Ezra Levant argues the West’s selective outrage—banning Russia’s "Z" symbol while ignoring China’s crackdowns in Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan—exposes hypocrisy, especially as Canada funds a $550M Chinese-backed TransPod monorail. He contrasts Hunter Biden’s laptop suppression with Paul Manafort’s prosecution, questions Joe Biden’s competence (nearly 80, shifting leftward), and predicts his resignation before January 2025 to avoid Kamala Harris’s succession. Vincenzo Gutzo, a Quebec businessman, defends Jean Charest’s leadership bid despite past controversies, criticizing career politicians like Poilievre for lacking empathy and blaming the convoy protests’ escalation on government inaction. The episode highlights how Western elites prioritize optics over accountability, even as their own policies undermine credibility. [Automatically generated summary]
Did you know they're trying to ban the letter Z or Z as our American friends say it?
That's going to be tough to do because I don't think you can ban a letter.
I don't think it works that way.
It's not really owned by anyone.
The letter Z is very ancient.
I'll tell you a little bit about the letter Z and who's trying to ban it.
You're going to laugh and cry.
And I'll compare that craziness with how we treat real threats in life.
Like those coming from communist China.
I'll outline a few.
Oh, it's a tangled web.
That's ahead.
I want to invite you to see this podcast, not just hear it.
I want you to see it on video because there's a lot of little clips we're showing.
And a great interview with Joel Pollock today about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden's laptop.
Please go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
It's $8 a month.
You get my daily show, plus weekly video shows from Sheila Gunread, Andrew Chapodos, David Menzies, and Nan and Kat.
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Plus, we use that money to pay our bills here because we don't take any money from Trudeau.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, is everyone being extra anti-Russian to obscure the fact that we're still abiding the Chinese dictatorship?
It's March 31st, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a 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.
You know, I have a letter Z in my name, which isn't that common.
I haven't played Scrabble in a while, but Z and Q are the high-value letters because they're rare.
You know, Z is an ancient letter, not like some of the newer letters.
Here's the ancient Greek letter Zeta.
Here's the ancient Hebrew letter Zion, which is related to Zeta.
Here's the Arabic version, Zain.
Pretty ancient.
I mean, those are some of the oldest languages around.
Compare that to a newcomer, like the letter W.
I mean, did you know, did you ever think about it?
I'm sure you haven't.
I'm sure you don't have that much time on your hands to think about letters, but W, literally just two U's together, it's only being accepted as its own letter for a few hundred years.
In other words, Z is a serious letter.
It's an important letter, if I do say so myself.
I mean, think about it.
Zipper, Zinger, frozen, frazzled.
All the fun words.
Maze, days, haze.
But I regret to report to you that the letter Z, or Z, as our American friends call it, is now being banned.
The letter, the alphabet.
I didn't know you could do that.
Because for some reason, the Russians have been putting the letter Z on their military vehicles in the Ukraine war.
Now, they call that letter Z in Russian.
I'm not pronouncing it right.
You know, it depends on who you ask.
The Z means different things.
Zapobedu, if I'm saying that right, to victory.
Zapodni means West.
I don't know what it stands for.
Everyone has a different opinion.
You can see, though, the letter Z all over the place.
It's a symbol for the war.
I get it.
You know, reminds me of Winston Churchill during the Second World War.
Churchill used to make the V assemble with his fingers, standing for victory.
I guess that was an early meme.
I regret to inform you, though, that the letter Z, Z, Zeta, Z, whatever you call it, is now zapped.
It's frozen.
I know that sounds zany, but it's true.
It started with what I thought was a joke on Twitter.
This is a tweet from the foreign minister of Ukraine.
I call on all states to criminalize the use of the Z symbol as a way to publicly support Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.
Z means Russian war crimes, bombed out cities, thousands of murdered Ukrainians.
Public support of this barbarism must be forbidden.
Now, I am not in favor of an authoritarian ruler invading a neighboring country, which is what Putin has done, but I am also not in favor of an authoritarian ruler telling neighboring countries that they must criminalize peaceful political expression.
I can't help notice that Ukraine has banned opposition political parties that disagree with their president.
I can't help notice that Ukraine has banned media that disagree with their president, and now they want to regulate political speech in other countries, including the use of a letter of the alphabet.
I just think it's extra weird given that Ukraine abides the notorious Azov battalion, which has a Z in it, and they just happen to use Nazi imagery, including the occasional Nazi swastika.
There's a Z in the word Nazi too.
I can't help but notice, you'd think that's all hyperbole, but it's actually happening.
They're banning the letter Z. Some German states plan to criminalize use of Z symbols supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Here's part of the story.
In Germany, officials plan to prosecute those who display the Z symbol as a way to show support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Nancy Fazer, the Interior Minister for the State of Berlin, announced Monday that authorities will be in charge of cases where the Z symbol is being used to promote Russia's war atrocities.
Well, of course, Germany will do a lot of showy things like this to distract from the fact that they buy about 40% of their energy from Vladimir Putin and Gazprom, despite Trump's warnings not to do so.
Do you remember the German chancellor named Gerhard Schrader?
I don't know if you remember him.
He was the chancellor of Germany for seven years, fairly long time, like a prime minister or president of the country.
And then afterwards, what did he do?
He went to work for Vladimir Putin.
I don't know if you know that.
He's the chairman of a large Russian energy company called Reznieft.
Just huge, huge company.
It would be like being the president of Exxon.
And just last month, he joined the board of Gazprom, Russia's huge natural gas company that sells to Germany.
This would be like if Bill Clinton or something went to work for Putin.
Like, it's that shocking.
And he still remains a polite company in Germany.
This is happening now.
I mean, Schrader has not resigned during the war.
He's been promoted.
German society is fine with that.
So yeah, go ahead and ban the letter Z. Right on.
Makes you feel better while you're burning that Gazprom gas.
And I tell you all of this, I tell you about the letter Z being banned and anyone with a trace of Russia in them being purged and canceled to contrast it with the total willful blindness towards China, a country with exactly 10 times the population of Russia.
Did you know that?
And exactly 10 times the GDP of Russia.
Maybe that's why we're not getting tough with China.
Because whatever you can say about Putin, violent, brutal, authoritarian, imperialistic, undemocratic, whatever you can say about Putin, you can say tenfold about China.
Whether it's their treatment of Tibet or Hong Kong or the Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang or their threats to the independent country of Taiwan or their espionage and undermining of us in Canada and America and the West, frankly.
And yet we treat China as an honored guest as if they're moral heroes.
I'm talking about the dictatorship here.
And talk about banning the letter Z, the opposite, you know, they use Greek letters to describe variants of the COVID-19 virus that came from China, that China lied about.
You know, there's the delta variant.
You know, that's a Greek letter, right?
The Omicron.
Those are Greek letters.
And they were going through the Greek alphabet.
And the next letter they were supposed to use was the Greek letter spelt in English XI, which is usually pronounced XI or Ksai.
That's the Greek letter.
But it happens to be spelled in English the same way as Shi Jinping's first last name, XI.
That's the dictator of China.
So the World Health Organization and the media and everyone just skipped the letter Ksai in Greek because it looked like Shi Jinping out of deference to the tyrants.
So they're banning Zed, but they're also skipping over Shi or Ksai.
But look at two pieces of news here about China.
Here's the first one.
Hong Kong has for years had a High Court of Appeal made up of some of the finest judges from around the Commonwealth, as in Hong Kong's tip-top court like our Supreme Court in Hong Kong.
So it wasn't just Hong Kongers.
It drew on judges from around the world, including from the United Kingdom and including from Canada.
I think that's wonderful.
There was something lovely about that.
But of course, the laws underneath that court of final appeal, they've changed, right?
That was the cause of the uprising in Hong Kong in 2019 and the crushing of democracy there in 2020 by the communists while the world was distracted by China's virus.
So all of a sudden you have the finest, fairest judges in the world, like truly amazing.
But they were presiding over a court in an authoritarian dictatorship.
And the laws they were implementing are illiberal.
They're vicious, bully dictator laws.
It doesn't work, right?
And it's getting worse all the time, right?
So the democracy activists in Hong Kong, if you don't know, they've been rounded up and charged and jailed.
Basically, it's been getting worse and worse and worse.
So look at this news from Reuters here, but it's everywhere.
It's news just yesterday.
Interesting story, I think.
Two senior British judges, including the president of the UK Supreme Court, resigned from Hong Kong's highest court on Wednesday because of a sweeping national security law imposed by China, cracking down on dissent in the former British colony.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I don't care how much money they're paying you, how prestigious the gig is.
You know, you're Xi Jinping's enforcer now.
Let me read a little bit.
Robert Reed, who heads up Britain's top judicial body, said that he and colleague Peter Hodge would relinquish their roles with immediate effect as non-permanent judges on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal.
I have concluded in agreement with the government that the judges of the Supreme Court cannot continue to sit in Hong Kong without appearing to endorse an administration which has departed from the values of political freedom and freedom of expression, Reed said in a statement.
Obviously, he's referring to the UK government that he consulted with.
But look at this.
Local lawyers said the resignations would likely put pressure on the 10 other foreign court of final appeal judges to quit.
Six of these are British, those judges who also from Canada and Australia are mostly retired senior jurists in their home countries, unlike Reed and Hodge, who are still serving.
Yeah, that Canadian they're talking about, that's Beverly McLaughlin, our former chief justice for years here in Canada.
I checked this morning to see if she had resigned.
No, no, she's staying.
She's staying in solidarity with Xi Jinping.
Look at her.
So proud of standing with dictators.
That's so gross.
You know, McLaughlin outrageously claimed that Canada is a genocidal country.
High-Speed Dreams00:08:32
She said that.
I'm serious.
Here's a story in the Globe and Mail that day, but there's many others.
But isn't it funny that she has not used the word genocide to describe her new patrons, the Chinese Communist Party?
That's odd.
Sort of puts all of her rulings against freedom in Canada in a new light, doesn't it?
It's weird.
Imagine that.
You can't use the letter Z, but you can be a judge enforcing China's brutal laws on its own people, and you're still polite company.
But look at this hilarious news from Alberta.
Let me just tell you one more story that I think is sort of related.
It's a tweet.
We are thrilled to share that TransPod has confirmed 550 million US dollars finance for the construction of the Alberta TransPod line in Canada to connect the cities of Calgary and Edmonton with fast, affordable, and sustainable ultra-high-speed transportation.
And then it continues.
The Alberta project will create, now this is incredible, 140,000 new jobs and $19.2 billion to Alberta's GDP while reducing travel time from Edmonton to Calgary by more than one-third and improving affordability by almost half the price of a plane ticket.
Wow, 140,000 new jobs, eh?
To connect Edmonton and Calgary with the railway.
Now, there's only about 800,000 people working in each city.
I checked.
So it's 160,000 between the two of them.
So almost 10% of the people are going to work on this railroad.
It's monorail.
That's quite something.
$19.2 billion in GDP, eh?
Just for putting a railway between Calgary and Edmonton, eh?
You know, I checked, and the entire agriculture industry in Alberta is only half that valuable.
What are they making this monorail out of gold?
I've driven that highway 100 times.
The two cities are about three hours apart by car, a little bit less if you speed, which I do.
Most people travel by car.
It's not bad, about two and a half hours, three hours.
For those in a big rush or wealthy, they can take a little low frills plane back and forth.
WestJet and Air Canada both do it.
It's really a half-hour flight.
I checked today.
It's about 250 bucks to be fair.
It's not cheap, but you're really not going to be much faster if you take a bullet train than, you know, half an hour in the air.
I've been on bullet trains before.
I actually took one from Shanghai Airport to the Shanghai city center.
It's pretty exciting.
We went over 300 kilometers an hour for a brief moment.
It was pretty cool.
But bullet trains generally don't make money anywhere, including in China or Japan, even though you've got tens of millions of people in each city that you're connecting.
So there's so many people, but connecting Calgary and Edmonton, billions of dollars to do what great highway bus companies, two airlines, even Uber does.
I don't get it.
And you're saying this is going to employ as many people as the oil and gas industry, really?
I'm going to call you the worst insult I can call you.
I'm going to call you a monorail salesman.
Do you know what I mean?
You know, a town with money is a little like the mule with a spinning wheel.
No one knows how he got it, and danged if he knows how to use it.
Mule.
The name's Lanley.
Lyle Lanley.
And I come before you good people tonight with an idea.
Probably the greatest.
Oh, it's not for you.
It's more of a Shelbyville idea.
Now, wait just a minute.
We're twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville.
Just tell us your idea and we'll vote for it.
All right.
I tell you what I'll do.
I'll show you my idea.
I give you the Springfield Monorail.
I've sold monorails to Brockway, Audmanville, and North Haberbrook.
And by gum, it put them on the map.
Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine bona fide electrified six-car monorail.
What I say?
Monorail.
What's it called?
Monorail.
That's right, monorail.
That was a great Simpson episode.
Now, they have been hucksker.
There's been hucksters promoting monorails and high-speed rail in Canada and the United States for generations.
You know, California has a high-speed rail project.
Lots of people in California, LA, San Francisco.
Voters approved the idea back in 2008, and they assigned a $9 billion U.S. government bond to it, but it's still not built.
And the price tag is now 80 billion U.S.
But boy, does it have a lot of people getting rich off it?
Here's a story in the LA Times, though.
This is what it sort of looks like.
Delays, half-built tracks and bridges, abandoned political promises to make it work.
Yeah, what a laugh.
But I saw this.
Now, this story is a few years old.
Chinese firms want in on America's first bullet train.
Asian companies would bankroll the $68 billion project that will connect LA to San Francisco.
Now, I note that that price tag was what it cost in 2015 when this story was written.
It's higher now.
China, eh?
So China wants in.
Well, what do you know?
Look at this story from Global News.
$550 million secured to help finance ultra-high-speed Hyperloop between Edmonton and Calgary.
Okay.
So where do they get that dough from?
We heard about that dough from the company.
And of course, where's the rest of the money going to come from?
Because these things are billion-dollar projects.
That's not going to come from taxpayers like it did in California, did it?
Let me read.
UK-based Broughton Capital Group, in cooperation with China East Resources Import and Export Company, have agreed in principle to provide a combined U.S. $550 million finance and master EPC arrangement,
respectively, to accelerate the development of a trans pod line between Edmonton and Calgary to finance the first phase of the project, which consists of the airport connection of Edmonton, said Sebastian Jean Dron, co-founder and CEO of TransPod.
The high-speed transportation system is being developed to carry passengers and cargo in a low-pressure tube environment.
It is 1,000 kilometers an hour.
Described as an aircraft without wings, the vehicles would be powered by electrically driven magnetic propulsion, according to the company.
Yeah, getting in a low-pressure tube to go 1,000 kilometers an hour.
You first, mate.
But what was that part there?
China East Resources Import and Export Company.
So they're going to own this monstrous monorail, eh?
Who on earth are they?
Well, here's their website.
This is what they say about themselves.
They say, established in 1993, China East Resources Import and Export Company is a wholly state-owned company with independent legal status.
Oh, okay.
So the Chinese government wants to own the monorail in Alberta.
Monorails are for thieves and grifters, suckering people like in that Simpsons cartoon.
They don't make money or save money, never have.
Even in dense places like Japan and China and California, they certainly won't work in sparse Alberta, connecting two cities that are already very well connected by road and air.
This is a scam, obviously.
Most train fetishes are.
But given that the power behind the scenes is the communist dictatorship of China, I think this isn't just an IQ test and an can you hold on to your money test.
I think this is a moral test or a political test of Justin Trudeau, but mainly of Alberta's premier Jason Kenney.
Loose Legal Ends Coming Together00:10:19
You going to accept this?
I wonder if he's up to that test.
Stay with us for more.
Well, for about 18 months, the following was considered a Republican Party far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.
So much so that Twitter suspended the account of the New York Post.
a newspaper more than 100 years old, for daring to publish that indeed Hunter Biden's laptop was not only real, but it contained damning facts about Hunter Biden and his dad.
Well, here's CNN now.
It seems pretty clear that Hunter Biden was trading on his father's name to make a lot of money.
They're saying what would have got you suspended during the 2020 election campaign.
Why are they finally talking about it, knowing that it's true when they've denied it for a year and a half?
Joining us now, Vice Guy from the greater Los Angeles area is our friend Joel Pollock, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Joel, you and I know that because we read the story in the New York Post a year and a half ago.
We watched as the media censored any stories about it.
And as CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times ridiculed it, as PBS said, they only talk about important news, not distractions.
Why suddenly are the liberal media talking about the Hunter Biden laptop?
Well, I think there's an indictment looming because we've seen leaks about a grand jury investigation that's collecting information that could lead to the indictment of Hunter Biden.
There have also been stories about back taxes that he's paid to the IRS.
So clearly some of the loose legal ends are starting to come together.
He may not face charges on some of the investigations.
For example, paying back taxes to the IRS is usually a prelude to reaching some sort of settlement that doesn't involve prosecution, although people can still be prosecuted and have to pay back taxes.
But I think there are leaks coming out that suggest the investigation is far broader than people had imagined.
You also have John Durham investigating the origins of the Russian collusion investigation.
So there are a lot of things happening at once.
And that could be a reason a lot of this reporting is coming out because of the leaks and because the newspapers want to get ahead of a story that they had denied for years and that they had suppressed during the election.
They don't want to look like they were complicit in any cover-up.
So they're trying desperately to get as much information out as possible in the event that Hunter Biden is in fact indicted or faces some other sorts of penalties.
But I think the other reason is that Joe Biden is now looking vulnerable.
His cruel rating is hovering in the low 40s, high 30s in some polls, but he's at the lowest point in his presidency.
He doesn't seem to be able to handle anything, whether the inflation crisis, the high energy prices, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
He doesn't seem up to the job.
Nearly launched World War III on his trip to Europe.
He was making gap after gap.
And so I think there are people within the media who've decided he's no longer useful.
His main job was to make sure Donald Trump didn't come back for a second term.
He achieved that with big help from the media, Silicon Valley, and so forth.
And now he's basically outlived his usefulness.
So it may be that the media are indicating to the Democratic Party they need to start preparing a backup plan.
And Pamela Harris is not that plan.
So this is potentially building up to a moment where Biden will simply decide he's had enough, he wants to enjoy his retirement, and he's leaving, rather than face embarrassing questions about his own financial interests, how deeply entwined his finances were with those of his corrupt son, and whether he is compromised by his business dealings with the Chinese government and other foreign business partners.
You said so many things there.
I mean, let's go back to the beginning.
You say that there may be a prosecution of Hunter Biden.
It's funny because for the entire Trump administration, we heard, oh, the walls are closing in on Trump.
The walls are closing in on Donald Trump Jr. and the crooked family.
We learned everything, every allegation.
And of course, there was no prosecution.
There was no there.
And it's incredible that there has been so little mainstream media coverage of Hunter.
But you're suggesting there might actually be a prosecution, and we're just barely a year into Biden's administration.
That's incredible.
And I think that had this kind of information been known to the general public a year and a half ago, I truly think it would have made a substantial difference in the election 2020.
I just, I mean, look, I'm not an American.
I'm not on the ground there.
But to charge a president's son and his entire livelihood has been renting out his father's influence and not from far away.
He's on Air Force One or Air Force Two, as it was, going to China.
He's traipsing around Ukraine where his dad comes in and issues threats to his political opponents.
Hunter Biden is like a barnacle on the SS Biden.
He is nothing without his dad.
I guess you could say the same thing about the Trump kids, but they were in the business side of the dad, not the political side.
Well, the difference between the two families is that the Trump family became wealthy outside of politics.
And the Biden family has no independent wealth.
They became wealthy through Biden's political career.
And the various members of his family, his brother, his son, various other relatives, they have become wealthy by advertising their connections to Joe Biden.
That's how they have obtained foreign government contracts.
That's how they have obtained domestic government contracts.
That's how they have been able to get paid simply for connecting one person to another, which is a form of lobbying.
That could be another charge Country Biden faces.
He is essentially a foreign agent.
He was acting on behalf of various foreign actors in an unregistered way.
Now, that's not a crime that's usually prosecuted, although it is a crime, but it has been prosecuted in the recent past.
Remember that the Department of Justice went after Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for allegedly doing that.
And so, look, I think this is a very important point of vulnerability for the Biden administration.
It's also an important vulnerability for the media and for Silicon Valley because the campaign of censorship that they undertook in 2020 was unlike anything we've ever seen in American history, and it happened right before an election.
The public had a right to know whether one of the candidates had potentially corrupt business relationships with foreign powers that could then use those relationships to control the president.
And all of that information was suppressed.
We were told it was Russian misinformation.
We were lied to about the intelligence community's assessment of it.
We were just fed all these complete lies.
And then, if you tried to actually share the truth on Twitter or Facebook, your account was suspended.
Even journalists who didn't agree with where all this was going, who didn't like the fact that it was going to help Trump if it got out, they tried sharing the article just to criticize it, and they found their own accounts that were suspended.
There was no debate allowed about these issues.
So it was really the beginning of a dark age of censorship in this country.
And the media are not just complicit in it, they actually teared it on.
So they're trying to bury that now under a slew of coverage.
And you see it not just reaching the highbrow pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, but it's also on the nightly news, on the networks.
So there's now no one who can say they're not aware of it.
But certainly before the November election, when it came out in mid-October in 2020, there was nobody who was aware of it outside of the conservative media because the rest of the media pressed it.
You said something very terrifying about five minutes ago.
You said, you know, could Joe Biden be replaced?
And there's different ways he could be replaced.
I don't know if it would be possible to lean on him and have him voluntarily resign using health as an excuse.
I don't know.
I mean, there is a your American Constitution in terms of removing a president is different than our methods up here in Canada.
But, of course, the vice president, I guess one of the vice presidents' main job is to be the president in waiting.
I don't think there's a lot of constitutional duties accorded to the VP.
And the idea that Kamala Harris is a heartbeat away from me, that's actually just as scary.
I mean, let me show you this video that Kamala Harris said.
It reminds me of a kid who didn't read a book, being asked to stand up and give like a book report.
And I've been there.
Or if you remember Mr. Bean in that funny movie where he was asked to describe Whistler's mother, the painting, he said, well, my first point, and I'm almost done now, like just to take zero knowledge and stretch it for a minute.
That's a heck of a thing.
Here's Kamala Harris doing that, talking about Jamaica and the pandemic.
There's not a lot else said here, but she says it very lengthily.
Take a look.
We also recognize, just as it has been in the United States for Jamaica, one of the issues that has been presented as an issue that is economic in the way of its impact has been the pandemic.
So to that end, we are announcing today also that we will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery efforts in Jamaica that have been essential to, I believe, what is necessary to strengthen not only the issue of public health, but also the economy.
I don't quite know if I learned anything there.
I don't think anyone in the audience did either, but that's an amazing way of talking.
I suppose just that utter fog machine does less harm than the gaffe machine of Joe Biden.
I mean, in a matter of a few days, as everyone knows, Biden said he'll meet a chemical weapons attack in kind, that there has to be regime change in Russia, and he implied that American troops either have been or will go into Ukraine all in the course of a week.
Those are dangerous gaps.
I actually don't think Kamala Harris would make those gaps because she would just say nothing again and again and again.
Democrats' Succession Dilemma00:07:56
Yeah, she's not viewed as competent.
She ran one of the worst presidential campaigns in modern political memory.
Had all the tickets.
She had all the constituencies prepared to back her, checked all the boxes.
She had all the Hillary Clinton donors in her back pocket.
She was the heir apparent, basically.
But she ran such a terrible campaign.
I followed her on the campaign trail for a while, and there was a lot of enthusiasm initially behind her effort, but she did basic things to mismanage the campaign, even putting the stage in the wrong place at events and things like that.
So she just couldn't connect to people.
She never had a message.
And that's been the pattern of her management throughout her career.
If you look at the various jobs she's held, she was district attorney in San Francisco, which began to descend into a morass of petty crime and decay.
She was California Attorney General.
She presided over the beginning of a crime wave.
She didn't really achieve much except for persecuting First Amendment rights of journalists who were pro-life and of organizations that contributed to conservative causes.
I mean, that's basically all she's done is just do politics.
She doesn't do management.
She barely does communication.
And she's been reliant on the beneficent patronage of America's liberal establishment.
That's basically how she has arrived where she is.
She's very good at failing upwards.
The problem is that when you're in the president's job, there's no room for failure at all.
So I think people are very nervous about her taking over.
Joe Biden likes her because she's the only person less popular than he is.
Well, I mean, it's a long time.
I mean, he's old.
I don't think he's firing on all cylinders.
It's not just how his brain moves.
Physically, he seems weak, like he has to be, like they have to, like a very old airplane.
It needs about six hours of maintenance for every hour of flying it does.
And so when he's out there, every minute's precious.
When he was in Europe having pizza with the troops, it looked like he was gumming the pizza.
And even physically, he looked not quite there.
And I'm not saying this to make fun of him.
I mean, Lord knows I'm not the fittest person around either.
I have plenty of problems.
But I just think that he's going to get worse.
Like no one gets, he's nearly 80.
You're not going to be better at 81 than you are at 79.
I forget the exact age.
It's not age so much.
Confucius said, if I can quote the great Chinese philosopher, that essentially all a good ruler needs to do is sit facing the right direction.
You don't need to be energetic.
You don't need to be young.
You don't need to be strong, but you have to have the right orientation.
And the problem with Biden is he has the wrong orientation.
Now, you can get away with that if you're young and vigorous and you can still take care of the things that government has to do, even if your overall philosophy is incorrect.
That was, in a sense, Bill Clinton's secret.
I mean, he was young and dynamic and charismatic, and even though a lot of his ideas were poor, he was able to fake it through his eight years.
And Newt Gingrich and the Republicans really set the agenda after 1994, the last six years of Clinton's presidency.
And although his moral example ended up nearly crumbling his presidency, He was able to make up for it.
He appointed the right people.
He was energetic and he was perceived as being a leader, even though many of the decisions he made were wrong.
With Biden, he's got the wrong orientation.
He's being controlled by the left.
He's become a Bernie Sanders Democrat, basically by default, because that's the voter base of the Democratic Party now.
That's where the party is.
And he doesn't have the vigor he needs to run the rest of the government.
You know, you can get away with bad left-wing policies, but if you make the trains run on time, people will forgive you for that.
He's not involved in administration in that way.
He doesn't have the energy.
And so he can't compensate for bad policies with good administration.
That's the problem.
Look, in the Canadian system, anyone could replace the leader.
If Justin Trudeau were to take a walk in the snow, as we call it in Canada, and step down, immediately the other members of parliament in the liberal caucus would vote and choose an interim leader.
They would choose.
And then they would probably have a leadership race, and that person would become the prime minister.
So that's how it's done in Canada.
Now, America, the Constitution says it goes from the president to the vice president, and then the third in line is the Speaker of the House, if I'm not mistaken.
Like, it's not up to the party.
Like, it's not up to party bigwigs or donors or Democrats.
It's sort of fixed in stone.
Am I right?
There's this pecking order, and Kamala Harris is number two, and Nancy Close is number three.
Is that right?
Yeah, it gets difficult.
There's an order of succession, which happens in case of terrible things.
So if Joe Biden passes away, then Tamal Harris, and if she passes away, and there's no replacement in time, because there are procedures to replace a vice president, then it does go to the Speaker of the House, and so on and so forth.
I think then it goes to the president pro tempor of the Senate, and then it goes to various cabinet members.
So they have this long line of succession in the event of an emergency.
You know, in the event of sort of a nuclear war, and all the cabinets meeting at the White House, they have this designated survivor who's not supposed to go where the other ones go in case they're all wiped out by a bomb, then there's one person left to leave the country.
So there is this bizarre succession, but that's not really how we elect our leaders.
You know, when this kind of thing plays out over time, you know, if you lose the president, the vice president moves up immediately, then there's a vacancy in the vice presidency.
You fill the vacancy.
There's a process for doing that through the House and the Senate.
So it gets a little complicated.
But generally, because a presidential election is, in a sense, an election separate and apart from our legislative election, you can't just easily remove a president or a vice president.
Well, it really would have to be both at the same time to kind of decapitate the government.
You can't do it so easily.
A president can resign, but then the vice president would become the president.
If a vice president leaves, as we saw with Mr. Piero Agnew under Nixon, you replace the vice president of the new vice president, Adam Gerald Ford.
It gets a little tricky.
The problem here is that the president's incapable of doing his job, most people agree.
Once he resigns, the vice president moves up, but she's incapable of doing her job for entirely different reasons.
And so they don't have a third person in waiting, and there's no procedure for making that person the third.
You know, if Republicans win Congress this November, they win the House specifically, which it looks like they will, then Kevin McCarthy, the Republican, would be Speaker of the House.
If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris leave office at the same time, conceivably it could happen that a Republican, Kevin McCarthy, takes over as president because he's the Speaker of the House.
Democrats are not going to let that happen.
So they're going to start to plan for some kind of procedural succession.
What I mean by that is they're going to arrange the steps in order that they need to do to replace Kamala Harris with somebody to replace Joe Biden once Kamala Harris moves up or to find someone else to do it instead of Kamala Harris, whatever it is.
But a lot of Democrats are already campaigning for the job, I believe.
Pete Budijad is moving around behind the scenes trying to get himself elevated out of the cabinet and into the executive vice presidency or presidency.
And I think Democrats basically have to go through all these procedural calculations, but there are all kinds of consequences as to whether they do it before or after January 20th, because January 20th, the next coming January 20th would mark two years into the term, which is halfway.
If they do it after halfway, there's all kinds of consequences for whether he can run for another term versus before.
It's very complicated.
So it's not like a parliamentary system where you have a majority party that can just elevate somebody into the leadership role.
This is very, very tricky.
And so Democrats are starting to look ahead a little bit.
Maybe that's one of the reasons you're seeing all these Hunter Biden stories.
The media are plotting the Democrats to act.
In many ways, the Democrats are run by the media.
They're not just a party that has media bias working in their favor.
In many ways, the media give their cues to the Democratic Party.
And I think the media are telling the Democrats, you have to solve this accession problem sooner rather than later.
Media Plotting Democrats00:02:50
Last question before I appreciate your time today.
If you had to guess, and I know it's always tough to speculate, do you think that Joe Biden will complete his first term?
No.
Pardon me?
No, he won't.
Well, that was a very quick answer.
That was a very quick answer.
And do you think it'll be for health reasons?
I think he'll leave after the midterm elections, yeah.
Wow.
Well, very exciting.
Never, never a boring moment.
Things are so momentous.
He says, Joe Paula, great to see you again.
Thanks for your time.
Thank you.
There you have it.
Senior Editor-at-Large of Brightpark.com.
Stay with us.
More than hey, welcome back.
Your viewer mail.
Joan Giesbrecht says, maybe Trudeau wants to give us all a Tesla.
That would solve the problem.
I don't know if it would.
There's just not that many Teslas out there.
I mean, there's usually delays in getting them, and good for Elon Musk.
You just, there's not a million Teslas for Canada.
And there's certain things about Teslas that are environmental.
I'd be lying if I said otherwise.
But, you know, the massive battery, the rare earth metals to make it, the cost is a huge part of it, and how to dispose of it afterwards.
But also, a lot of electricity in Canada still comes from fossil fuel sources, natural gas or even coal.
I'm not sure if anything will actually change the temperature of the world.
In fact, I'm sort of sure it won't.
I used to follow the UN's global warming projects much more closely.
Even the UN itself, their framework convention on climate change, as they call it, they say that even if all of their emission requests were met, even if we basically shut down all automobiles, all airplanes, basically shut down fossil youth use, that would not reduce the temperature of the world at all.
It would imperceptibly slow the growth of temperature over a century.
But it's not going to cool the world.
So it'll do nothing but enrich people who have schemes and scams, just like that pod train.
Someone nicknamed This Is My Freedom says it is obvious who is in power.
This is all a part of Klaus Schwab's great reset plan.
Isn't it convenient how everything is lining up?
COVID, vaccine mandates, supply chain, fuel costs, hyperinflation, and now Russia-Ukraine.
This is all pre-planned.
I don't know if it's pre-planned, but you know, the saying of the left, I suppose it's a Leninist idea, never let a crisis go to waste.
Why Quebec Should Unite00:09:53
They're using the crisis as an opportunity to have their lockdown cease control things, whether it's censorship or economic control.
Sean Delabe says, I would be far more concerned about Biden than Putin.
Well, as you heard Joel Pollack said, he answered immediately without hesitating.
He thinks that Joe Biden will not serve out his term.
I thought that was very interesting.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rubble World Headquarters to you at home, good night.
Keep fighting for freedom.
And let me leave you with our video of the day from Alexa Lavois talking to a former dragon's den host named Vincenzo Gutzo, commenting on Jean Charé's aspirations to be prime minister.
This is an interesting one.
All right, we'll see you tomorrow.
Bye, everybody.
Vincenzo Gutzo, also known as Mr. Sun-Chine, was present at Mr. Champs Charé event in Montreal for the Conservative Party of Canada leader race.
In 2018, Mr. Gutzo joined the cast of the CBC reality show Dragon Den.
He also owned several businesses, including the famous Gutzo movie theater in Quebec.
In 2022, following the departure of the Conservative leader Erin O'Toole, Vincenzo Goudzo hinted that he might be interested in running for the leadership of the Conservative Party.
I spoke with Mr. Gutzo, who, for his part, supports Jean-Charé's candidacy.
Here is the interview he gave me.
So we know that Mr. Charet was the premier of Quebec, but for the Liberal Party.
Now he's running for being the leader of the Conservative Party.
What do you think about that?
Well, look, I think you got to remember there's in some provinces there is no Conservative Party, provincially speaking, right?
So at the time that he came into provincial politics, the Federalist Party that regrouped all of the Federals, no matter whether you were Liberal, Conservative, whatever, was the Liberal Party of Quebec.
So, I mean, if you wanted to defend the unity of Canada in Quebec, the only party that could do that was the Liberal Party of Quebec.
And so being its leader was just a legitimate transition towards that.
The other thing is, as a leader of that party, he did implement very conservative-minded fiscal policies and so forth.
So, you know, it's not the label.
I think in BC, if I remember well, there's the Liberal Party of or Manitoba, one of the provinces out west, there's a Liberal Party that's more conservative than maybe most conservative parties, right?
So the label doesn't really mean anything.
And we know that his name was involved in the Machuré investigation.
We know that a lot of Quebecer have lost their trust for Mr. Charé.
Is that the case for you?
No, I mean, I wouldn't have supported him, and I'm here as co-chair of the fundraising for Quebec for his leadership.
So you got to remember, I'm a Quebecer-Canadian of Italian origin.
So if there's anybody who's been labeled all kinds of stuff because of my success in business, it's me.
So I guess, you know, it's one of the sad things.
But what I am happy about is that he wasn't found innocent.
He was just not at all accused of anything, which is, I think, what's important here.
It's not a question of, you know, they went after him and, you know, they couldn't find him guilty.
The idea was they didn't even go after him.
I mean, there was nothing to say about that.
And at the end of the day, I think, you know, that ultimately it's already hard enough.
Public life is hard enough that if we have to keep grudges on stuff like that, it just doesn't make sense.
I think, you know, at the end of the day, we have a potential leader of a party and a potential prime minister who can unite the country, who can explain, you know, to Quebecers why, you know, we have to unite with Alberta and the rest of the country and why we're one country.
He was Captain Canada in the 95 referendum, so I have no problem supporting him.
So why more him than Mr. Pierre Polyer or Mr. Brown, for example?
So Mr. Brown, I really don't know very well, but Mr. Polyev, as much as I'd go and have a beer with him and watch a hockey game, truth of the matter is, you know, Justin Trudeau or Pierre Polyev for me is the same thing, just wearing a different blazer.
At the end of the day, I think both of them are very well coached to repeat or to deviate and not answer the questions.
The other problem is, you know, I've always said, so when I wanted to run as leader in the last campaign, somebody said to me, but you have no political experience.
I said, well, with the politicians we've had in the last two years, I'm hoping we're putting somebody with zero political experience.
And the truth of the matter is that Jean-Charré has had the good fortune of being a politician, but he's also had the good fortune of being in private life, sorry.
And so therefore he knows what it is to be on both sides of that life, versus Mr. Polyev has been a career politician.
And it's a little strange to say to somebody at 42 years old, you're a career politician.
It means you haven't done anything else.
So how could you have really empathy for Canadians?
How could you understand what the average Canadian does or doesn't do or paying a mortgage, let's say, for an average Canadian when every one of your salaries had a Canadian flag on it because you were an employee of the state, in all intents and purposes.
And I think that that's what got us into the trouble we're in today, right?
Is that we've elected the Beau Parlar, as we would like to say.
We've elected people with a lot nicer hair than I have, but that doesn't make them great administrators of public funds.
And we've seen that both Trudeau's have indebted us more than ever.
And it happens every time.
The Conservatives go in, we fix up stuff, and we finally turn the corner and all of a sudden we lose an election.
The Liberals go back and use our hard work and use it against us and then re-indebt us by a few hundred billion dollars.
For being involved in the past in the conservative and in the leadership, why you were not like in this race now?
So I mean, you know, COVID has had a huge impact on my family's finances.
I mean, we lost $14 million and so forth.
And while it's not a problem in the sense that we've managed to save Limeble, as we'd like to say, the truth of the matter is I would still like to put back the things the way they were pre-COVID.
So I've given myself a three, four-year window to re-establish and put back things so that my oldest son will be 28 years old by then.
My dad will be a little older, and so hand off the business to family and then maybe I will jump into the political arena and hopefully do some good.
Did you support Mr. Aaron Otou before he was wiped out from the Conservative Party?
So I supported Aaron during the leadership race.
I was his co-chair also as a fundraising for Aaron.
So I did think Aaron would be a good leader and a good prime minister.
I think that unfortunately what you also need in politics is a leader that's willing to make his decisions and not rely on communication experts as I like to call them.
And I think that there was some misguided advice given to Aaron and I think that made him stumble during the election and so forth.
We ended where we were.
Was I willing to cut him off and force a leadership race?
I thought it was a little early, but the Pierre Polyev team made sure that that happened.
And so I'm just hoping people remember that normally he who kills the king never becomes king, right?
And so I think Pierre's done that twice.
His team has done twice toppled leaders.
I don't think it's right.
For my last question, did you support the Friday convoy that was in Ottawa?
So I would tell you that I supported the initial idea of them going there and making a point.
I would have loved for them to behave like the one that went to Quebec City, which is, we'll be here for the weekend, we'll leave, we'll come back.
I think ultimately, you know, it was a slippery slide that occurred.
And I think what is interesting about what happened in Ottawa is how no government representative actually reached out to those people.
Nobody gave them the time of day.
Everybody, in French, they say, yon pleis, yon jois l'Truche, and they pretended as if nothing was, and they're just going to go away.
And that is the Trudeau way, right?
I mean, Trudeau just does what he wants.
He does his monkey show, and then we get in trouble, and everybody.
So I would say that I supported the idea, I supported the spirit of it, but at a certain point, there are citizens in Ottawa, those people have the right to live, and there's no reason to do bonfires and none of that.
I mean, if they really wanted to bother Trudeau, they should have gone in front of his home and not in front of homes of other people per se.
But the spirit of it was, I think, well-intentioned.
I think it just derailed at a certain point.
But that happens often when you're not willing to put your foot down and say, okay, enough is enough.
Versus the Quebec one, I think, was way more efficient.
Three days and then they left.
And I think it Ibrahim Ali, Monsieur Le Gouasi, that he started changing his tune very quickly.