day, it's their decision what they say and what they don't and what they mean and what they don't.
So the privilege of a speechwriter is to help great men and women.
The punishment is that you must be a ghostwriter and do it quietly.
David wasn't down for long, though.
He soon wrote a book about George W. Bush called The Right Man, about his tenure.
It's been a while since I looked at it.
I seem to recall it was generally a friendly book towards Bush, but I also seem to recall in emerging that David actually only met the president once in his whole time there.
You can say you work at the White House and you can be a speechwriter, one of many, and that's enough to write a book, but I don't think it was anywhere near the inner circle.
And fair enough.
But soon David broke with the Republican Party over health care.
Maybe it was his Canadian roots, but he supported Barack Obama's government-run healthcare project, a most un-American or certainly unconservative idea.
He was dumped by his conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute.
And that began what's become two decades of being an anti-Republican Republican, sort of like the never Trumpers under Trump, but long before Trump was a thing.
Of course, David Frum is an anti-Trumper too.
It goes without saying, but it sort of lacked the intended effect since he had effectively left the party decades earlier.
There's a phrase in political journalism, strange new respect, that makes me laugh whenever I hear it.
Preston Manning received strange new respect from the media when he was deposed as party leader and was therefore harmless.
And he had strange new respect even more once he endorsed a carbon tax.
Strange new respect.
Yeah, that's because he was no longer an anti-Kyota Protocol Western populist that the media hated.
He became a man of the establishment.
He no longer threatened the status quo.
Strange new respect.
Doug Ford enforcing lockdowns.
Strange new respect.
It's not strange at all.
There's nothing the media like more than a conservative who turns against conservatives.
It's sort of gross.
It's like when a hockey player accidentally scores on their own net.
You wouldn't really want that guy on your own team, but you're glad that he's putting the puck into his team's net.
I used to like David when I was a youngster.
He once came to speak at my law school in Edmonton when I was in charge of the visiting speakers committee.
He was always very nice to me.
I visited him once at his home in Washington, D.C., where he lived in one of the most elite neighborhoods, not in neighboring Virginia or Maryland, but in a really lovely area not far from embassies.
I remember walking with him to a nearby restaurant for dinner, and simply in that short walk, we bumped into so many of what I call masters of the universe, like the bureau chief of a network or something, or senior political organizer with some lobby group.
We met a few folks like that.
I don't remember their names now.
And the restaurant itself was packed with these real insiders, movers and shakers.
And each of them stopped for a chat for a minute with David Frum.
And I remember that at the time, I think this was around 2008, it must have been, Sarah Palin had just been chosen as John McCain's running mate for the Republicans.
And she had that accent and that look.
She didn't go to an Ivy League school like David did.
I think he went to both Harvard and Yale.
She went to some community college in Idaho and she lived in small town Alaska and she had that Western accent that the cool kids at Saturday Night Live just ate up.
Governor Palin, would you like to respond to Senator Biden's comments about John McCain?
No, thank you, but I would like to talk about being an outsider.
You see, while Senator Biden has been in Washington all these years, I've been with regular people, hockey moms and Joe Six Packs.
And I'd also like to give a shout out to the third graders of Gladys Woods Elementary who were so helpful to me in my debate prep.
You get it, right?
The joke is that she's low class, blue collar, not our kind, dear.
And here's what I observed because David was a Republican and really the only fancy Republican in that fancy neighborhood.
And these establishment liberals, he was the only Republican that they knew on a friendly basis.
And each of them had something to say about Sarah Palin.
And they raised it with David, very friendly-like, but they also sort of hung it around his neck.
They weren't asking him for his arm's length opinion of Sarah Palin.
It was more like they were holding him personally accountable for her, asking him to defend her, associating her low-class idiosyncrasies with him.
Surely you don't like her, do you, David?
It was a matter of taste and class and wealth and aesthetics and insiders versus outsiders.
And I could just feel it myself how unbearable it would be to try to live in that zip code, in that industry, in that high stratus of society, but to be associated with working class schleps, the deplorables, people who said words like newculer.
Which is funny because George W. Bush himself was even more like that than Sarah Palin.
That's why I attempted an explanation for why David Fromm broke with the Republican Party.
Seriously, the guy who wrote dead right, warning about embracing big government, he embraced Obamacare, the biggest government program in history, not because he had an ideological epiphany, in my view, but because of peer pressure.
You can't be a cool kid if you don't sign on to the official narrative of the establishment.
You can be permitted a few little deviations from the liberal orthodoxy if you're their House Republican, their token Republican, but you can't really disagree with them fundamentally.
You can't be a dissident.
You just can't.
Anyway, that's my theory.
I have fallen out of touch with him years ago, and I've fallen out of touch with his sister, Linda Fromm, who was appointed to the Senate by Stephen Harper.
She was actually a lot more politically loyal than he was.
She was one of Stephen Harper's lieutenants in the Senate, big supporter of the Conservative Party.
I'm not sure what Linda Fromm is doing now.
And I deliberately tune out David Frum because I don't want to be mad at him.
I prefer to think of him as I did when I was a young kid in college and he was a slightly less young man in a hurry in the big leagues.
I block him on Twitter not because I'm mad at him, but because I don't want to be mad at him.
And I'm sure I would be if I read his stuff.
Because I did manage to come across this.
Someone took a screenshot of it and posted it.
And it did upset me, partly because of what it says, but largely because David himself wrote it.
And I know he knows better, or at least he used to.
It's not that I just disagree with him.
I do.
But it's how he says what he says.
There's something new here that I find troubling.
Let me read it to you.
Unless the U.S. moves to vastly stricter vaccine mandates, which I would favor, but which is plainly not going to happen, the U.S. will stall at present vaccination levels.
Now, that's true.
If people didn't get the jab by now, it's not because they didn't hear about them or they forgot about them.
They obviously have made a conscious choice.
Unless you force them, they're not going to do it if they haven't done it by now.
That's actually true.
I agree.
What's surprising here is to see the guy who wrote against big government calling for people, you know, the anti-big government guy calling for people to be forced to have medical procedures that they don't want.
That's about the biggest that big government can get.
But like I say, he left the Republicans a long time ago.
This isn't the tweet that bugs me.
Neither does the next one in his series.
He said, so the practical political choice is keep schools and businesses on the present hobbled footing indefinitely or return fully to normally as boosters become available to all, accepting the inherent risks of normal in a 30% unvaxed society.
Again, I think he's wrong.
Ron DeSantis of Florida and Texas and South Dakota, places like that, I think they prove him wrong.
He sounds more like Bill de Blasio than a Republican or maybe a Pfizer salesman, but that's fine.
Listen, that's just a normal establishment pundit.
It's this next one that gets me.
Look at the word that caught me.
You can probably guess which one.
You want to fulminate against the dumbass malignity of the anti-vaxxers and their quietly personally vaccinated media and political enablers?
Go ahead.
I do it myself almost every day right here in this space.
Dumbass.
I don't care.
That's a childish insult.
Mr. Harvard and Yale shows that he has a big vocabulary.
I think he's just trying to sound hip or something, but it's the next word, malignity, malign.
That just means the opposite of benign.
It means evil.
But look at this next one.
He's warming to his phrase.
He likes that word, malignity.
He said, but the malignant minority is not yielding to reason anytime soon.
And even such seemingly basic mandates as no jab, no fly seem beyond the enforcement capability of the U.S. federal government.
So what now?
The malignant minority.
Put aside his call for ghettoization and segregation.
That's gross.
Of course it is.
But calling people a malignant minority, a malignant minority.
Malignant, you know, that's a word we use to describe cancer.
Malignant cancer.
Malignant minority.
It reminds me, I'm sorry to say this.
It reminds me of Nazi propaganda against the Jews.
Here is a Nazi poster from occupied France in the 40s saying that the Jews are like large human fleas that spread tuberculosis, syphilis, even cancer.
David ends his rant this way.
He says, seems the best option is one, keep encouraging vaccines and boosters.
Two, impose vaccine mandates where it can be done.
Three, otherwise return to normal as fully as we can, especially the schools.
And four, let hospitals quietly triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last.
So he's done using the word malignant minority, but he hops straight to his prescription, his solution: sell the vax, force the vax where you can, and if someone gets sick, they're unvaxed, don't help them.