Ezra Levant critiques Meta’s March 11 policy allowing violence calls against Russians but not civilians, comparing it to Western sanctions on oligarchs like Roman Abramovich. Guest Gordon G. Chang warns China may exploit Ukraine’s invasion to test global deterrence, risking nuclear proliferation if trust in treaties like the Budapest Memorandum collapses. Levant also highlights Canada’s conservative leadership shift, praising Leslie Lewis and Roman Baber for engagement while criticizing past dismissals by Scheer and O’Toole. The episode ties policy inconsistencies to broader geopolitical instability and media safety concerns. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I talk about Facebook's decision to permit hate speech as long as it's targeted at certain Russians.
This feels like an act of war from a company against a country.
That's unusual.
But I'm not so much worried about Vladimir Putin as I'm worried about me.
As a Facebook user, what does this mean I should prepare for from Facebook towards us?
I don't know.
I'll take you through it.
And then we've got an interesting interview with Gordon Cheng about China.
That's all I had.
But first, let me invite you to subscribe to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
I do it every day.
We have weekly shows from Sheila Gunri, David Menzies, Andrew Chapato's and Nat and Cat.
So there's a lot of content there.
It's just $8 a month.
I can't even believe it's so low.
That's half the price of Netflix.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com and click subscribe.
Thanks.
Here's today's show.
Tonight, Facebook and Instagram changed their policy.
They now allow calls for violence, but only against Russians.
It's March 11th, and this is the Esther 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 don't give them an answer.
The only thing I have is in the government.
But why publish them?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
You know, we get censored all the time by Facebook and Instagram.
There are certain news stories we do and opinion commentaries we do that simply don't post there.
Social Media Censorship00:15:21
We just don't put on there.
Put them on our website, put them on other places.
The news reports are all factually true.
The opinion commentaries are all reasonable enough.
But Facebook and Instagram are effectively political censors.
So if we disagree with lockdowns or if we disagree with any particular public health order, a lockdown, which is a political decision, not a medical order, like a doctor's order to a patient, we would be suspended on Facebook or Instagram.
By the way, many of the things they censor later turn out to be true.
I mean, if you dared to say that maybe the vaccines aren't really vaccines and that they don't actually stop you from getting the virus, well, I mean, this video is apparently fine for Twitter where I found it, but even now, I would imagine it would probably immediately get suspended on Facebook and Instagram.
Take a look.
So now we have two vaccines that are really quite effective.
The mRNA vaccine is highly effective, extraordinarily efficacious, 94 to 95% for mild to moderate disease and virtually 100% efficacious because the real world effectiveness is even more impressive than the results of the clinical trial.
You might need another shot.
We've got to make sure we clarify that with people.
It has nothing to do with whether or not it's effective.
We know it's highly effective.
Highly effective.
Come on, man.
So, yeah, masks are bad, then masks are good.
You can mix and match vaccines.
You shouldn't mix and match vaccines.
They're fine for young people.
Oh, let's really not give them to young people.
Well, it depends on what country you're in, I guess.
I mean, what a laugh to say that there's things that cannot be said when they change every month that science is changing.
My favorite one is the six feet of separation rule.
You know, that I mean, it's just incredible.
Scott Gottlieb, who works for Pfizer now, who is a former FDA commissioner, he says that nobody actually knows where the whole six-foot social distancing rule came from.
Someone said it, then everyone else just repeated it, and it literally became the law.
A rumor became a law.
But if you dare to challenge it, Facebook and Instagram would ban you, even though no one knows where it came from.
And that's just for the wrong opinion.
They ban people they don't like too.
Obviously, Donald Trump is the main example who was banned even when he was the sitting president of the United States.
It's not just Facebook and Instagram.
While every dictator in the world has their Twitter account, no problem.
I mean, here's Vladimir Putin's English language account.
He's got that blue check mark saying he's official.
He has one in Russian too, obviously, but not Trump.
So you can't be Trump, but you can be Putin on social media.
But look at this.
Besides banning people who are skeptics of COVID mania or lockdowns or who are too trumpy, you should know that social media companies also ban graphic violence and they also ban calls for violence.
There are many categories for things that are banned.
Outright crimes, for example, are banned.
Death threats and calls for violence are banned.
That makes sense.
I don't even think that's censorship really.
But stopping death threats, those are actual crimes.
If it's a real, credible, imminent, believable death threat, I think that should be banned.
And I'm not talking about, you know, speaking metaphorically or making a joke or being dramatic, but if you actually call for violence in a way that is actionable, that's probably the crime of inciting violence or uttering a death threat that's illegal in real life.
If you say it in person, if you scrawl it in a banknote and hand it to the bank teller.
So it should be illegal on Facebook too.
It's probably a good rule to ban that.
But yesterday, Reuters reported that Facebook and Instagram, which are both owned by Mark Zuckerberg's company called Meta, Facebook and Instagram made a change to their policy.
You can now absolutely call for violence against someone, as long as that someone is Russian.
I'm not kidding.
Let me read to you from the story.
Reuters have the scoop.
They said Facebook allows war posts urging violence against Russian invaders.
Meta platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails sent by Reuters, seen by Reuters on Thursday in a temporary change of its hate speech policy.
The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, according to internal emails to its content moderators.
As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules, like violent speech such as death to the Russian invaders.
We still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians, a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
Okay, well, that's a relief.
You can't just randomly call for some mom pushing a baby in the stroller to be slashed with a knife.
Okay, thanks, Facebook.
You're really looking out for humanity.
But you can do so towards political leaders.
You can call for assassinations now, apparently.
So remember to wear your pink shirt on anti-bullying day.
Hey, Facebook staff, remember, don't be mean.
Use your proper pronouns, g and jur.
Be sure you're really, really nice.
Give a shout out to whatever indigenous people used to live where you live.
Be super exquisitely nice like that.
But then feel free to call for violence against the bad people.
I mean, it's okay by Mark Zuckerberg.
Russia responded by naming Facebook and Instagram, their parent company, Meta, extremist organizations.
Russia opens criminal investigation of Meta over death calls on Facebook.
Russia opened a criminal case against Facebook's parent Meta platforms on Friday after the social network changed its hate speech rules to allow users to call for death to the Russian invaders in the context of the war with Ukraine.
Russian prosecutors asked a court to designate the U.S. tech giant as an extremist organization, and the communications regulator said it was restricting access to Meta's Instagram.
A criminal case has been initiated in connection with legal, illegal calls for murder and violence against citizens of the Russian Federation by employees of the American company Meta, which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, Russia's investigator committee said.
I think that might be fair.
I mean, I don't like censorship.
Putin's restrictions on Facebook remind me of Trudeau's restrictions on Russia today and its attempts to squash us here at Rebel News.
Putin and Trudeau are similar that way, aren't they?
But there is something to it.
If one of the largest companies in the world with 2 billion users now okay's calls for violence, I mean, if you have 2 billion users and only one in a million people takes your call to violence seriously, well, and if only one in a hundred of those, so one in a million and then one in a hundred of those are in a position to actually act on it, but still 20 murders.
And who could deny that Facebook specifically, thoughtfully, carefully decided, yeah, that's fine by them.
I mean, if you allow calls for violence, you are accepting that it could happen.
You're permitting it to happen.
Multiply the small odds of it happening by 2 billion, and you're pretty much guaranteed it will happen.
And of course, if you whip up anti-Russian sentiment, that doesn't have to be acted on in Russia alone or Ukraine alone, against soldiers alone.
You don't think that could spread?
It's not foreseeable to you that that might spread.
There's 600,000 Russians in Canada.
There are people with Russian-sounding names, even Ukrainians with Russian-sounding names, by the way.
There are Russian restaurants and Russian stores with signs in Cyrillic.
It's just not every day that you see this normalization of something as abnormal as wishing violence on not just someone, but a group of people for their ethnicity or their nationality.
The left used to call that hate speech, you know, but now it's just what we do.
Is Facebook even a company anymore?
Or is it a bit of a company and a bit of a country in its own right?
I mean, it certainly acts like a country.
It's got a foreign policy, apparently.
I mean, yeah, it's a company too, but I mean, look at this.
I see that Canada has put sanctions on a Russian oligarch named Roman Abramovich.
You might have heard of him.
He's a little bit famous in the West.
Even though he lives in London, and for years, his primary identity, I think, his primary mission has been as the owner of a famous soccer club there they call the the Chelsea Football Club.
That's what they call soccer in the UK.
I always thought he moved to London and bought a fancy football club in London as a way of putting some distance between himself and Vladimir Putin.
That's just what I thought it was about.
And by that I mean so that Putin didn't consider him a threat or a rival.
Abramovich was too busy living the high life in London to be a competitor to him back in Russia.
I guess that didn't work because, you know, Chelsea is one of the most successful football teams in the UK.
It would be really like owning the New York Yankees.
Like, it's that prominent.
And now it's under strict sanctions.
Could be destroyed.
Imagine destroying the New York Yankees.
That's what it'd be like.
I'm not sure what it has to do with the war.
I'm not sure who the victims would be if that football club were smashed.
But anything with a connection to Russia must go.
Same thing in Canada.
Abramovich owns a slice of a steel factory in Saskatchewan called Evraz.
So that's been frozen too, actually.
Italy has seized luxury villas and super yachts from some other Russian billionaires.
I mean, I'm just going around the world here now.
So Italy is seizing things.
So is France, by the way.
France is a very lovely place to have a villa, I hear.
So is Germany.
Massive yachts.
They make a lot of yachts in Germany.
So that's a lot of yachts and villas and fancy football clubs that have just been seized in the past week.
And that stuff's just great in the media.
I mean, who doesn't want to click on those stories just to see a picture of the yacht or see a picture of the super villa?
More importantly, to see wealthy, powerful men be humiliated and brought down a notch.
Whether or not these sanctions will hold up to legal scrutiny is another matter, but the headlines were half the goal, and the court cases will be later.
Look, I don't know what's true and what's not true about these Russian oligarchs.
Do you think I know?
Do you think the media knows?
My theory is that if you have amassed billions or even tens of billions of dollars in Russia, which was communist, and then sort of anarchist, and now I think it could be properly called fascist,
if you manage to make billions or tens of billions of dollars there, you probably have some business skills, but you probably, your main skill set is how to survive crime and how to perpetrate it on your rivals.
There are too many oligarchs playing too many tricky games in both Russia and Ukraine.
It's how they operate in that part of the world.
And by the way, I don't want to besmirch the sainted Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky, who is the hero of our story, but he has accepted millions of dollars in secret payments to an offshore bank account from the oligarchs.
And that was big news a few months ago before the war, before the narrative took hold that he was a sinless saint.
China's Rising Influence00:15:27
I'm just saying oligarchs run Russia, but they also run Ukraine.
But here's my real point about the sanctions and about seizing yachts.
And my real point about Facebook and Instagram acting like countries, really.
I mean, really, they're declaring war against Putin and the Russian army, I think.
Is that in the world of international relations or, you know, I think that what comes around goes around sometimes.
It's a tit-for-tat thing.
Just as the West is banning some Russian firms from doing business there, Russia is banning some Western firms from operating in Russia.
It's a back and forth.
Now, who will be hurt more by that?
Surely Russia, Visa and MasterCard are gone.
That's not a big deal to those companies, but it's pretty inconvenient to Russians.
Except that China has a company that's a competitor to Visa and MasterCard called Union Pay.
And it's huge, by the way.
Not just huge in China, but huge anywhere around the world where there are Chinese people, like in Canada.
I mean, I travel around the city of Toronto and I see these little signs in shops.
They accept visa, they accept NASACARD, Amex, and union pay.
So there's a fire sale on in China right now, in Russia right now, and Chinese firms are filling the void.
I saw this today.
I don't know if you saw this.
Russia threatens to abandon American astronaut in space as sanctions threaten peace aboard International Space Station.
The plan is for astronaut Mark Vanda Hay to land in Kazakhstan with two Russian cosmonauts on a Russian spacecraft.
Now, that's just not nice to ban him.
I mean, America doesn't have the ability to get up to the International Space Station.
I don't know if you know that, but we used to.
America used to when it had a space shuttle.
A decision was made to rely only on the Russians to get up and back.
All right.
So how does that work now?
Are the Russians really going to leave an American up there to die and only take the Russians back down to Earth?
I don't think so.
I hope not.
I mean, that's really murder.
But didn't Facebook and Instagram just normalize murder?
Why is it only Russia that is prosecuting Facebook and Instagram for calling for murder?
Why isn't America looking at it too?
Oh, well, but here's a possible scenario.
And you tell me why this wouldn't work.
And when I was telling you about Roman Abramovich and the other oligarchs, here's what I'm getting at.
So Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta, they're worth about a half a trillion dollars, about $600 billion on the stock market.
They've got huge assets, huge cash flow.
What a business.
And that business just declared war on Russia and on Putin.
I think they did.
But instead of thinking of Mark Zuckerberg as a businessman or as a nerd or as a censor, what if we gave him a different title that's pretty accurate, though?
What if we used the word that the West describes Russian tycoons?
What if we called Mark Zuckerberg an oligarch?
Is it not accurate?
Him and Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon and the rest of the high-tech mafia in Silicon Valley, why wouldn't we call them oligarchs?
And if America and Canada and the United Kingdom and France and Germany and Italy can seize assets of Russian oligarchs without a trial, without a hearing, which is a bit of a Putin move, you have to admit, why wouldn't or couldn't Russia do the same in return, at least to Zuckerberg, the oligarch?
I mean, the obvious answer is that there aren't a lot of assets that American oligarchs stash in Russia.
It's sort of the opposite.
Russian billionaires want to take their wealth out of Russia and secrete it somewhere in the West, in a Swiss bank or in yachts or villas, somewhere that's safer and freer.
I mean, no one in California is trying to move money to Moscow.
It's sort of the other way around.
So I guess there's that practical problem.
But there are yachts on the high seas and there are private jets in the skies.
I don't know if the Russian Navy or Air Force has the ability to grab those things.
But if we're getting to the point where Western oligarchs are calling for assassination of world leaders, Don't be surprised one day if a world leader like Putin fires back in a Putin kind of way.
I'm not here for Putin.
I'm here for me and you.
As Facebook users, I don't like being censored by Mark Zuckerberg.
I don't like the control they have over our lives.
But even worse, I don't like the whimsical approach that Zuckerberg has taken to enforcing rules.
If you're his enemy, you can be killed.
If you're his friend, nothing bad can be said about you.
Vladimir Putin has revealed his true colors in this war.
I mean, he really is that old KGB agent, isn't he?
But I think it's revealed the true colors of our Western oligarchs, too, and what they would do to us if they could.
And really, I think they could.
Stay with us for more.
Well, there's an old Yiddish proverb when two argue, a third grabs the hat.
And Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden, in fact, Russia and all of NATO and the West are in more than just an argument.
It's a war, a proxy war, and certainly much more than that.
Sanctions both ways.
But who is the third that grabs the hat?
I put it to you that it is communist China.
I'll give you one example.
Visa and MasterCard have suspended their operations in Russia, leaving tens of millions of Russians without a credit card.
How could you possibly operate without Visa or MasterCard?
Well, the answer is union pay.
Now, you might not know Union Pay, but it is one of the largest credit card companies in the world.
It's Chinese.
A lot of their market is in China, but I can tell you, just here in Toronto alone, you see union pay all over the place.
Many people in the Chinese diaspora use it.
So is China benefiting economically from the West removing itself from Russia?
And more importantly, what are the lessons China might learn from the Ukraine crisis and apply it to its own sphere of influence, including Taiwan?
Well, there's only one person I trust to answer these questions.
He's a China expert who's been studying the subject for decades.
His name is Gordon Chang, and he joins us now via Skype Gordon.
Great to see you again.
Thank you so much for joining us.
And I just want to say, before we even get started, folks, if you're not following Gordon on Twitter, do yourself a favor.
He's Gordon G. Chang on Twitter, and you will learn more from his Twitter feed than you would from any mainstream media broadcast.
Gordon, what do you think of how China is looking to learn and take advantage of the NATO-Russia spat?
Yeah, thanks, Ezra.
A couple things.
First of all, Russia needs to sell oil, gas, wheat, coal, and it's going to be selling this stuff to China.
And China, knowing the situation, is going to get these commodities at very low prices.
So Beijing is looking forward to a continuing flow of essential items at dead bargain basement rates.
The other thing, though, as you point out, as the West disconnects Russia from the dollar and Euro-based financial systems, China is rushing in.
And it's not just union pay.
It's also, for instance, SIPS.
SIPS is the cross-border interbank payment system, which is the Chinese version of SWIFT.
And as we know, Russia is being disconnected from that international bank messaging system that is run by Europe.
So all of this is ending up where China is actually taking over the Russian economy and making Russia sort of like a very dependent junior partner, more junior than it has been in the past.
That's incredible.
I mean, historically, Russia was the mighty power, and China was very underdeveloped.
And of course, Russia had ambitions in the Far East, but I think the tables have turned.
I recall that when there were Western sanctions on Iran and Iranian oil, that China reportedly was buying that oil at an incredible discount to world prices.
So if the world price of oil would have been 80 bucks, maybe China was getting it for 40 bucks because Iran was simply not allowed to sell it on the lawful market.
I get the feeling that China is probably going in at fire sale prices.
I mean, if you have Western companies divesting themselves in a hurry, there's no way they're getting proper market value for what they're leaving behind.
I mean, this really is, as the old investors said, you know, the time to buy is when there's blood running in the streets.
China's getting a deep discount on Russia, isn't it?
Yes.
And to put forward another quote, you know, Karl Marx said, history repeats, and China does take advantage of countries that are under sanctions that do sell commodities.
So we're going to see this big time with Russia.
You know, in the short term, we're going to see China get a lot of advantage out of this relationship with Russia.
But long term, though, Russia is going to be a crippled country.
Its economy is going to shrivel.
And essentially, it'll become an albatross for China because China, for various reasons, is going to have to support Moscow.
So at least long term, this is going to be advantageous for the West.
But in the short term, China's reaping a lot of advantages, as you point out.
I want to talk about the lessons that China is learning from how NATO and America in particular are responding to an incursion, an invasion, an annexation.
I mean, it's basically been a slow-motion war between Russia and Ukraine for the better part of a decade.
Putin has already annexed parts of Ukraine, the Crimea.
And that really sounds analogous to how China talks about Taiwan, that it's a province of China, that it was split off, that it needs to be reunited.
I mean, that's the same kind of language and rhetoric and sort of myth-making about a greater Russian empire or the greater Chinese empire.
What do you think the lessons are of the last month or so that China is learning about how Biden makes military decisions and how, I guess, other NATO countries would too?
What's China learned?
The most important thing that China learned is that although the United States and Europe are overwhelmingly more powerful than Russia, that deterrence completely failed.
You know, the United States, the 27 nations of the EU, and Britain have an economy that is more than 25 times larger than Russia's.
And that was the numbers for last year.
But yet we're not able to stop Russia from invading Ukraine.
And so China looks at that and says, well, in its situation, although the United States is more powerful than China, when you look at the metrics, this is a failure of leadership.
I think they see the imposition of sanctions as really crippling Russia.
So that does give China some second thoughts about what's going on.
But they can see that these sanctions are not being imposed all at once.
they're being dribbled out, which is, I think, another bad example that we're giving China, that Russia is not going to be punished or that we're reluctant to punish Russia.
And this whole debacle over the supply of MiGs from Poland to Ukraine, that is just, you know, that must make military planners in China really happy because it just shows the complete incompetence of the Biden administration.
So those are the things that, but I guess there's one other thing, and that, of course, is the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people.
And I think that China might, well, certainly was surprised by that and certainly is going to start thinking about what will the Taiwan people do to resist an invasion from China.
I want to ask you about how boycotting, like I would almost say it's verging on Russophobia.
I mean, you see people completely unrelated to Putin or the government, you know, artists like, you know, opera singers or musicians in the West.
If they're Russian, they're being canceled.
Even in Vancouver, there was a musician who was canceled just because he was Russian.
It's got nothing to do with politics.
So you've seen massive boycotts.
Some of them are comedic.
People changing the name of a white Russian drink, like changing the name of a drink on a menu to get the word Russian.
I look at that and I contrast that with the absolute lack of any form of boycott or sanction on Chinese products, and Chinese events like Beijing, from Beijing, where the Paralympics are still happening, were happening until very recently.
The Olympics are making an announcement boycotting Russia.
So they're in Beijing, in that country, while they're condemning Russia for human rights abuses.
And that just, so here's my question for you.
The kind of total Russophobic sanctions.
And I'm not sticking up for Putin here.
I'm just saying it's astonishing how anti-Russian groupthink has set in.
That's a long way from where we are with China, where every big American business is deeply rooted there, whether it's Disney or the NBA or every factory that supplies America.
I just have trouble seeing sanctions being applied to China.
Nuclear Treaty Troubles00:06:19
I have trouble imagining it.
Yes, and China actually has made itself a combatant on the side of Russia.
So we should be sanctioning China.
And we should be sanctioning China in the same way that we sanction Russia, because our measures against Russia are ultimately going to be ineffective unless we also go after Russia's partners.
And of course, the biggest and by far the most important partner is China.
So we need to hit both of them.
And that would then have an effect.
You know, with regard to your first point about the way the world has reacted to this invasion, it is actually quite stunning.
And I think that this is just an indication of the way the world is these days.
That we were not serious as a world about all sorts of issues, including Ukraine, but others as well.
And then Putin has been able to crystallize thinking not only in Europe, which is directly threatened, but also elsewhere around the world.
And so I think we're looking at these issues now in a much more realistic light.
That's a good thing.
But I do agree with you.
We're still a long way from going after the big partner in this axis.
Yeah, I remember, I mean, in Canada, there was a while when the phrase soft power was being used all the time.
It's moral authority and will cajole them.
I think we've seen that soft power doesn't do well when it's faced with hard power.
But let me just ask you one last set of questions, and I'm really grateful for your time.
I know that Ukraine really wanted, there's some people in Ukraine, including the President Zelensky, who really want to be part of NATO.
And I think Putin, with perhaps some justification, was worried about having another NATO country right abutting its borders.
I mean, just like the Baltic states.
And that was at least one of his arguments, whether or not there's merit to it.
Russia has been invaded in the past.
But there is no treaty right now.
And you can see that the refusal of America to do that transfer of military jets from Poland to Ukraine, it seems to me, Gordon, that America and NATO are trying not to give a tripwire that would make this battle expand and, God forbid, nuclear.
If NATO positively sent in fighter jets to Ukraine, it seems like NATO knows that would be an escalation.
And my point is that Ukraine is not in NATO now, and the Allies don't want to make it like it's in NATO.
What is the treaty situation with Taiwan?
Because I know it's quite often there's a U.S. carrier there.
There's actually Americans as that kind of a tripwire.
I don't think the West has that same obligation in a treaty with Ukraine.
I could be wrong.
But what is the legal or treaty relationship between the United States and Taiwan?
Would there be a tripwire that if China moved on Taiwan, it would legally and practically provoke an American response that has not come to Ukraine?
The United States has the Taiwan Relations Act, which requires American governments to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself.
But there no longer is a mutual defense treaty.
That was terminated when the United States switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
There is in the U.S. a one-China policy, the six assurances, the three communiques, and essentially the United States does not recognize China's jurisdiction or sovereignty over Taiwan.
We say that the matter is unresolved and that when it is resolved, it must be done through peaceful means.
With regard to Ukraine, because you did raise that in your question, there is the Budapest Memorandum of December 1994, where the United States, Great Britain, and Russia agreed to respect the sovereignty of Ukraine.
Obviously, the Russians have violated that.
Now, we don't have a formal obligation to defend Ukraine, but when the Budapest Memorandum was inked, the United States did give private assurances that we would protect Ukrainian sovereignty.
And obviously, we haven't really fulfilled that obligation.
And the reason why we gave those assurances is because we wanted Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, which at the time it had the third largest arsenal in the world, which it inherited on the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the incredible thing is that Ukraine gave up actual hard power, nukes, for a promise.
And I think the UK was a signatory.
I think even Russia signed the thing at this time.
And I think that that ought to send a chill through Taiwan and United Arab Emirates and Israel and other countries thinking, all right, well, if I get into a tussle with my neighborhood bully, whether that's China or Iran, maybe I can't count on any written piece of paper.
Maybe I got to count on myself only.
And Israel, you know, Israel has nukes.
Israel has a pretty strong military.
I don't know if Taiwan's is in the same class.
I mean, I don't think Taiwan has nukes.
Has there been any change domestically in Taiwan?
Have Taiwanese legislators, has the think, has the mood in Taiwan changed so that they have decided, well, we had better beef up now because it's only a matter of time.
Have their hearts hardened in Taipei?
Yes, they have.
And they're starting to get serious about their own defense, which is about time.
And, you know, going to your broader point, we could see, we have the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which is something like 195 countries around the world.
We could see that fall apart and countries race to get the bomb because they don't trust the United States.
They don't trust other countries to defend them.
And this could be a much more dangerous world.
Instead of just having eight or nine nuclear powers, we could have 80 or 90.
And that's a much more dangerous world, Ezra.
Terrifying Times Ahead00:03:55
Yeah.
Well, these are terrifying times.
We learned so much from you every time, Gordon.
Thanks so much for stopping by.
Folks, again, that Twitter account, which is really my number one source for news and views on China, is Gordon G. Chang on Twitter.
You've got to follow him.
Great to see you.
We'll look forward to catching up with you sometime soon.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
Right on.
Our pleasure.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Nellis Fozier says, looks like some of the protesters Alexa was talking to may be mentally unstable, similar to the Black Lives Matter protesters who were burning cities in the U.S. Trudeau supports those types of protests, so I guess that is okay, according to the government.
Yeah, you know what?
I talked to Alexa about that, and I think we have to send her out with a bodyguard.
Obviously, not everywhere, and obviously not most of the time, and not to friendly crowds.
But that could have gone sideways.
There are some people who hate rebel news so much they would try and hurt Alexa, especially male feminists who have no problem hurting women.
Rob Nordle says, if Pierre wasn't running, Leslie would have my vote.
Nice, smart lady, another true conservative.
Well, I was really glad Leslie Lewis came on the show.
I got to tell you, yesterday, I talked to Leslie Lewis, as you saw.
Our reporter in Calgary, Adam Sos, went to a Jean-Charais scrum.
And in the Greater Toronto area, our reporter, Dakota Christensen, went to a Roman Baber event.
So yesterday alone, we had three rebel reporters, I'm calling myself a reporter, talking to three different contestants.
And I feel really great about that.
It shows that Rebel News is doing reporting on the conservative leadership, and that so far, at least, the three candidates we've interacted with have not been of the Aaron O'Toole, Andrew Scheer variety, saying, oh, no, we have no time for rebel news.
I think there's a few reasons for that.
I think one is that the people we've, you know, I think in the case of Shere, he probably doesn't know Rebel News very much.
He's from Quebec, and we don't have a strong long presence there.
But I'm saying he's not part of the Toronto or Ottawa rebel derangement syndrome.
I think in the case of Leslie Lewis, she's always been friendly to us.
In the case of Roman Baber, you know, he knows that if he's going to get traction as a critic of the lockdowns, well, who else are you going to talk to besides rebel news?
You're going to talk to the Toronto Star, maybe?
So I think that the reputation of Rebel News is bigger.
We've had a very successful two years.
The last month alone was a record for us in how we handled the trucker rebellion, et cetera.
So I think that these conservative candidates, even if they're slightly nervous about what the media party says about us, I think they've realized it's a really dumb idea to do what the CBC would do in blacklist rebel news.
I think that Aaron O'Toole and Andrew Scheer were just personally weak people, and they gave into that.
We'll see.
I mean, we haven't talked to all of them.
I don't think Patrick Brown likes us much ever since we caught him sneaking into that hockey rink.
We'll see what Pierre Polyev says.
I've known Pierre for more than 20 years.
I hope he talks to our reporters.
Here's another letter from Chuck Andrews, who said, would have loved to have heard her view on the Black Lives Matter movement.
You know, that's a good question.
I didn't think of asking it because it didn't feel really current.
I mean, we had a good general chat.
I asked her a few questions about civil liberties and about French, but we'll have time to talk to her more about things in the months ahead.
I don't think the vote is till September, so we'll have some time.
Well, that's the show for today.
Until Monday, on behalf of all the Sierra Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.
And keep fighting for freedom.
Convoy Convulsions: Law Enforcement Actions00:06:50
And let me leave you with another video of the day, also from Alexa, talking to a convoy organizer who recounts the repercussions of Trudeau's crackdown and his emergencies act.
Very interesting video.
Goodbye, everybody.
Alexa for Rebellion News, and the video you are about to see was filmed two weeks after the peaceful trucker convoy to Ottawa.
Protest against lockdown restriction, who was dismantled by the government.
Trudeau invoked the emergency hack, which gave police extraordinary power of search, arrest, and seizure of bank account and property in an attempt to send thousands of Canadian protesters home or to jail.
One woman, an organizer, Tamara Lych, was held for nearly three weeks for the minor crime of counseling to commit mischief.
Today, you will see an interview with Tom Marazzo, one of the organizers of the convoy, targeted by law enforcement for his story.
So I want to know a little bit what happened on the last few days of the convoy and how the organizer have handled the situation that was happening not only with the police, but as well with the government.
Well, that's a tough question.
There's a lot to really unpack there.
But we worked with all levels of government in terms of the city itself, like with the different departments.
We worked with the police.
We worked with the city.
We talked to different factions within the truck convoy.
And we could see very, very plainly that the federal government was trying to set the conditions for what eventually happened at the end.
And on top of that, I was getting signals through the OPP and through the Ottawa police that, hey, You know, your days here in the city are numbered.
And so we all knew that we were sort of marching towards the edge of this cliff.
And unfortunately, the federal government decided to take everybody over that cliff with them.
So, you know, it was a buildup that everybody saw coming.
But in my conversations and meetings that I had with the city, what I had with the law enforcement, what I was trying to have with the federal government, but they chose to ignore us, we actually had a strategy to try to avoid all of that from happening, with the exception of we weren't just going to outright leave because we were getting signals from the police that they were going to attack.
So there was a lot going on, including we did some media events and stuff like that to try to reach out to the federal government.
And I was trying to back channel with the federal government to absolutely no avail at all.
And so what, you know, the rest is history, as they say, because the law enforcement did actually attack and, you know, broke up the convoy and destroyed or damaged thousands and thousands of dollars worth of damage to trucks needlessly.
And there's people in jail currently.
And, you know, for what?
Because of parking violations.
Ultimately, you know, the situation with us in Ottawa was about parking violations.
Ultimately, that's what it was.
Because if you look at the conditions inside the emergency order, none of that applied to what was happening actually in Ottawa.
None of it.
But they still chose to use the Emergency Act to physically attack us.
So my other question is because we saw many organizers had been arrested.
So Tamar Lynn says she's still in jail right now.
We have Chris Barber.
We have Danny Burfour.
But not you.
I was just wondering, why so?
Or did you heard something about you being having a warrant of arrestation against you?
Every day after Chris Barber had been arrested, I would contact the OPP and I would ask them, are there any warrants for my arrest?
And they would say, well, let me check.
And they'd come back on the phone and say, no, not that we're aware.
You're fine.
So day after day while I was still in the city, until I left the city, I inquired with the OPP on a daily basis.
And oddly enough, there was not a warrant for my arrest.
And I think the reason probably was that in my role, I was constantly working with the liaison teams with law enforcement, and I had been talking to the government, and I hadn't been really doing anything to other than working with the city and working with the police.
So really, I didn't become a person of interest for them in terms of an arrest because I hadn't committed a crime.
And I think it's questionable that any of the other people that were arrested committed any kind of a crime.
But they're like Danny Beaufort was arrested, but he was never charged.
Chris Barber was arrested, had conditions and abided by the conditions and let go.
And he has more proceedings, obviously.
And as you know, Tamara is in jail as of today.
We expect that she'll be released today if logic prevails in the courtroom.
And we think it will.
But in my particular case, I think it was because I was able to create a relationship with the police.
And the one thing that I, in my role, I insisted on and I constantly communicated to the police that I was trying to keep safety lanes open.
So if it was a single lane road, I gave instructions to the trucker, stay off those roads.
If it was two lane, keep one lane open.
If it was three lanes, make sure there was an emergency vehicle.
down the center so that emergency vehicles always had access.
Because for personal reasons, a member of my own close family had been in an ambulance during the time that I was in Ottawa.
And so that reinforced the need to make sure that we were acting in a responsible and safe manner.
So that was always my communications with the police.
Organizers and Roles00:03:35
So I became less interesting to them in terms of mischief when I was actually trying to work with them and relieve pressure on the city and relieve pressure on the police.
So I became kind of less valuable to them in terms of criminal charges.
Because if they would have taken me out or arrested me, then who would they have to work with?
And especially, what is your thought and your feeling about some of volunteer individual or other people who have claimed themselves to be part of the organization and organizer, but at discredit and have heard the movement.
What is your thought?
So we've said in public statements many times that this is a very organic grassroots movement.
So, you know, the term organizer is a very loose word, right?
I prefer even in my case to say I'm a volunteer because that's what I was.
I was volunteering and I was filling a role.
But an organizer could be anybody.
An organizer could be somebody that arranged to have somebody come to Ottawa and speak on the stage.
And so they can say, hey, I'm an organizer.
Or let's say a trucking company from wherever across Ontario, they say, okay, we're going to get a group of truckers from our community.
We're going to drive to Ottawa and support the convoy.
Well, that person's an organizer.
So this has always been a grassroots movement of people that are organizing in their locations and then coming in, attaching onto the Freedom Convoy.
And so you see a lot of different groups all across Canada that have attached onto the right movement at the right time because they want to support the same thing.
Let's get rid of the federal mandates.
So you do get some people that you'd like to distance yourself from, but you get some people that you literally want to hug and embrace and say, great, you're part of the team.
So that happens.
Not all the groups were on the same page.
Not all the groups were, you know, publicly helping what we were there to do.
But everybody had some sort of a role or another.
And it wasn't always positive.
Sometimes it was negative.
You know, as an example is, you know, this issue of the MOU kept coming up.
But with the people organizing the MOU, they recognized that it was in conflict with the rest of the convoy.
So they did a public statement and said, okay, we're going to put this on hold.
This is another time in another place.
So some of the organizations and the organizers of those organizations realized that we were out of alignment and pulled back, but not everybody did.
Some organizers that have large followings kind of were half in, half out.
They had their own agenda, but they were also trying to fit into the overall big picture.
And I will finish on, do you regret, or do you have any regret on what happened or what you have been involved to with the convoy?
That's a good question.
Wishes And Regrets00:01:08
It's not really a matter of regret for me.
It's a matter of things that I wish I would have done better.
And so from that perspective, there are some things that I've reflected on since I've been home, things I wish I would have done better.
But ultimately, I don't think there's very much we could have done differently to stop the police brutality that they brought to Ottawa.
I don't think there was anything that we could have done other than a week before leaving and not achieving anything at all.
We were always a peaceful protest and we absolutely proved it to the entire world that we were a peaceful protest.
And the way we proved it was because we didn't physically retaliate from the police.
And a lot of great people, including yourself, took a lot of physical punishment during those two days.
And we never retaliated with violence.
We proved we were were a peaceful protest and we left.