Ezra Levant examines Elon Musk’s 9.2% Twitter stake and April 5th board seat, framing it as a free speech push amid employee concerns over his influence—especially after Parag Agarwal’s contradictory stance. The NCLA sues the U.S. government for pressuring tech platforms to censor COVID dissent, citing May 2nd deadlines and cases like Michael Sener’s suspension. Janine Eunice argues statements from the Surgeon General and Biden suffice to prove "government action," while James Topp’s 4,293 km cross-Canada march protests mandates, fueled by public support despite institutional backlash. Musk’s potential clash with ESG investors and Trump’s reinstatement looms as a test of real free speech reform. [Automatically generated summary]
Day two in our coverage of Elon Musk's acquisition of nearly 10% of the stock of Twitter.
Today, it was announced that he's getting a board seat.
Very exciting.
And the reaction to him from the public, but also from woke Twitter staffers, is very interesting.
I'll take you through some of it.
I'll also explain who might be behind the left-wing wokeness in so many big companies.
Is it radical staff?
Or is it actually radical investors?
I'll give you some evidence both ways.
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OK, here's today's show.
Tonight, the world reacts to Elon Musk getting his share of Twitter, including the staff of Twitter.
They've got a lot to say.
It's April 5th, 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 don't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government.
But why publish them?
It's because it's my bloody right to do so.
Well, Elon Musk buying a 9% share in Twitter isn't as important as, oh, I don't know, the bonfire of our civil liberties.
Today, later in the show, we'll talk to Janine Yunes about a mom who was fired from her job for daring to ask the mayor of New York City about the rule that kids as young as two have to wear masks.
That's important stuff.
The war in Ukraine with Russia.
That's important stuff.
There are real important issues, inflation, the price of oil.
You might think that a billionaire iconoclast, Elon Musk, buying 9% of a social media company based on narcissism and quarreling, that's really not important, but actually it is because it's about free speech.
Yesterday, it was revealed that Elon Musk bought 9.2% of Twitter, sending the stock sky high.
I'll talk about that a little bit more later.
But before that news was revealed, Elon Musk took to Twitter, which he uses better than most, to conduct a poll.
He said, free speech is essential to a functioning democracy.
Do you believe Twitter rigorously achieves, adheres to this principle?
And 70% of people said no.
And then he said, given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.
What should be done?
Well, he obviously had in mind what he ought to be done.
Well, today, news came that far from the passive role that was originally and somewhat strangely reported yesterday.
I don't know how you can be a passive investor when you're the number one investor in a company with voting shares.
It was announced that, in fact, Elon Musk would have a board seat at Twitter, which means he'd be able to get deep into the details and ask questions and look through the financials and maybe take a peek at that algorithm that seems to suppress conservatives.
You saw that Elon Musk framed his acquisition in terms of free speech.
Well, here's how Bloomberg.com wrote it.
I just can't get enough of this.
Elon Musk's Twitter investment could be bad news for free speech.
I'm sorry, I couldn't read that without laughing.
He's a free speech absolutist.
And Bloomberg says this is going to be bad for free speech.
And they say the Tesla founder's decision suggests that he wants to bring the social media platform to heal.
Really?
To heal.
That's as if Twitter is his target.
I think it's sort of the opposite.
He wants to rein in the censors at Twitter, bring the censors at Twitter to heal to let people do the talking.
I'm not sure if that's why Twitter's stock price soared.
If they just thought, well, here's a rich guy buying shares.
He might want to acquire the whole thing.
It's just a strictly financial reason to buy.
Or do people say, you know what?
It's not just that you've got a new investor with fresh ideas.
He wants to bring Twitter back to the good old days of free speech, and that unlocks value.
I don't know.
Well, Elon Musk himself read the article above, and he said, Washington Post always good for a laugh.
But here's a good point.
And I saw this from an investor who was talking about political activism, not just by social media companies, but the recent quarrel between Walt Disney, Disney World, and Ron DeSantis, Disney, one of the largest employers in Florida.
Ron DeSantis, the very successful governor there, who recently brought in a bill that stops teachers from teaching sexuality of any sort.
There's no reference to heterosexuality or homosexuality.
It's just no sexuality can be taught in Florida schools in grades kindergarten through grade three.
Now, you're probably shocked and thinking, were they teaching sex in kindergarten and grades one, two, and three?
Yes, they most certainly were.
And if you don't think that's happening in Canada, you're not paying attention to the curriculum.
So Ron DeSantis passed this.
He was a big supporter of this law.
It was labeled by the Democrats as don't say gay, which, of course, the word gay or homosexual or heterosexual didn't appear at all.
And it's just don't talk about sexuality or gender to children of tender years.
But the Democrats had a big campaign saying that Ron DeSantis was a homophobe.
And for some reason, Disney, perhaps because it has big operations in Florida, the cruise ships and Disney World, Disney got more and more involved.
And here's a tweet by an investor who says, Disney CEO, Bob Chapik, appeared to bend the knee to a small group of radical employees, but the real problem runs deeper.
His top three shareholders, they represent a $20 trillion cartel that pushes companies to advance political agendas, and they're using your money to do it.
I'd like to show you a clip.
And just by the way, ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance.
Take a quick look at this video by Vimik Ramaswamy.
Yes, so let me give you some insight.
And this may actually even be confusing to a lot of people who see Disney doing business in countries ranging from Japan to cruise lines, going to islands in the Caribbean where gay marriage is banned where they don't say a peep.
Why is that?
So a lot of people look at this situation and think that CEO Bob Chapik was bending the knee to 20 employees who complained about him and are confused about why he's doing it.
There's a quieter undercurrent here too, Will.
If you look at who are the top shareholders of Disney, it is BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, the three largest asset managers in the United States who collectively manage over $20 trillion, by the way.
That's more than the GDP of the United States, who are the shareholders, technically the bosses of the CEOs, who quietly tell them that exactly these are the kinds of social agendas that they want to see them pushing.
So actually, if you're a CEO in a public company today, you find yourself sandwiched not just between your progressive woke employees and people who on the outside wonder why are they bending the knee to them.
It's that when you look at your alleged bosses, the quote-unquote shareholders, they're actually quietly whispering in your ear that they want to see you doing the same things too.
So it runs far deeper and it's far more complicated.
But the problem, Will, and you know this well, is that those shareholders aren't the actual shareholders.
They're actually the everyday citizens of this country who entrust those institutions with their money.
But those institutions, I think, are betraying their true clients by telling these companies Disney, Nike, Airbnb, et cetera, that you got to actually behave this way.
That's what we have to do.
It's a complicated equation.
So that's him talking about Disney.
That sure, you might have some Disney employee activists, but is that what's really motivating Walt Disney to go to war with Ronda Santa, a handful of rambunctious employees?
Here's the next tweet by Vivek.
He says, this is why I like what Elon Musk did today.
We need more actual shareholders to compete at scale with the ESG-linked asset management cartel.
That is the single greatest lever to drive cultural change.
So do you see what he's saying?
Is that the people who are pushing for radical changes in society, whether it's trans or education in kindergarten or whether it's censorship in the name of wokeness?
Sure, it's individual employee activists, but it's these huge investors behind the scenes.
Elon Musk isn't close to 20 trillion.
His own personal holdings are 1% of that.
But it's enough to conquer Twitter and be the top investor there.
Here's Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat who's often railed against censorship.
She said, Thank you, Elon Musk.
Now do Instagram, which is even less transparent and more aggressive in shutting down free speech than Twitter.
That's very true.
However, Instagram is owned by Facebook.
And although you can buy Facebook on the stock exchange, they have a share structure different from Twitter.
Mark Zuckerberg is the controlling shareholder with preferential shares no matter what happens on the financial side.
He's the decider of things like that.
In that way, he's monomaniacal.
He's like an emperor for life of Facebook.
And I think some Facebook investors don't mind that.
But if you want to make Instagram free, you'll need more than an Elon Musk because all the money in the world can't change the fact that that's personally controlled by Mark Zuckerberg.
It's funny the outrage at Elon Musk, a billionaire, throwing around his money, when all the other tech oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg seem to control the shot.
So she called on other billionaires to join along with Elon Musk.
I'm not sure there are that many who believe in freedom.
Peter Thiel, also Silicon Valley is one of the few, but I think most billionaires these days, I'm afraid, are part of that global asset management world economic forum point of view.
There are some real individuals who are billionaires.
Maybe you have to be an individual, be a billionaire.
But too many of them still are chasing social acceptance.
But I want to read to you from Andy No, who is a great journalist who's watched the left and has been attacked by anti-FUD death threats.
He said, days after inquiring his followers about free speech and the lack thereof, Elon Musk has become Twitter's largest shareholder.
Many leftists are concerned about what this might mean for their stranglehold on censorship policies that favor their politics.
So he's talking mainly about staff at Twitter.
Let me read.
Cassie Nick Arumba, a data scientist at Twitter, is among the employees and contractors very upset that Elon Musk is now the largest stakeholder in Twitter.
A prominent transphobe buying a large stake in Twitter is not at all funny, she says.
I'm not going to go through all of them, but Annie knows collected a good number of them.
Gerard Taylor, a senior software engineer at Twitter, is concerned about the leftist company culture following Elon Musk becoming the largest shareholder.
I'm just going to read a few more because they're amazing.
Looks like I picked a good week to be off, reacts Jerry Kidd, a recruiting manager for Twitter, to the news that Elon Musk is now the largest stakeholder in the company.
You know, a lot of Twitter staff are outraged, but as we heard yesterday from Alan Bokari, maybe that's a good thing.
I think it was Coinbase whose CEO got sick of all the staff politics and simply said, we're changing our policies.
No more politics at all.
No more political pressure groups.
No more action groups.
If you insist on expressing yourself, we'll pay you a handsome severance and you can go do that elsewhere.
But if you come in to work at Coinbase, I think that was the company, this is where we will do business and no politics.
And it cost him a few bucks, but he got rid of all the radicals.
I don't know how many of the staff at Twitter are these radicals.
Probably most of the trust and safety censors, but I think getting rid of them is sort of Elon Musk's point.
And if they storm off, I think that's just doing Elon Musk a favor.
The question is, how many of the people who actually make Twitter Twitter, the engineers, the computer scientists, how many of them are extremist wokists?
We saw a few people there claim to be software engineers and who are woke, maybe.
But it'll be interesting to see if they will destroy and sabotage Twitter from within.
I don't know.
Can they cancel Elon Musk?
They're much bigger than him.
BlackRock, 100 times as much.
Let me show you what the CEO of Twitter had to say about Elon Musk.
I'm excited to share that we're appointing Elon Musk to our board.
Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our board, I'm sure.
He's both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service, which is exactly what we need on Twitter and in the boardroom to make us stronger in the long term.
Welcome, Elon.
So again, I say, why did the stock go up?
A big buyer coming to take over a company, financial reasons, you know, you know, he's going to pay a premium.
Why The Mayor Is Confronted00:16:41
Or is it the belief that Elon Musk will return an essential element to social media that it's been lacking for years, freedom of speech, a valuable asset?
I think we're going to figure out soon how this goes.
Elon Musk is a powerful man, a wealthy man.
He's now a director, and the CEO claims to say he wants to work with him.
I'm not sure how true that is.
We saw Parag Agarwal, we quoted him yesterday, saying he doesn't really believe in free speech.
He believes in giving attention to political views he favors.
They tried to cancel Elon Musk before, but I don't know if they'll be able to.
If Elon Musk succeeds and retakes Twitter for the free speech side of the thing, I think that it'll excite conservatives who've been trying to make their own alternatives.
And I think it'll put to the test liberal belief in free speech.
But I don't think that test is a mystery.
I think from the New York Times to the ACAU to the Washington Post to the CBC to the entire press corps in Canada, with maybe five exceptions, liberals actually don't believe in free speech anymore.
They say that hate speech ought to be banned, and they define hate speech as any speech that they hate, anything they disagree with.
They believe in canceling people, not debating them.
This is a wonderful experiment.
I think in many ways this is just as important to our daily lives as inflation, the price of gas, the war in Ukraine.
Because if Elon Musk is able to liberate Twitter in a way, he'll make all of us freer, more than any politician I can point to.
Stay with us for more.
Well, Quebec is the only place left in Canada where there is a mask mandate, although some schools still implement it.
In the United States, New York, which was one of the most oppressive lockdownist jurisdictions, masks mandates are gone pretty much everywhere except for in New York City.
Apparently, the science is different there.
Now, the new mayor there, Eric Adams, said that yesterday, April 4th, would be the end of the mask mandates.
Well, he has caved in on that to the pro-mask lockdownists and insisted that especially young kids, almost toddlers, have to wear masks.
I think it's a form of child abuse myself.
Well, so did one mom who accosted the mayor yesterday.
I'll let you take a look at that and I'll let you know what happened to her afterwards.
Take a look.
This is Daniela Jampel, a lawyer in the city.
This morning, I walked into the mayor's press conference at 11 a.m. as a private citizen to ask him why he decided to reneg on his promise to unmask our toddlers.
Three weeks ago, some parents confronted him at a bar on St. Patrick's Day and he said, trust me, they'll be unmasked.
And then 10 days ago, he announced that on April 4th, they would be unmasked.
And then on Friday, at the 11th hour, he told us, actually, no, they will not be.
So I am a private citizen.
He is my mayor.
He works for us.
And I think I deserve to hold him accountable.
You know, it's really hard.
I had a lot of, I had very high hopes for this mayor.
I thought he'd be a moderate.
I thought he'd govern accordingly.
And for him to keep children age two to four masks, and I really want to point out here that nowhere else is this happening.
Very few places is this happening.
It's not happening in Westchester.
It's not happening on Long Island.
And if he thinks that the science means that these children have to be masked, then by all means, he should share that with other places because they deserve to know too.
But there is no science that requires our children age two to afford a mask.
He knows that.
That's why he's not talking about it.
I don't know why they're doing this, but it's really unfair to our toddlers.
Well, I think she makes a good case, a case that millions of moms and dads and kids around the country and the continent have made too.
She emphasized that she was there in her capacity as a private person.
Indeed, I understand she's on an extended maternity leave with the blessing of her employer who granted her that extended leave just two months ago.
She was there, like I say, off-duty private person asking questions of her own mayor, except for this one wrinkle.
I mentioned that Daniela is a lawyer.
She is indeed.
She works for the city.
And apparently, the mayor was so enraged by being challenged by this mom that Daniela Jampel was fired by the city in less than an hour after she dared to ask His Royal Highness about the April 4th mask ban, which did not come to pass.
We're joined now via Skype from Washington, D.C. by Janine Eunice, a staff lawyer at the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
Janine, great to see you again.
We've talked to you before about your lawsuits on behalf of people who got COVID, recovered naturally, had natural immunity, and yet were forced by institutions to take the vaccine.
So you've done a lot of civil liberties work on this issue.
What do you make of the case of Daniela Jampel?
Well, it's very despicable what happened to her.
And actually, to clarify, only the city is only requiring two to four-year-olds to wear masks because they're the unvaccinated population.
So adults and children of any other age actually don't have to wear masks.
Another lawyer actually won an injunction against the toddler mask mandate on Friday, and the mayor immediately appealed that.
So that day, the appellate division issued a stay.
So basically, what that meant is that the appeals court invalidated the lower court's decision, at least pending appeal.
So the kids still have to be masked.
So that's why the mayor is being confronted over this.
And Daniela, it is a wrinkle that she's an employee of the city, but she was confronting the mayor in her personal capacity as a mother.
She has young children.
She has children the age that have to be masked.
So she was expressing her concern as a mother.
I watched the video of her confronting the mayor.
She didn't do anything out of line.
She was perfectly calm.
She, you know, she was not insulting.
She didn't yell.
She didn't scream or she was in no way threatening.
The other aspect of this is that they claimed that she lied and said that she was press in order to get in.
First of all, I spoke to some people who were there, and that's not, that wasn't the case.
Anybody could just walk in.
You didn't have to be press.
Also, Daniela has an active Twitter account where she's been criticizing the mayor and others for these policies.
So in a way, she is press.
So that, in my opinion, is not a valid reason.
That has nothing to do with anything.
Yeah, and even if she said she would press and she's not, and like you say, what is journalism other than doing journalism?
It's not a profession.
It's not like impersonating a doctor or something.
Right.
And I don't know.
I think it's incredible that she would be denied the chance to ask a question in any event.
And I understand that the mayor allowed her to continue.
Here, let's watch the clip of the actual confrontation.
Take a look.
Hi, Mr. Mayor.
Three weeks ago, you told parents to trust you that you would unmask our toddlers.
Ten days ago, you stood right here and you said that the masks would come off on April 4th.
That has not happened.
You re-negged on your promise, and not only did you re-neg on your promise, you had your lawyers race to court on Friday night to overturn a state court.
No, no, no, no, let her finish because you let us start.
Go ahead and finish, ma'am, okay?
But you got to come to a conclusion.
Can't do it.
Okay, come to a conclusion to turn on your phone so you can get my answer correctly, but come to a conclusion.
Okay.
Trust me, I will unmask your toddlers.
You had your lawyers race to court on Friday night, arguing that there would be irreparable harm if children under five were allowed to take off their masks today along with their older siblings in school.
So my questions are: what is the irreparable harm to children aged two to four taking off their masks, just as they do in Long Island, just as they do in Westchester?
When will you and when will you unmask our toddlers?
Thank you.
As I stated, as you indicated, I made the announcement that we were looking to announce today, which is Monday, to take the mask off the two to four years old.
But I also stated, if we see an uptick, we will come back and make the announcement of what we're going to do.
We're going to pivot and shift as COVID is pivoted and shifted.
There's a new variant.
The numbers are increasing.
We're going to move at the right pace.
And that's the role I must do.
That's what I stated.
I'm living up to my promises.
If I have to pivot and shift and have other adults do something different, I'm going to do so.
I'm going to continue to do so.
I answered your question.
If you want to follow up, we can do a follow-up, but I answered your question.
Thank you.
You know, I think she was asking questions that, frankly, what I call the media party, the legacy media, the corporate media, which is almost uniformly pro-lockdown.
I think she was compelled to ask these questions because the media party doesn't, if anything, they're demanding to know why the mayor doesn't clamp down harder.
I actually didn't know that New York City imposes masks on children of such tender years.
I mean, it's been a while since my kids were as little as two, but I can't imagine forcing a two-year-old to have a mask on.
It would just be so unnatural and uncomfortable.
They'd be fidgeting.
It's just, it feels so brutal and abusive.
The fact that it fell to this mom to be a citizen journalist to ask that question speaks not just to the mayor's failure as a political leader and a civil liberties guarantor, but it shows the failure of the corporate media legacy media.
The fact that they stand for this in New York City alone is outrageous.
That's absolutely right.
And, you know, I think what happened to Daniela is sort of a broader trend where a lot of people who have been on the right side of history with this, I consider myself among them, are being sort of silenced.
Now that we have been proven right, the population is moving towards our side.
And I actually have a lawsuit against the United States government on behalf of a few Twitter users who've had their accounts suspended for ostensible COVID misinformation.
Such misinformation as saying that the vaccines don't stop transmission, natural immunity is better than the vaccines, things that many epidemiologists and public health experts agree on.
And the government, the U.S. government, has been pressuring these companies to censor people like my clients.
And I think that a lot of this is happening now because the governments know how wrong they got it and they don't want to be held accountable and they don't want people like my clients, like Daniela, like myself, to be able to voice our opinions.
You know, I read in the New York Post, and we're grateful for their coverage on this subject, that Ms. Jam Pell, if I'm saying her name right, was fired in less than an hour.
And that's quite something.
I mean, to fire anyone with obviously with no process, no inquiries, no conversation, not even a day to cool off, come in, let's talk about it.
This is a mom on mat leave to fire her, obviously unilaterally, without any sort of hearing or process, strikes me as high-handed.
Now, at the end of the day, I think any employer can fire any employee other than in a collective bargaining agreement if you're willing to pay, if you're willing to pay enough severance, but to sack someone so brutally in such a clearly vengeful act, it strikes me, I mean, I don't know the nature of her employment, but if you fire, if you're a government and you sack a lawyer, which is a fairly high-ranking position, immediately enrage, I mean,
she's a form of a whistleblower.
I mean, she's not blowing the whistle on something secretly, but what she did was in the public spirit.
She wasn't stealing.
It's laughable to claim she was impersonating a journalist.
She obviously was a journalist.
It just, it's so vengeful and so contrary to the public spirit.
Is there any kind of whistleblower protection?
Obviously, she's not in a union.
What can she do?
So I do not know.
You know, this is a, I'm not an employment lawyer, so that would be that area of law.
I do know that government employees have some First Amendment protections.
Given that she was speaking as a private citizen on behalf of her children, she wasn't speaking as a lawyer for the city, which would be a little bit different since she's criticizing the city's policies while working for the city.
That would be a different situation.
At the very least, the spirit of free speech should make us all see this as a very reprehensible act.
I don't know the ins and outs of the employment law, so I'm not sure what her prospects are in a lawsuit.
You know, I can just imagine if Donald Trump had sacked someone who in their private duties, private life had criticized him.
That would be news everywhere.
I see the New York Post is digging in here.
How has the rest of the media covered this case?
Have they covered it at all?
Have they condemned Daniella Jampell?
I mean, I think this is an interesting case.
I think it shows a thin-skinnedness on the part of the mayor.
I think it shows, I understand the mayor of New York is becoming a bit of a control freak with messaging, demanding every single department have their communications, their day-to-day press releases vetted by the center.
I mean, he sounds like a bit of a control freak.
I had high hopes for this mayor.
I think they've been underwhelmed.
But how has this story been covered?
Has there been any coverage?
And how have the lockdownist media covered it?
So I'm not actually sure about that either.
To my knowledge, it hasn't yet been covered, but I expect it will.
It's just, it all happened very quickly.
So I expect we'll see some articles in the next few days.
And I'll be curious what they say.
I mean, there's no question that if this was a Republican mayor who had done this, the city would be absolutely up in arms that a mother was being fired from her job merely for speaking up on behalf of her children.
So yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, I mean, we have folks who go on maternity leave here at Rebel News.
And, you know, frankly, I don't even know what the legal status of that means.
I guess they are an employee, but they're just on a hiatus.
I don't even know what it technically means.
But if someone is on an eight-month maternity leave and they're wearing their civilian clothes or whatever, and they're going out in their personal capacity, to sack them for a legit act of public accountability journalism just seems so, so over the top.
And like, it's not a bona fide reason.
I don't know.
I don't, like you, I don't know New York employment law.
But I want to come back to something you said that you said it in passing, but my ears perked up when you said that you're representing clients on Twitter who said things.
And I want to make sure I caught what you said.
You're representing a Twitter user, am I right, that was suspended for saying things contrary to the official narrative on COVID.
Can you tell us a little bit about this case?
I know it's off topic from Daniela Jampel, but we're very interested in both Twitter and censorship, especially with Elon Musk making news.
Can you give us maybe a minute on your Twitter cases?
Sure, sure.
So I'm representing actually three people.
Michael Sener, whose account was permanently suspended.
That means it's basically been deleted.
He's never allowed to create another Twitter account again.
Mark Chengezi, a cognitive theoretical scientist who studies sort of like how social contagions, mass hysteria, this is sort of his specialty.
So he's been very critical of COVID hysteria, looking at it from that angle.
And then Daniel Coatson, who's actually Jennifer Say's husband.
Jennifer Say was the president of Levi's and was pushed out for her tweets on opening schools.
So I'm representing all three of them.
Chengeez and Coetzen were suspended only temporarily.
But our argument is that the government, the U.S. government has been pressuring Twitter to censor people who say things that conflict with the government's messaging on COVID.
And so that their suspensions and censorship were essentially a result of government action.
And that makes this First Amendment violations.
There's also a Fourth Amendment issue that's that in the United States that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, warrantless searches and seizures.
So the Surgeon General demanded that tech platforms turn over sources of misinformation, which includes the identities of people.
Surgeon General's Demand for Data00:07:36
We don't know if it might include their direct messages, emails, phone numbers by May 2nd.
And he doesn't, he also, the other issue is that he doesn't have the authority to do this.
The Surgeon General doesn't have the right to be involved in censorship on tech platforms.
And all of these people, my clients, many other people, including myself, are afraid to say things on Twitter now because we don't want to lose our accounts.
So this is effectively the government chilling speech, and that's a huge First Amendment issue.
Yeah, it sure is.
I hope Elon Musk's arrival in the boardroom of Twitter yesterday.
We did a show on him acquiring 9.2% of the stock.
Those are voting shares.
And I see today he's come to terms with the board that he'll be on the board and he'll have the right to, I don't know under what rule, to acquire even more stock.
I'm very excited about it.
And hopefully he can bring a little ray of freedom back in there.
So it seems to me that your case relies on being able to prove in some way that the government pressured these tech companies and perhaps in the disclosure process of the lawsuit they would reveal if anything was put in writing.
Who knows?
Some of those conversations may just be done verbally on the phone.
But have you received disclosure?
Is that what it's called in the United States when the other sides hand over records?
Discovery.
We're actually in that process.
So we have a hearing in, we filed in Columbus, Ohio, where Mr. Changese lives.
And we have a hearing there on the 26th on a preliminary injunction.
So sort of an emergency motion because of the May 2nd deadline.
So we'll see what we can find out.
I actually think that there's enough on the record in order to win.
Both the Surgeon General and various other members of the Biden administration have made statements that I think are enough to establish that the government is pressuring these tech companies.
They've said it's their fault that Americans are dying, that they must be held accountable, that we're going to look into regulating them.
I think the case law is pretty clear that that puts enough pressure on these companies that it turns it into government action.
Is the lawsuit itself available on the NCLA that your new Civil Liberties Alliance is?
It is, yes.
Be sure to link to that below.
I have not read these lawsuits.
I just heard about them in your comments to me about Daniela Jampelle.
I'm fascinated by that.
I just want to ask one more question.
And I know we didn't call you on this, but you're obviously on top of it.
You're suing Twitter.
Are you also suing the government itself in the same legal action?
We're only suing the government.
We're not suing Twitter.
Oh, isn't that interesting?
Are you able to subpoena documents from Twitter even though you're only suing the government?
Well, that will be determined.
Well, this is very interesting because I think this is the new front line.
If governments can contract out their censorship to private entities and say, hey, it's not us, it's Facebook fact checkers.
Hey, it's not us.
It's trust and safety at Twitter, then they can evade scrutiny and accountability.
I think your lawsuits are very important.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And certainly, I mean, in the United States, at least the case law is clear that the government can't commandeer private companies to accomplish what it wants.
And so we should be able to win.
Well, I sure hope so.
I'm just delighted with the work that the NCLA is doing.
I love saying it, the new Civil Liberties Alliance, if I'm got that right, because the old Civil Liberties Alliance, I don't think has lived up to its name and its promise during the Civil Liberties bonfire of the last two years.
The ACLU in your country, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association up here, they've really been hibernating or even occasionally taking the wrong side of things.
So I'm glad that the NCLA has stepped up.
And you, in particular, Janine, I love following you in on Twitter as well.
We'll have your Twitter handle below.
Great to catch up with you.
Please let us know how that Twitter lawsuit goes.
Course, I'm interested in the lockdown stuff and the mask stuff and Daniela Jampelle.
But your lawsuit regarding Twitter, I think, is the strategic long-term one, because if they can stop us from talking about things, if they can take away our freedom of speech, then we'll lose our other freedoms even faster.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
And I sort of identified this as the underlying issue.
I mean, that's what went wrong with the whole COVID thing.
I mean, was censorship, whether sort of formal or informal, just shaming people for questioning the overarching idea that lockdowns and mask mandates were the right thing to do.
So I think censorship is really at the root of a lot of what's happened here.
And that's why this is sort of the next frontier as the mask and vaccine mandates fall away.
Let me throw one last question.
I was going to let you go, but you just made another question.
Here in Canada, when I think of the institutions that failed, and all of them failed.
We don't have a Ronda Santos.
We don't have a freedom wing.
Every government party and every opposition party were unified in every federal and provincial jurisdiction.
Imagine not just every government, Janine, but every opposition too.
In fact, sometimes egging the government on even more.
Every police force, every media outlet, every court.
We did not have a single substantial court case rolling back any lockdown.
In fact, our Supreme Court hasn't even yet bothered to weigh in on any cases, if you can believe it, two years in.
But to me, the greatest failure of all, perhaps, was the colleges of physicians and surgeons, the doctor regulators, who, if any doctor dared to, God forbid, provide an exemption letter, God forbid, prescribe a medicine.
You can't even say in vermectum, let alone prescribe it, or tweet.
Those doctors were investigated and suspended by their regulatory bodies.
And to put that fear into doctors and then say, hey, everybody, it's unanimous.
Yeah, because you're prosecuting the dissidents.
I think of all the failed institutions, police departments, prosecutors, the College of Physicians and Surgeons will go down in history as the worst of them all in Canada.
How have they been in the United States?
It's been really bad.
So, you know, Martin Kuldorf and Jay Bhattacharya, who are two of the people who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which basically said that lockdowns are a horrible idea.
They cause more harm than good.
They were both persecuted.
Martin Kuldorf, who's one of the most esteemed epidemiologists and vaccine safety specialists in the world, was driven out of Harvard.
Jay Bhattacharya is still at Stanford, but he's been really persecuted.
There were months where he would go to campus and there were signs calling for him to be fired.
I mean, I've talked to many, many doctors.
I've spent the last year and a half doing that who agree with us and who have been really persecuted, afraid to speak out.
I know Monica Gond, even I pursued as well.
So it's abysmal what's been done to these people.
I understand mob and deplatforming cancel culture and threats.
I get that.
But if I can zero in on the, I don't know what they're called in the United States.
Here they're called the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
It's the regulatory body that investigates, suspends, punishes.
I don't know if disbar is the word, but they're the bosses for if a doctor does something wrong.
So putting aside the public pressure, which you just described, I don't know if it's called colleges of physicians and surgeons.
It would be like the Law Society for Lawyers.
How have they been, these colleges of physicians and surgeons?
So I haven't heard anything.
Nationally, I don't know of anything like that.
I do know that there have been state incidents where like the state boards have been threatening doctors, telling them not to grant or not to request exemptions from vaccination requirements.
And various other there.
I know of somebody who was told he couldn't prescribe ivermectin, even though he thought he should have hydroxychloroquine.
So I think it's happening more at the state level and in the United States than at the national level.
Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons00:03:13
Right.
Yeah, it was the same way here.
Well, listen, I won't keep you any longer.
You just keep saying interesting things, and I want to ask you more.
Janine Yunes, great to see you.
Well, I'm always happy to come back.
Well, I look forward to it, and we'll have you back on when we have news on those Twitter lawsuits.
Great.
Thanks so much, Hester.
All right, all the best to you.
There you have a Janine Eunice, a lawyer at the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
And I really encourage you to follow her on Twitter.
Her Twitter account will be found below this video.
Stay with us, Moorhead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your viewer mail.
Someone with a nickname New Force Pony says, can Elon please do the same to YouTube, Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia, please?
Well, he could buy big chunks, that's for sure.
The guy's got a quarter of a trillion dollars.
But some of the companies you're mentioning are worth a trillion dollars.
I mean, you don't need to buy it all to have a real commanding presence in them.
I mean, you can have 10% and really be a dominant shareholder for sure.
I looked at the other Twitter owners, and they're owned in chunks.
About half the company is owned by big institutional investors, 8%, 5%, 2%.
So there's millions of individual owners, and then there's probably a dozen big institutional investors.
As we saw earlier in that video I played from Vig Vivek, I don't want to try and mispronounce his last name.
A lot of those institutional investors are actually hardcore left-wing woke environmental social governance investors.
But yeah, you got a quarter trillion dollars.
You can do a lot of damage.
But remember, that money is just not a pile of cash sitting in Elon Musk's bank account.
A lot of that is Tesla stocks.
So he's very rich on paper, but it's not liquid.
I don't know.
I like what I see.
And it'll be interesting, very interesting to see if Donald Trump is allowed back on Twitter.
That will be the ultimate test of who's boss.
Because there's nothing the left hates more than Twitter.
Will Elon Musk allow him back on the platform?
If he does, then we'll certainly be in the new territory, won't we?
Rich Bills says we can only hope that Musk will have an impact.
I think he will have to have a bigger stake to have any meaningful impact.
At 25%, he could theoretically control the company.
Well, I mean, if he has the CEO bending to his will, he could control the company with what he has now.
It'll be interesting to see what the other investors say.
And maybe, frankly, they want to sell their shares to Elon Musk at a premium.
Stephen Cruz says if Elon finishes what he started and improves free speech on Twitter, I will consider buying that Tesla, but not before.
Well, I mean, Elon Musk is quite an interesting character.
There's no one else like him, is there?
I'm excited by it.
I think it'll make a difference in our lives.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.
Terry Fox's Legacy00:03:49
And keep fighting for freedom.
And here's our video of the day from Adam Sos, who talks to James Topp in Calgary about why he is walking to Ottawa.
Take a look at this.
We'll see you tomorrow.
Adam Sos here for Rebel News.
And in just a moment, I'm going to be joined by James Topp, a 28-year Canadian Armed Forces veteran who is walking 4,293 kilometers across Canada protesting COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates that have fundamentally undermined Canadian values and principles.
As a serviceman in the military, he defended this country and now he is defending our fundamental freedoms.
So this is how we're doing it.
You found a way and you can do it too.
All you need to do is convince people around you to ask themselves what they can do and stop focusing on what they can't do.
It was folks like Danny Bulford.
It was truckers who went to Ottawa.
It was that group of people who assembled there to make a stand, to make their voices heard.
So that inspired me.
And it also inspired me on a different front was to see that those people were ignored and insulted.
And I had an issue with that.
And so one of the things I wanted to talk about and that has come up throughout some of the Freedom Convoy stuff, there's some obvious parallels with sort of the Terry Fox story.
Did his story inspire you in any way to take on this action?
It did, but I cannot in any way compare myself to Terry Fox.
I am no Terry Fox.
So what it did do was because I lived close to Vancouver, well, relatively speaking, an hour and a half away.
The Terry Fox Memorial, it was a place outside of British Columbia place where I could use as a kind of a landmark.
But in a way, pay my respect to the man for something I was going to do in a similar vein.
And it has personal meaning to me because Terry Fox was doing the business when I was a little kid, right?
So he was out there making that attempt to make a change in a constructive, meaningful way.
And I want to say I take inspiration from that, but in no way, shape, or form can I compare myself to Terry Fox.
Do you feel that your sort of calling to join the armed forces to stand up for freedoms speaks to your character to a certain extent?
And is this the same sort of calling that has called you to do this?
To be perfectly honest, I will say that as a young person joining the armed forces, I didn't particularly pursue any higher form or any higher calling.
I was a young guy looking for adventure, looking to travel.
I would say that it wasn't until later on and probably within the last three or four months where I really realized what I was doing as a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, as a public servant.
What is my role in the federal government?
What was I doing in the Canadian Armed Forces for 28 years?
When you look at the role of the Canadian Armed Forces is defend the security of the nation and you have to ask yourself why.
Because we want the people there to have secure, successful, and happy lives.
Now, one of the things that we've seen throughout all of this, whether it be peaceful protests, peaceful freedom convoys, we've seen the vilification of people standing up for freedoms.
Have you experienced any of that?
I haven't.
Well, to say that I have gotten some negative feedback on the route, it has happened.
I'm mystified by it because I can't understand why our national flag is now looked down on and is something that disgusts a certain segment of the population.
I just, I simply do not understand it.
And I can't understand why anybody would take offense to what I'm doing.
So there is, there has been some negative feedback, but not a lot.
Overwhelming Support00:02:30
The overwhelming support for what I'm doing, it's actually quite astonishing.
And to focus on the positive there, what sort of, you've had people joining you on the march, you've had a lot of positive feedback, very much a peaceful message of positivity.
What has the energy been like out there when you're talking to people on your march?
Well, that is what compels me to move forward.
It's the encouragement.
I'm hesitant to go too deeply into it because I frequently am at a loss for words to describe it and it's very emotional experience.
That's coming from somebody who's not typically emotional to have, you know, senior citizens like tell me how they believe in what I'm doing, like little kids making drawings for me and stuff like that.
Mementos offered along the way.
Folks opening their houses to us so that we can sleep at night.
I mean, it's just, it's overwhelming.
It's overwhelming.
It's not something I ever saw myself doing.
And it's probably the most amazing experience I've ever had in my life.
And probably one of the reasons why I'm so shocked, because I'm experiencing something that is the opposite of depression that we've been experiencing for the last three years.
And for those who aren't familiar, how long have you been on the road and how much longer do you expect your journey to take?
Well, I'm going to be, I've been on the road for 41 days, actually 42 days as of today, but the day is kind of a down.
We're taking a break today, starting up again tomorrow from where we left off yesterday, and we're going to head towards a place called Coldale.
I expect to be in Ottawa around the end of June.
So it's not something I can predict with any sort of pinpoint accuracy, but that's the timeframe I've given myself.
So another roughly 90 days from today.
Incredible.
For most of us out there, it's impossible to imagine even walking from Calgary to Edmonton, let alone across the country.
Finally, where can people follow your story?
Where can people keep apprised as to where you are?
Yeah, I have, well, we have made a website for what we're doing.
It's called Canadamarches, one word, Canadamarches.ca.
And in there, you can find links to a number of social media platforms.
On the actual website itself, there is a live GPS tracker because we were donated a spot tracker and the technology to kind of link our location real time.
So you can go to Canadamarches.ca, click the link, and you'll see exactly what my location is.
Canadamarches Update00:00:12
And I typically march from 8 to about 6 p.m. in the evening.
Incredible.
Well, James, I want to thank you so very much.
It's an honor and a privilege.
And for everyone out there, I hope you enjoyed this so much.