Ezra Levant examines the shift from COVID censorship to Ukraine war narratives, questioning pro-Western media bias suppressing Russian perspectives while comparing it to Trudeau’s authoritarianism—like freezing bank accounts and demonizing dissent. He critiques Bill C-16’s suppression of debate, citing parallels to East Germany’s doping scandals, and highlights Unsporting, his book on transactivism’s impact on women’s sports. Levant also covers Air Canada’s $5.9B bailout and vaccine mandates, featuring pilot Greg Hill’s fight against digital ID expansion like KTDI, warning of surveillance risks tied to QR-based access. The episode suggests media control and ideological enforcement now threaten free discourse, from sports to public health, reshaping societal norms under the guise of safety and progress. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello, my friends, a bit of a philosophical ramble for me today.
I'm going to try and think about what the next battle is.
I mean, for two years we've been fighting lockdownism and fighting junk science behind the pandemic.
We're trying to make sense of the Russia-Ukraine war.
But what's the next big issue?
Is there a unifying theme?
I'll give you some thoughts on it and how to look at the world.
That's today's podcast.
Let me invite you to become a subscriber to the video version of the podcast.
It's called Rebel News Plus.
I do a video every day of this podcast.
In fact, it sort of started first.
The podcast came later.
In addition, we have four other weekly podcasts.
Sheila Gunread, David Menzies, Andrew Chapatoes, and Net and Cat have a show called Misunderstood.
So that's a lot of content video-wise every week.
And it's behind our paywall, but it's just $8 a month, which I think is really cheap, if I may.
So I'd love to invite you to subscribe to it.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month, half the price of Netflix.
And importantly, that's how we pay our bills here because we don't get any money from Justin Trudeau, unlike the rest of the media.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, how should we look at the world?
It's March 18th, 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.
How should we look at the world?
I don't mean that metaphorically, like what ideology or through what philosophical lens.
I mean, how should we actually look at it?
How do you see the world?
Well, the answer, as anyone in the last hundred years knows, is you look at the world through your own eyes, but most of the world you look at through someone else's eyes, not just through their storytelling in words, but through their visual medium, their videos.
Photography is about 170 years old, I'd estimate.
Before that, I suppose you would look at the world partly through paintings and certainly through your own imagination from stories.
But these days, would you agree with me that most of the world is filtered through someone else's visuals and words?
That's sort of trite and obvious to say.
The trouble is, those lenses through which we look at the world are filtered.
Again, pretty obvious.
Marshall McLuhan talked about such things.
But it really came home to me when I was talking to our friend Joel Pollock the other day about my feelings about the Ukraine-Russia war.
Now, of course, I'm against war.
And of course, I'm against the destruction of a sovereign country.
And of course, I know that Vladimir Putin is the KGB agent who's quite brutal.
We saw that in Chechnya.
He wants to be an imperialist.
I know all that.
I've written a book with a chapter denouncing Vladimir Putin.
And I feel like I'm giving you my anti-Putin credentials because what I'm about to say next, which is I can't help but feeling that I'm being lied to.
Now, of course, truth is the first casualty of war, and there's propaganda on both sides.
I just feel like the entire Canadian media, the Western media, the American media, and most importantly, social media, is full-tilt pro-Ukraine propaganda.
Now, maybe that's okay.
Just as the media during the Second World War, again, you know, you had newsreels during the movies.
You had radio and of course you had propaganda.
And it was good to have pro-Canadian, pro-Allied propaganda in the Second World War.
But the propaganda that we're being fed this time is drowning out basic news, legitimate news coverage.
I find it confusing.
It's obviously on both sides.
For example, here is a tweet by the Ukrainian side showing death and destruction on the streets of a city of Donetsk.
It's heart-rending, as so much Ukrainian war propaganda is.
And I feel very sympathetic looking at it, but I happen to know that Donetsk is a Russian enclave.
It's not part of the Ukraine that was annexed by Russia a few years ago.
But if someone was shot and wounded in Donetsk, I think they were shot and wounded by the Ukrainian side because that's sort of a Russian town.
I've seen so many propaganda images that both the Ukrainian and the Russian propagandists claim shows their guys in the right and the other side in the wrong.
And I mean literally the same picture.
I don't even know whose soldiers are whom.
Sometimes it's a lie.
For example, in Babiyar, we talked about this, the site of a mass murder during the Holocaust.
The Ukrainian side said that Russia bombed the Holocaust Memorial.
An Israeli reporter went to the site and proved that no such thing happened.
I don't think I'm mad that countries are engaging in propaganda.
And I'm certainly not mad that, I guess, the good guys are engaging in it and perhaps more successfully.
But because I don't feel like I have a deep personal stake in this war, because I'm neither Russian nor Ukrainian, although my family came from Ukraine 118, 119 years ago.
I just don't feel like I need to be in the propaganda milieu as if it were my own country.
And I would like to get some basic news.
And more importantly, I would like the right to access the news of my choice, including, if I so choose, to see the propaganda of the Russian side.
Because if I'm on my alerts, if I'm being very careful, I believe I can watch Russian propaganda.
And I think I showed you a short clip from Russia today a couple weeks ago, and actually learn from it, even if all I'm learning is how they think and what they want to show the world.
There is something useful to hearing someone lie.
You get an insight into their mind, into their conduct.
You know what to beware of.
You know perhaps what they're sensitive of.
I believe that Russia today, which was originally banned by the government of Canada pressuring the cable companies, a ban that was confirmed by the CRTC in a hasty decision, I believe that Russia today was useful and I believe that I'm sharp enough not to be duped by it.
And I'm disappointed that as a Canadian citizen in the country of Canada, I'm denied my civil rights as a viewer to see that.
And frankly, that they're denied their rights to publish it.
And the reason I mention all this is because I find it hard to cheer along with Justin Trudeau and the political media establishment, which I sometimes call the media party, after two years of being lied to and being gaslighted.
You know what that word means.
It comes from the movie where someone would turn down the gaslights and then turn them back up.
And someone he was trying to gaslight would say, what's going on with the lights?
And the first person would say, oh, nothing.
You're going mad.
It was an attempt to manipulate someone to tell them something that they saw with their own eyes wasn't so, to drive someone crazy by lying about reality.
That's what gaslighting means.
After two years of gaslighting by Justin Trudeau and Christia Freeland, the same Christia Freeland that seized bank accounts in this country without rule of law, after two years of censorship and being abused and having peaceful political opponents like the Truckers Convoy bullied by Trudeau, demonized by Trudeau, I am unable, as I said to Joel Pollock, to immediately flip into cheerleader mode along with Justin Trudeau and Christia Feland.
Perhaps it's because the Trucker Convoy and their abuse of it and their invocation of a form of martial law is so recent.
I mean just weeks ago, I'm unable, I am inflexible.
I am unable to so quickly go from saying, look at how authoritarian Trudeau and Freeland are, look at the bullies they are, look at the censors they are, look at their crackdown on civil liberties, to immediately cheering them on as they criticize Putin for several of those same things.
Now, I do not say that Trudeau and Freeland are as violent as Putin, but that may be only because they are unable to be as violent as him.
They've certainly shown no limits of their appetites for power, at least peacefully, if you can call their treatment of the trucker convoy and seizing funds.
And it made me think about how we see the world.
Because I think I was always a skeptic of Justin Trudeau and, frankly, of all politicians.
But the last two years has scorched any remaining vestige of respect or, more importantly, trust that I had for the media.
I saw the lying in real time.
I am firmly concluded that the so-called profession of fact-checking is anything but its spin by another name.
That the most fact-checking that fact-checkers do is they're criticizing the opposition, the opponents of power.
Big Tech's Goggles00:04:42
And so I tell you, how do you look at the world?
And I think about this because what should rebel news be doing now that some aspects of the lockdown and the pandemic are waning?
We talked at great length the other day about how it's not over yet.
The no-fly list is in effect.
There are various punitive mandates still in effect.
And of course, the residual powers are there that could be reinvigorated at any time if Teresa Tam or Justin Trudeau wants to.
But if things are subsiding, what should Rebel News cover?
What's the most important thing in the country?
What's an important news story?
What's the most important thing to criticize, to analyze?
Because that's what we do here.
We do the news.
We give you the news.
But we also give you news analysis.
How should we think of the news?
What should we make of the news?
How should we view the world metaphorically?
And here's how I think about it.
We don't just look at the world through our eyes.
We don't just look at the world through the eyes of the media.
But I think more and more we're looking at the world of the eyes through big tech.
It's as if we're all wearing those big, clunky virtual reality goggles.
As I said on a live stream a couple weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg is creating an entire world that he calls the metaverse, where you walk around, you interact with other people, you conduct commerce in this virtual reality as if you're a computer simulation.
You have a little avatar walking around, but not just a human.
You could be a robot.
You could be an animal.
But the thing is, Mark Zuckerberg controls the entire metaverse.
Everything you see, everything you hear, he knows everything that you say and do.
And of course, he's there to sell you everything.
I believe that the greatest news story is also the greatest threat to our freedom, and that is how big tech and big government are combining to put a pair of virtual reality goggles on all of us on every subject.
It's combining big tech, big government, frankly big pharma, the number one thing that's censored these days.
The industrial military complex these days, you're censored if you say certain things about Russia or Ukraine.
Blending that with censorship, putting that on everyone's heads.
And so you'll never know what you don't know.
You'll only know what they let you know.
And any opposition to the official narrative is what they call controlled opposition.
It's to give you a semblance that there's a diversity of opinion.
You know, for today's show, my interview with Linda Blade, which is coming up in a minute, I googled the name of the transgender swimming athlete who just crushed it at the NCAA swimming competition in Atlanta, Georgia.
You know what I'm talking about, Leah Thomas, who was a man until most recently, who's just crushing it in girls' sports.
I think it's a disgraceful story.
But here's what I mean about the virtual reality goggles.
What was the name of Leah Thomas that his mom and dad gave him?
What was he born as before he transitioned a couple years ago?
I typed in Google Leah Thomas birth name.
I typed in Leah Thomas dead name.
That's a transgender phrase for your old name when you were your old self.
And I must have gone through 40 results and I couldn't find it.
Google will not let you find the so-called dead name of Leah Thomas.
They simply have banned that information.
Now we see this happening to us all the time, but that was a fact you think would be pretty easy to find.
Now I switched to another search engine called DuckDuckGo and I found it with a little bit of effort.
But DuckDuckGo, and that was their selling feature, that's what they said to web surfers, use us.
We may not be quite as great as Google, quite as fast, quite as big, quite as many features, but we will not filter.
If you're wearing the goggles, it's just a clear plate glass window.
There's no colors, there's no virtual reality, it's real reality.
Switching to DuckDuckGo00:06:09
But look at this.
Here's a tweet from the boss of DuckDuckGo just a week ago saying they made the decision to downrank Russian sources that they didn't like.
Well, all of a sudden, DuckDuckGo is in the virtual reality goggles gaslighting business.
You know, I have an account on TikTok.
I had deleted it because I thought they were snooping on my phone.
I reactivated it.
Maybe they are snooping on my phone.
You'll laugh at me, but I go to the gym now.
I'm trying to get less fat.
And so I talk about the gym, but I've literally never texted or emailed the word gym or personal trainer.
I just don't.
But I talk about it a little bit.
And on TikTok, half of the videos being served up to me by the algorithm are of people in the gym.
I swear I've never emailed or texted that.
But all your devices are listening to you all the time and serving up to you what they think they're interested in.
Now, I know none of this is news to you, but I'm trying to answer the question, what is the greatest issue that we face in Canada today?
And it's not just Justin Trudeau.
It's not just the seizing of the bank accounts.
It's not just the lockdown.
It's not just the threat of the third year of the pandemic, as Pablo Rodriguez says.
It's not just the censorship.
It's not just the war in Ukraine and Russia.
It's all of it.
It's literally everything if you're forced to wear the virtual reality goggles, not of Mark Zuckerberg, who we know is a creepy, privacy-busting terms of service violating megalomaniac.
Yes, I'm worried about here and by it, but I am far more worried not about his private ambitions, but about the government blending with big media and big tech to simply stop you from seeing anything they don't want you to see.
It's one thing when they ban Russia today, and I not, I say again, I wish they didn't.
I would like to know that, but what if they ban things that you never even knew about and you never will know about them?
I think of the crises in this country today.
I mentioned the lockdown and the pandemic.
I mentioned the war.
I mentioned censorship.
How about housing?
Just out of control prices in any Canadian city.
Inflation, the highest in decades.
How about the fact that Canada's oil has been landlocked by environmental extremists who cut off the pipelines?
The world could so desperately use more oil and gas.
Now we in Canada could, but it's been stopped.
These are individually important issues, but if you cannot find out the truth and the whole truth about them, how can you possibly make decisions about anything?
And so I've come to the conclusion as the lockdown wanes and as the Russia-Ukraine war replaces it as the new big thing for people to have a strong opinion about, that the media itself is the biggest issue because the media itself is every issue because it's being corrupted, the media.
It's being colonized.
You saw the story in Blacklocks the other day about the former editor-in-chief of the Globe Mail, Edward Greensbaum, putting together a clique of 25 Ottawa insiders who would accept payment and a flight to a secret huddle about how they can be trustworthy conduits of government information.
25 journalists participated in that, and all 25 of them kept it a secret who they were.
Those 25 are indeed trustworthy if you're Justin Trudeau, but if you're someone wearing the VR goggles, not so trustworthy at all, are they?
And I think that's why Rebel News' work will never be done.
You know, I don't think other than David Mentis, a single person on our team, has a journalism degree.
I could be wrong on that.
We have such a big team these days.
I don't quite know everyone's story.
But our style is citizen journalism.
It's very low-tech.
We often just take a cell phone, point it at things, and live stream that.
I think it's our lack of fanciness, our earnest citizen journalism style.
Some people laugh at it.
We're not as slick and professional as the big networks.
But I think it's that citizen journalist style that makes us authentic and trustworthy.
It's the opposite of the fancy virtual reality goggles that we're supposed to wear.
I don't know if there's ever going to be an end to it because I think we're all so extremely online.
Everything we do is online.
Compare how much you use cash to how much you use credit and now your Apple Pay.
I think we are irrevocably online.
And I don't know if the internet will ever again return to its Wild West days of pure freedom.
I actually don't think it will, which is why Rebel News has its purpose.
For the last two years, our purpose has been fighting against the civil liberties bonfire of the lockdowns and fighting against the junk science of the pandemic fear mongers.
We've moved beyond just talking about it.
As you know, we've crowdfunded money for lawyers for it too, for helping ordinary people who got caught up in the system.
I think our work will never be done because in Canada at least, more and more journalism itself is the problem.
Stay with us for a moment.
Welcome back.
Women's Sport Controversy00:15:31
Well, Will Thomas was a pretty good swimmer when he was in high school.
He placed in the championships.
He placed in the Ivy League championships, but he was never a gold medalist and certainly not a record breaker.
So Will Thomas decided to become Leah Thomas and to compete as a woman.
And ever since he has been crushing it here, take a look at him yesterday at the NCAA women's swim meet.
That's the best of the best.
But no one's as good at being a woman as a man.
Take a look.
I don't
know if you caught that.
Someone shouted out cheater at the beginning of the race.
Well, so what?
Didn't stop him from winning.
Here he is crowing about his victory and how glad he is to be there.
A new moment, a new milestone in sport.
Leah, how did that performance measure up to your expectations coming into this meet tonight?
I didn't have a whole lot of expectations for this meet.
I was just happy to be here trying to race and compete as best as I could.
You've undoubtedly been under the spotlight over the past few months.
How have you been dealing with that and reasoning with everything?
I try to ignore it as much as I can.
I try to focus on my swimming, what I need to do to get ready for my races, and just try to block out everything else.
What did that race mean to you?
It means the world to be here, be with two of my best friends and teammates, and be able to compete.
Thank you for stopping by.
Thank you so much.
Very disappointing for the girls and young women who have trained all their lives, getting up very early, going to swim meets, sacrificing.
Here's the podium.
There's Will, excuse me, Leah on the left.
And then there's the three genetic women who came in second, third, and fourth.
But as I always say, why do you think there will only be one transgender woman in a competition?
Why don't you think others would say, hey, I sort of am middle of the pack as a fella, but let me go into the women's league and maybe I can beat Leah Thomas, but maybe I'll come in second and that's still better I can do against other blokes.
Soon you will see the entire podium, first, second, third, all the way down, being trans women.
Why wouldn't you?
It worked for Leah Thomas.
Why wouldn't it work for anyone?
Well, joining us now to talk about this is a Canadian coach, a national champion athlete in her own right, and the author of a book published by Rebel News called Unsporting, our friend Linda Blade.
Linda, it's a pleasure to have you here.
You were a champion athlete yourself in track and field, and you've been a coach for many years.
You were there yesterday.
Tell me a little bit about the mood in the room.
I've got to think that most of the people there were, you know, born double X chromosome women and girls, and they had been training their whole lives and getting up early and going to swim meets and sacrificing.
But they all knew advanced they were going to be beaten by the lad, by the bloke.
That's kind of hung over the whole event, did it?
Yeah, to me, going into a sporting venue, it seemed rather subdued.
I have to be honest.
It seemed quite subdued.
And of course, those of us who were there protesting and making our voices heard on behalf of the women and the female athletes had a, I felt anyway for myself, I can only speak for myself, but I felt torn because on the one hand, I didn't want to be there at all.
I did not want to witness the destruction of women's sport, which is what is happening here.
But on the other hand, I felt the need to speak out and to show the world that women really aren't just taking this laying down.
We really do want to fight for our sports.
And we feel, those of us who've had our turn, we feel like we need to help these young girls, these young women athletes, and fight on their behalf.
I mean, it's very important that somebody speaks out and says this is not correct.
I have a similar feeling I do when I look at the Olympics in a totalitarian regime like Beijing, or even some of the boycotts against Russian sports teams now.
On the one hand, it's important not to glorify and participate in something that's immoral.
On the other hand, these, you know, do you really make a young athlete pay a political price for you?
Do you really say to people, you can't go to Beijing Olympics because we don't like Beijing?
And the reason I make that analogy is because what were the other young women supposed to do?
Were they supposed to not compete?
Were they supposed to go and try and start up some rival league or conference?
I mean, I don't even know what they should do because the fix was in.
I mean, it's like a rigged boxing match.
It's the opposite of sport.
So they were fighting over second, third, and fourth place.
And as I say, I think next year they'll be fighting over just third and fourth place and just over fourth and fifth place as more lads get in on the game.
Yes, so there are a number of people who have called for the girls to boycott and to stand on their blocks and not participate.
But honestly, I wonder whether in this moment, they haven't had enough time to organize.
And in fact, you have to remember that these women who are competing, they are rivals.
It's not like they're going to put their heads together and figure out what they're going to do together.
I don't think the women in this particular year have even had enough time to figure out what they're going to do.
Now, having said that, those girls who are in their fifth year, fourth year of university last competition, they should be willing to come out afterwards and say this is not correct and this is not appropriate and it's unethical.
And maybe in years to come, there will be more opportunities for action.
In the meantime, what these girls want is a university education and to be able to go and get a job.
So, if they protest or do anything radical, their universities have literally told them they will make sure that they're not going to get a good job offer.
They've been threatened that way.
You know, it's interesting.
Caitlin Jenner, really, the first household name global celebrity, really, and former great Olympic athlete in his own right, when he was called Bruce Jenner, he's now transitioned to Caitlin Jenner.
Interestingly, he or she weighed in on this yesterday himself.
It was rather a self-deprecating joke.
I don't know if you saw Coach Blade.
He said, I got the balls to stand up for young women.
And I think it's rather incredible the reaction to him from the trans activists.
They're raging against Bruce Jenner, Caitlin Jenner, really the pioneer of transgenderism, because it's clear that he just wants to be in his own skin.
I mean, I don't want to delve too deeply into the psychology of it, but Bruce Jenner really felt like Caitlin Jenner, and that's who he wanted to be.
That's a very different motivation than I want to take something away from other people.
I think if you had to say it, Bruce or Caitlin Jenner was using transgenderism as a shield, whereas others want to use it as a sword.
And it's one thing to say, let me be me, let me be who I am.
Let me express myself in my own way.
You may not understand it, but just leave me alone to be who I want to be.
That's a very different kind of transgender politics than I am coming into your spaces and I'm going to take your things and you will call me woman.
Like it's a very different mindset, isn't it?
Yes.
In fact, it reveals the split in the LGBTQ community.
Because when you think back to the gay rights movement, all they wanted to do was have their own rights taken care of and leave us alone, so to speak.
But now the Q and the T come along and they insist on not only being able to live as their truth or whatever they feel like in their own skin, but now they want to compel everybody else to believe a lie, to believe something they don't agree with, to use pronouns the way they want us to, to dictate speech and dictate how the rules should work for everybody else.
So this last part of the Q part of the LGBTQ community is quite kind of almost totalitarian in that way.
And meanwhile, there is a split even in the trans community because as you pointed out, there are many transgender women or people who identify as women who are born male who just want to acknowledge that they're really male at birth and they just want to express in a different way.
And they want, and they don't believe in going into women's bathrooms and women's private spaces and into women's sports.
And that they want to, they understand there's sex, the way you're born, male or female.
And then layered on top of that is whatever the gender or whatever the expression they feel like they want to have.
But the people like Leah Thomas and those activists, the trans activists, they want to now deny the very reality of sex, which is just not practical.
It's even not, it's not doable in society.
We have to have guidelines.
We have to have sex-based rights.
Yeah, it's very strange.
And, you know, I saw it just yesterday.
It's so atrocious, I hate to even say it.
I saw women referred to as bleeders, a reference to having one's period.
And I was just so furious when I saw that because it's, again, that's being done in the name of the trans project.
I mean, so the denormalization and the denaturing women, adding prefixes and suffixes and euphemisms.
So it's, and to me, that's rock-solid proof that this is not about protecting trans people.
It's about destroying the definition of women.
And it's incredible to me how many people who once called themselves feminists are going along with this.
I don't know.
I don't know where this is coming from.
I don't know why it's happening.
But I have to tell you that, for example, even our conversation here, Linda, this conversation is unlawful on Twitter because I've done two things.
I've deadnamed Leah Thomas by saying the name he was born with.
And I think both you and I have misgendered people, which is to call them he instead of her.
I don't know if you did that, but I did.
Both of those things are enough to get you kicked off of social media.
In fact, the harshness, the speed, and the unforgivable nature of censorship in the trans issues is stricter even than those if you have dissident views on the pandemic.
And this all happened in five years.
I don't know how it happened so quickly.
Where did it all come from?
Well, I think it had been bubbling under the surface being indoctrinated in the schools through the last 10 or 15 years.
And it just kind of rose to the surface after that generation started having jobs where they were in bureaucracy and in the policymaking sphere.
I will say this, though.
If misgendering is a sin on Twitter and it should not be abided, why is Leah Thomas supposed to be on there at all in the women's show being shown swinging with women?
Because as far as I'm concerned, the moment a male-bodied person, a male person, competes with women or goes into the women's category, that person has just misgendered all the women in that group.
Yeah.
I find it very frustrating.
And I think there's, I mean, swimming, you steal the victory from women and girls who have been working on it for years or decades.
But there are actually transgender athletes in violent sports like mixed martial arts and wrestling and football and things like that.
And to see men who transition to women physically smash genetic women in the name of equality is so appalling.
And I think that the reason why Will Thomas, Leah Thomas, is a media star is because that it's less viscerally offensive to see a man beat women in a separate swimming lane.
But there are transgender athletes in every sport, including the ones with physical contact.
And maybe the reasons those aren't quite as celebrated in the media is because there's something very deep within us.
I think even genetically, probably over the course of thousands of generations, to see a man physically pummeling a woman generates a sense of disgust and rage and sympathy amongst us.
And I don't know.
I don't know how this is going to end, but it's nowhere close to over yet.
Let me ask you this last question, Lynn, and thanks very much for joining us.
I know you're on holidays right now, but I appreciate you chiming in.
Is there any resistance to this, or is everyone just so afraid?
Everyone's afraid, and I feel like if we don't start speaking out now, we've actually literally lost women's sports.
Because even in Canada, all of our sports associations are being pressured in the most absurd and intense way to adopt the self-identity strategies.
Like I know in my sport in track and field, we actually are now looking at a draft policy that basically says for domestic competitions, anybody can compete in whatever category they would like to identify into.
Resistance Is Futile00:04:50
And that's not even like no hormones, no surgery.
It could change from one day to the next.
And, you know, we're just going to have to have the doors wide open and let people, and no questions asked, and let people just compete the way they want.
But if, you know, the point, my job as president of Athletics Alberta, which is the Alberta branch, is to go to the table and really argue these points.
But you know, it's amazing to me, Ezra, how much fear and hesitation to say anything happens even in these meetings behind closed doors when you have presidents of provinces and everybody's so afraid, whether it's Bill C16, I don't know what it is, nobody wants to say anything one way or another.
There's like a dead silence and it's like the polite smiles at coffee time.
Like it's nobody wants to talk about it.
You know, when I was a kid, very young age, I remember the Olympics, there were always questions: well, were the East German women's teams, were they, you know, were they actually men?
Were they on steroids, et cetera?
There was a, everyone knew there were some shenanigans afoot.
We naturally knew there was some trickery and unsportsmanlike.
And, you know, it was, we all knew instinctively it was cheating.
If only they were 40 years later, they would just be running all the East German and Soviet men, and the West would invite them to come and cheat.
It's very depressing, but I think the key is to be able to talk about it.
That's how everything starts, which is why they're censoring it.
I'm glad you're talking about it.
I'm very proud that Rebel News published your book.
And I'll just read it one more time.
I'll put it on the screen: Unsporting: How Transactivism and Science Denial Are Destroying Sport.
And you can get that at unsporting.com.
Great to see you.
Thanks for joining us in the middle of your vacation.
Appreciate you taking time away.
Thank you very much, Ezra.
I appreciate it.
Hi, everybody.
There you have it.
Linda Plays.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Hope Dealer64 says, in reference to the Melinda Gates interview: how could she have any discernment about a man she met once, but not the one she was married to?
I call Bull.
Well, I don't know if you saw my story about Bill Gates, where I did a deep dive on him.
There's a lot of very strange things with Bill Gates, including the fact that he every year would go on a getaway with his former girlfriend with the approval of his wife.
And that's sort of what his best friend Warren Buffett does, too.
Two wives.
And I think just there was so much weird about Bill Gates, and he gets away with it because, first of all, he looks sort of like a harmless schlepp.
But second of all, he just spends hundreds of millions of dollars bribing people not to ask him prickly questions.
It is rather amazing that Melinda Gates said those things.
I think you're right.
I can only imagine the things she's seen.
I can only imagine the things she put up with before Epstein was the breaking point.
It's just, I tell you, billionaires, they're not like us, are they?
Rebel in the City 77 says the same actors on the same set on the same movie, all reading from the same script.
Nazis learned they can't conquer the world by force.
I think you're talking about the World Health Organization in this script.
I don't think I would equate the World Health Organization with Nazis.
Nazis implies a mass violence.
But I think the World Health Organization are fear-mongers.
They like the power of unelected public health.
I think they saw it as a way to create the Panopticon, the all-seeing surveillance state.
And I think a lot of them had been daydreaming about this pandemic crisis for a long time, Bill Gates being the most obvious one of them.
Friend of the King says this is just a preparation in case the Ukrainian war doesn't work out for them.
I don't know what the interests of the West are in the Ukrainian war other than to have it stop and keep as much of Ukraine whole and sovereign and independent as possible.
Air Canada's Vaccine Mandate00:11:08
I know there's some who really, really want Ukraine in the NATO alliance.
I'm not sure if that's good for anyone.
I don't know if it's good for Ukraine because I think Russia would feel the need to come in and stop that from happening.
I think that's one of their rationales for invading this time.
And I don't know if the NATO alliance, including Canadians, want Ukraine to be a tripwire for World War III.
Sometimes I get the feeling that it was Americans who wanted the war in Ukraine almost more than Russia.
Here, look at this video featuring John McCain and Lindsey Graham from about 10 years ago.
And tell me if I'm wrong.
It is time for them to pay a heavier price.
I believe you will win.
I am convinced you will win, and we will do everything we can to provide you with what you need to win.
I believe that you will win, and I'm confident that you will win, and we will help you with all the possible tools.
Thank you.
Well, those are our letters for the day.
Let me say goodbye to you, and thanks for watching all week, and have a great weekend.
We'll see you on Monday.
But let me leave you with our video of the day, our friend Tamara Ugalini, doing a story on pilots still facing termination and the link between vaccine mandates and digital ID.
There's a video from Tamara.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.
Tamara Ugolini with Rebel News discussing more aviation squashing through continued COVID-related mandates and restrictions.
Early in 2021, Air Canada specifically took a massive government bailout at the tune of $5.9 billion after record losses in both 2020 and 2021.
The airline lost $3.6 billion in 2021, which was an improvement from a $4.6 billion loss in 2020.
Air Canada's 2021 revenue from domestic flights was only at 39% of what it was in 2019, while revenue from international flying was at a mere 20% of that 2019 baseline.
At the beginning of 2022, the aviation industry, like many other sectors across Canada, saw staff shortages allegedly due to illness and isolation rules, while healthy, unvaccinated employees remain on forced unemployment despite being ready and able to work.
One of those is Greg Hill.
He is a Canadian airline pilot and military veteran.
Greg is both co-founder and director of Free to Fly, which is an initiative started by aviation professionals to stand alongside passengers in defense of freedom, obviously to fly and more broadly travel.
Despite vaccine mandates now being reined in in almost all sectors across Canada by provincial and territorial guidance, federal travel restrictions remain heavy-handed.
Greg and I discuss what this has looked like for him, a pilot with an impeccable safety record.
Check it out.
Well, we kind of saw this coming last April, almost a year ago.
We figured as part of the airline industry, we'd be at the pointy end of any mandate.
So we the free to fly was really born out of trying to get ahead of that.
And it did go the route that we expected it to go.
The walls closed in, I guess, until the end of October.
And at that point, the bulk of our membership ended up unpaid at home as of the end of October.
And then fast forward to where we are now.
This unpaid leave for the bulk of the industry came to a close around the end of April.
And the time, you know, the clock was ticking roughly as we got towards the end of April.
And now what we're seeing over the last few weeks, for some, it's been further back, even in the fall, we've had some of our members outright terminated.
But we saw most recently Air Canada, one of the top 25 largest employers in the nation, announced that they're going to terminate all of their unvaccinated employees effective the 1st of May.
So that's in a nutshell where we've been.
Lots of advocacy from amongst our group, really encouraged by their willingness to stand firmly for their God-given freedoms in a variety of means, whether it's advocating with politicians, whether it's showing up at rallies, whether it's speaking out with their unions and their employers.
There's many means, but that's where we've been the last year.
What would you say is the amount of colleagues that you have who are taking this stance with you?
Well, it's difficult to say in terms of numbers because as we know, this is a matter of privacy, but obviously the bulk of our members have spoken out and it's obvious as we head towards terminations.
But statistically across the nation, you're looking at vaccination numbers in the range of 85 to 90 percent.
So to be blunt with you, it's not as large of a number as we would have liked to have seen, which sounds counterintuitive.
But the reason I say that is if you look south of the border, for instance, down in the States, we had some of their airlines where take their pilots, for example, they were very firm.
15-20% of them said, we will absolutely never concede our bodily autonomy.
And guess what?
They're still flying airplanes down there.
Unfortunately, in Canada, for a variety of reasons, it's been a discouragingly small number.
And this is the nature of collective action.
When we don't act collectively and stand up against authoritarian overreach, this is where we end up.
And that's really a comment for broader society, not so much just within our own industry.
Can you comment at all on where you're at with your union and these talks with the airline?
Well, I'll speak broadly as far as our membership as a whole.
With free to fly, we've got 42,000 members, 38,000 of those are passengers, and then we've got around 3,000 plus as far as the aviation professionals go.
And I'll speak with what should be most obvious in terms of recent news.
You look at Air Canada, for instance, over the past week, they announced as of the 1st of May, as I mentioned, that any of their unvaccinated employees will be terminated.
So if you know, if you take a statistical range, you're looking at 1,500, 2,000 employees potentially, if the numbers are similar to broader society in terms of who's vaccinated and who's not.
Surprisingly or unsurprisingly, depending on your outlook, this is unknown to the broader public, which seems surprising given the size of the employer and the amount that Air Canada tends to trend in the news.
So in terms of where those employees are at with their unions, it's been very discouraging.
I think that's a common story that you'll hear across the various industries, not just in aviation, that the unions themselves have done very little.
At this point, they are trying to push back to a certain extent, but it feels like it's a little bit too little, too late.
Within 24 hours of receiving this termination notice, you say that a partnership popped up between with KDTI, so that's the known traveler digital identity.
Why does this concern you and who are those partners?
It's a great question, Tamara.
And well, the WEF, the World Economic Forum, is what's behind this KDTI.
It was really rolled out in 2019, but a white paper came out in 2020.
And I would encourage, well, I'd say every Canadian to get their hands on that.
It's not difficult to find.
It's on the internet and read through it.
I would call it the Trojan horse for digital ID more broadly.
And you take a read through that white paper and it is very concerning.
It literally says that KDTI, which is the known traveler digital ID, is the foundation for a globally accepted decentralized identity ecosystem, which is rather euphemistic, but it talks about how the layers of cryptography and everything else that form the foundation of it aren't sufficient in and of themselves to create a trust network, that this requires developing agreements between issuers such as credit unions, banks, stores, healthcare providers.
The document itself says that in black and white.
And so this wasn't rolled out immediately just last week.
It's been sitting around for a while, but I'd say it means something very, very different.
And as it rolls out as something that seems convenient and increasing safety, which are things that we keep hearing over and over again, convenience and safety, convenience and safety.
And before you know it, this cage starts to close around you.
And I think broadly in society, we're kind of looking left and right sometimes and people are feeling like, wow, I got through this unscathed.
It looks like those guys are getting terminated, but I'm going to be okay.
But I think what we don't realize is that there's a broader cage that's kind of closing around all of us at this point.
And I think this KTDI needs to be looked at in more depth by everyone in terms of where it's going.
Connecting the dots is a very relevant aspect of these indiscriminate vaccine mandates.
See, vaccine passports have begun the normalization of carrying around a scannable QR code on your cell phone to gain access to places.
And that translates well into situations like airport security.
After all, removing our shoes and belts and carrying travel-sized liquids in clear containers were all supposed to be temporary measures post-9-11 that still remain in place today and in many instances have become even more aggressive.
Like Greg says, it's all about convenience and safety.
Soon your handy little QR code will be tied to your hotel and then to your rental car.
And well, next thing we know it, we're building a known traveler status, which ties in attestations from your university, your bank statements, or your vaccination status.
This decentralized identity foundation aims to be an open source, decentralized identity ecosystem that equips the identity community with the protocols, tools, and implementations necessary to create and validate identity attestation.
This is the future that Greg is opposing, and he believes the vaccine mandates and, of course, the subsequent passports are the precursor to.