Ezra Levant exposes Justin Trudeau’s bodyguards silencing reporters in Kelowna (July 20), comparing it to authoritarian tactics while criticizing the QCJO-funded media echo chamber. Pollack warns of Biden’s potential decline amid $6.7T in unchecked spending, inflation fears, and broken promises like Keystone XL and Middle East policies. Both leaders prioritize ideology—Biden’s green mandates over grid capacity, Trudeau’s ethical oil hesitation—ignoring economic hardship, from West Virginia’s coal voters to Calgary’s $87B net-zero fantasy. Voters’ frustration stems from detached, debt-driven governance, risking long-term instability. [Automatically generated summary]
The first is Trudeau's visit to Kelowna, a lovely city in British Columbia.
The most bizarre report you will see.
I can't believe it.
I will read every word of it to you.
Just incredible journalism.
I'm serious, you gotta read it.
And then later, a big chat with our friend Joel Pollock.
We're really catching up.
We haven't seen him in a while.
He's got so many smart things to say, including about Ukraine, which I didn't mean to ask him about, but we just got on that track.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
See, we produced this as a TV show.
The podcast you're hearing is sort of a byproduct of that, but I want you to see the video version because there's a lot of stuff, video clips, images.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
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But for us, it's so much if you add it all together because we don't take money from Justin Trudeau.
That's part of my story today.
We are not on the government teat, and so we rely on you.
I saw this one sentence in a small regional newspaper that caught my eye on Twitter.
This is from the Kelowna Daily Courier in the BC Interior.
Here's a look at the article.
The headline is, Trudeau's muted trip to Kelowna, a liberal success.
Well, that's important news that every Kelownian wants to know.
Not was it a success for the country or their city, but did the liberals succeed?
The good news is our top investigative reporter looked into the matter and asked the Liberal Party, and indeed the news was good.
The trip was a great success, if the liberals do say so themselves.
What a weird headline.
Now, in fairness to the reporter, we don't know if he himself wrote that headline.
Often that's an editor or even the publisher writing the headline.
So let's read the story itself.
I'm going to take you through every word.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's summer listening tours stop in the Okanagan was as silent as advertised Tuesday.
That's a weird way to describe a political tour, isn't it?
Silent?
He toured a boys and girls club, a packing house, and a fruit stand with reporters invited to take pictures and videos, but forbidden in advance to ask any questions.
Any shouted queries would result in police-assisted eviction from the various premises, handlers told the media.
Silent.
I mean, let's be honest, it's not like they'd be asking tough questions even if they were allowed to.
I mean, you know, my favorite example.
Here's the star of Global News a few years back, the disgraced liberal Tom Clark, asking Trudeau the toughest question he could.
So I guess the first thing I should ask you is, are you feeling lucky?
The entire country wants to know.
What shampoo do you use?
What a disappointing answer this is going to be.
Whatever happens to be hanging around at the time.
Yeah.
But imagine being told no questions.
You can only gaze upon Trudeau and his wondrous new hairstyle.
You can only transmit exactly what he himself wants you to see and hear.
He will essentially be your editor for you.
He will give you exactly what words you need to hear and show you exactly what you need to see.
No questions, no raising other issues, nothing in the public interest, just as the headline here says, what's in the Liberal Party's interest.
Imagine consenting to that, complying with that, and calling what you produce news.
Outside the BC Tree Fruits retail store on Vaughan Avenue in downtown Kelowna, one reporter risked such manhandling by asking Trudeau if he was going to meet with BC Premier John Horgan.
Other things today, a smiling Trudeau replied before getting into one of the big black SUVs that made up his Okanagan convoy.
Ah, convoy.
Now slow down a bit.
The toughest, roughest accountability question the press gallery could muster is, would you meet with the Premier?
That's such a pitiful question.
It's so bloodless.
It's actually the sort of thing you could just surely find out by looking at each man's schedule, as are usually published on their websites.
Or you could even ask a press secretary that question.
It really is an administrative question.
It's not a substantive policy question.
It's not, what do you say to homeowners on variable mortgages given the 1% interest rate height from the Bank of Canada?
That's a good question.
Or why did you rewrite your Russia sanctions to exempt those big natural gas turbines that Russia wants?
I don't know.
I mean, they don't even have to be that tough.
Just anything in the public interest, anything substantive.
Seriously, a logistical or scheduling question that's almost secretarial, but apparently even that was too much.
And the Kelowna Courier said he risked manhandling for that.
And no, Biggie.
No, no, that's not the headline.
The fact that the liberals are just killing it out there, that's the headline.
If they do say so.
This reminds me of when the Turkish authoritarian Erdogan visited the United States and his bodyguards roughed up Americans in America, and it was all fine, apparently.
I don't know.
Back to cross.
It's OK.
Yeah.
Get over there.
Get off!
Don't talk.
Start.
I don't know.
I don't care.
We're going to have more 14 cents than all of us.
Don't move.
Except that the thug in the black convoy making threats to journalists to shut up is Canada's authoritarian, not a foreign authoritarian.
But, you know, his thugs do mean it.
Remember what Trudeau's bodyguards did to our own David Menzies for daring to ask the wrong question, for shouting a question and not being silent.
Remember this atrocity?
Ezra, we have.
I don't know what happened to Lincoln but I just got brutally assaulted by Trudeau's RCMP guys.
They smashed my face into a wooden wall.
Yeah, that's Trudeau.
I'll read some more from the story, Though a few of Trudeau's other summer appearances around the country have been met with protesters allied with last winter's Ottawa-bound convoy, even forcing the hurried cancellation of some such events, there was no such tumult waiting for Trudeau in Kelowna.
That's likely because the Prime Minister's office was extremely vague on just where exactly he was going to show up in the Okanagan.
The PMO's website didn't even refer to Kelowna or Summerland, the two cities where he was to put in appearances, saying only the PM would be in the interior region, British Columbia.
As a result, anyone inclined to protest Trudeau's visit would have been hard-pressed to know where to take their placards.
Only one protester carrying a sign with an expletive was outside the packing house, and he was kept well away from the facility's front door by police.
Apparently discouraged, the man left before Trudeau reemerged on the street from the adjacent fruit store 20 minutes later.
So we know why there weren't more protesters, but what does that have to do with why the press gallery was told to shut up?
By the way, I'm not necessarily a fan of signs with swear words on them, but it's not illegal to swear in Canada.
You should know that, and that's good because Trudeau himself likes to swear.
Here he is calling a Conservative MP, Peter Kent, a piece of SHIT.
Well, Mr. Speaker, my honorable colleague, if she had been in Durban, would have seen that in fact, Canada was among the leaders in Montreal.
Order.
order.
So it's not illegal to swear, even in parliament.
So why were police involved in keeping someone far away from the outside of a building?
Again, that's how they roll in Turkey, but in Kelowna, Canada.
I'll read some more.
At the store, Trudeau asked BCTF representatives questions about the fruit, such as whether the high-grade cherries shipped for export were also available to locals.
He paid for a small box of cherries with a $20 bill.
How are you today? The clerk asked Trudeau.
I'm doing very well, but I'll be doing even better when I get some Okanagan cherries in me, Trudeau replied.
Wow, I smell a Pulitzer Prize here.
This is great accountability journalism.
Really good investigative work.
Thank God for the fourth estate.
You guys really are holding the Prime Minister to account for all of us.
You literally reported his banter buying some cherries, and then you published this in a newspaper as news.
At the end of the tour, the PMO was likely well pleased with the silent movie-style news footage it produced of Trudeau talking to kids and admiring Okanagan fruit.
His departure from Kelowna's industrial area was delayed a few moments when his convoy appeared to be hemmed in by semi-trailers at either end.
Though the black SUVs were blocking the middle of the street, the truck drivers did not honk their horns.
What a passive-aggressive news report that was, eh?
I get the sense that the reporter, Ron Seymour is his name, might have actually liked to have written it a bit differently.
Different headline, maybe.
Maybe focus a bit more on the bullying and the threats.
But that's not really the journalism that's allowed anymore, is it?
He calls it silent movie propaganda-style footage, but he acknowledges in a way that that's what he's doing too.
And let's look at that headline just once again: Trudeau's muted trip to Kelowna, a liberal success.
Would you say that's journalism?
Who wrote that headline?
I'm guessing it's the guy who cashes the Trudeau checks to journalists in this country.
It's not just the propaganda, it's not just the slavish, slobbering love letter.
It's that Ron Seymour observed the bullying, the threats, the threats of violence.
He observed a press gallery being humiliated and loving it.
And he observed one lone protester being pushed back by the cops like it was in Turkey.
And yet that's not the headline, and no one else cares either.
None of the reporters going along with it in this convoy.
Hey, look at this.
This is from the Canada Revenue Agency website.
If you'll remember, if you see down there, this is the list of media companies, journalism organizations that are licensed by Trudeau with the QCJO status, qualified Canadian journalism organizations.
That's what Trudeau calls trusted journalists, and he can trust them.
That's the word he uses.
So they're approved.
They're licensed.
The QCJO is a kind of government permit.
And with that license, you get government money.
And you will soon get money from Facebook and Google extracted by Trudeau.
And soon you will get your stories boosted on the internet by Facebook and Google by order of Canadian law.
But only if you're a QCJO licensed media outlet.
And if you don't have that status, you won't get those things.
You won't even have access to government events.
You won't get government money, of course, or Google or Facebook money, of course, and you will be downranked by Facebook and Google on the Internet.
What you just read in the Kelowna Daily Courier, and I read every word in the story to you, is what licensed Trudeau-approved QCJO journalism looks like.
It is obedient.
It is cringeworthy.
It is partisan propaganda.
It's humiliating, but they do it because they're beggars, the QCJO journalists.
And we don't do that here.
But we're one of the only ones in Canada who don't take that government money.
Step by Step00:12:04
You know, sometimes countries become dictatorships overnight in a revolution or a war.
Thinking of the Taliban retaking Afghanistan.
Not that it was a vibrant democracy before that.
But I think more often it happens slowly, step by step.
Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, but it took him six years to fully corrupt Germany and turn it into a full-blown Nazi dictatorship.
Six years it took him.
Venezuela didn't become a dictatorship overnight either.
Do you really think there's some magic reason why Canada would be immune to this step-by-step descent into authoritarianism?
Stay with us for more.
We've got a great interview with Joe Pollock next.
Hey, welcome back.
We're so focused on our own prime minister, as we should be.
I mean, we're Canadian media.
Most of our viewers are Canadian, and Justin Trudeau truly is atrocious.
By the way, I see that Joe Biden is around 38% approval rating in the polls, depending on the pollster you look at in America.
And that's regarded as atrocious.
That's worse than Donald Trump even had at the lowest ebb of his presidency.
But may I remind you that Justin Trudeau won the last election with just 32%.
Even on his great victory day, he was 6% more unpopular than Joe Biden in his atrocious worst polling numbers.
Of course, that is hidden in Canada by the NDP's blind support for Trudeau, giving him an effective coalition government.
And most importantly, as I said in my monologue, the media party, which is now fully rented or even owned by the government.
But let's look south of the border because I think that what Joe Biden does and what the Americans do has as much an effect on us in some ways as what Trudeau does.
And, of course, I'm Republican in my leanings, though I'm not an American citizen.
I am worried about the state of their president because I don't know if what he says has any cognitive truth to it.
I don't know if the president's losing it.
I think he's a weak president.
And then he goes ahead and says something like this just today: is Joe Biden saying he has his cancer?
And guess what?
The first frost, you know what was happening.
They had to put on their windshield wipers to get literally the oil slick off the window.
That's why I and so damn many other people I grew up have cancer and why can't for the longest time Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation.
I don't know.
He said that in the present tense.
Did he simply misspeak or is he telling us something about his health that might cause him to step aside?
There's so many things I want to talk about about Joe Biden, about his recent trip to the Middle East, including to Saudi Arabia, where he fist-bumped the leader of that country.
I want to talk about inflation and Russia and oil and gas.
And who better to take us through all those things than our friend Joel Pollack, Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart.com?
We haven't had him back on in a while.
What a pleasure to see you again, Joel.
Nice to see you.
Thanks for being here.
Do you think Joe Biden simply misspoke on that cancer thing?
I mean, I don't want to put too much on a gaffe, or do you think he was really telling us something?
Well, we don't actually know what the state of the president's health is because it's never clear what he's talking about.
We don't know if it was just a gaffe, if he was trying to identify with the audience.
Sometimes he does that.
He places himself in stories.
He makes up things about his past as a way of trying to establish a bond with the audience.
Remember, he claimed to drive an 18-wheeler truck.
He's made a number of other outlandish claims, and this might have been one of them, you know, trying to establish a kind of sense of empathy with the audience or from the audience by talking about having cancer.
We also know that he had some non-melanoma skin cancers or skin abnormalities removed before he became president.
So maybe he was talking about that.
I don't know what that has to do with having oil on your windshield, but that's the other bizarre part of this: that he claimed you could get cancer from having oil on the windshield of your car.
So he's out to lunch in general on a lot of this stuff, and he has been invisible from public view for the last three or four days leading up to this event.
He returned from his trip to the Middle East and then he could not be found, would not be produced, had no public events on his schedule.
And when the White House was asked, where's Joe Biden?
They said, well, he's very busy.
But we don't know what's going on.
We don't know.
Perhaps he is receiving cancer treatment.
Perhaps he was completely wiped out by the physical exertion of the trip or the time difference, jet lag.
I mean, we have no idea.
So it's never clear what's happening with this president.
And we know that the White House is not letting the public know as much as they do about the state of the president's health.
So we don't know.
It's just one of those weird things, but it could be his way of letting slip that he's not well.
And there was a lot of speculation about his age and about Democrats' desire to replace him as president with his approval numbers so low.
They want to have a chance of going into the midterm elections with out Joe Biden as a sort of albatross around their necks.
Of course, the only person who's more unpopular than Joe Biden is his vice president, Kamala Harris, who would step into the role.
So I'm not sure that's a solution, but we just don't know what it means.
We are asking the White House.
We have yet to receive a response.
Yeah.
You know, I remember the last time we spoke, I asked you, do you think Joe Biden will be the Democrat running again in 2024?
And you answered without missing a beat that you did not think so.
And you know what?
I see more and more Democrats saying that publicly, refusing to endorse Biden.
Here's a strange story in the New York Times.
They, quote, a quote, expert about how Joe Biden is a super ager.
He's amazing.
I didn't know that that was a thing and they were experts in it.
But the fact that they're talking about how old he is and his decline in the New York Times says that there's at least a wing of the Democrats that has come to terms with, look, Joe Biden will always have a place in our hearts as Democrats.
He beat Trump.
They would say some are skeptical about that.
So give him his just desserts, make him, you know, some sort of regent, but get him out of there because he's going to destroy us.
I think the Democrats have used him for their purpose.
And frankly, it feels like elder abuse from here forward.
The problem for Democrats is not Joe Biden.
The problem for Democrats is the policies of the Democratic Party.
Voters are moving to the Republican Party, particularly Hispanic voters whom the Democrats thought were going to be in their camp for generations, because of the policies of the Democratic Party.
Voters in San Francisco threw out their district attorney, not because of Joe Biden, but because of the left-wing progressive policies bankrolled by George Soros, which simply don't work.
They're about to do the same in Los Angeles with our own district attorney, George Gascon.
And they're moving to the right.
Latino voters just elected a Latina Republican in a border constituency in Texas, which hadn't happened for decades.
And you're seeing that because people are just fed up with Democratic policies.
So there's this idea that Joe Biden isn't being aggressive enough on climate change, aggressive enough in defending abortion rights, aggressive enough on all these left-wing priorities.
What the Democrats don't get is that nobody cares about that stuff.
And in fact, a lot of it is offensive to voters.
Voters are worried about inflation.
They're worried about crime.
They're worried about education.
They're worried about health care.
Democrats aren't talking about those things anymore.
They're talking about these wedge cultural issues, the transgender pronouns, all the stuff that means nothing to anybody.
They're talking about climate change when Americans are paying record prices at the pump.
Gas prices have come back a little bit, but there's no guarantee they're not going to go back up again, especially because production is so low in the United States.
These are all the results of explicit choices by the Democratic Party.
That does not improve if Joe Biden's out of the picture.
If he is replaced, he'll be replaced by someone more left-wing than he is.
And that's just going to take the party further down the road that voters are rejecting.
So there's a cognitive dissonance in the Democratic Party.
They're talking about Joe Biden's age because they feel the midterm election verdict is coming.
They're trying to avoid it.
They're trying to avoid defeat in 2024.
The presidential election is basically already underway.
You got candidates visiting Iowa, New Hampshire, and so forth.
The Democrats know that they're in trouble, but they're not yet reckoning with the fact that they are the reason they're in trouble.
They keep running down the same failed path.
And Joe Biden is not the problem.
In fact, Joe Biden is probably the one thing that is restraining the party from doing even worse.
You know, I see different names being touted as potential successors.
One name that baffles me, he was a candidate in the primaries, in the presidential primaries last time around.
He loves that nickname, Mayor Pete, Pete Buttigieg, who was like a McKinsey business consultant who actually worked for a Canadian company that paid a massive fine for bread price fixing.
Like this Pete Buttigieg is an interesting and unusual character.
I think he's awful as a candidate, but I hear him touted all the time.
I feel like he's really out of touch, as you would expect from a McKinsey management consultant.
Here he is the other day saying the problem is not high energy prices.
It's with Americans who just won't get on board with Teslas or whatever.
Here he is talking about transitioning to clean energy.
Take a quick look.
I'm still astonished that some folks, and I felt this I was testifying in Congress yesterday.
Some folks seem to really struggle to let go of the status quo.
We've heard that same thing in Canada.
Our own finance minister says, yeah, prices are high.
That's why we all need to go green.
I don't know if that language works in 2022.
I just, you know, what's the alternative?
Buy an $80,000 Tesla?
I think Pete Buttigieg is an awful choice for a successor, but he's awful on policy, like you say.
Well, let me deal with Buttigeg as a candidate first, and then I'll talk about the issue of the electric cars that he's trying to push.
I have covered politics for a long time.
I've been around politicians for a long time.
I've never been as unimpressed in person with a politician as I was with Pete Buttigieg.
On stage, he looks very handsome, very polished.
In person, he looks very diminished, and he does not have the charisma that attracts people to him.
His handlers try to keep him away from the press.
He ran away literally from our reporters in the spin room after every debate.
He never came to the spin room to talk to reporters extemporaneously, only for setup interviews with MSNBC.
He has something fake about him.
The Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party has always hated him.
And I don't think he strikes many Americans as being authentic.
There are people who like him and find him to be very intelligent, very charming, and so forth.
He attracted a lot of former Elizabeth Warren supporters after Elizabeth Warren's candidacy.
It looked like it was going nowhere.
So there's a kind of appeal he has, I think, to suburban women and some of the more liberal parts of the gentry, you might say.
But he's been completely ineffective as transportation minister.
He was AWOL during the cargo crisis and only belatedly explained he had been on paternity leave.
So he and his husband decided to have twins in the middle of doing one of the most important jobs in the country.
Transportation Transition Troubles00:04:21
You know, that's something you can choose to do.
You know, you understand a married couple in the ordinary course of events might have a pregnancy that's unplanned or unexpected.
But they did this deliberately while he is serving in the cabinet.
There's no particular rush.
Neither of them has a biological clock that's ticking.
So they decided to do this.
He's all about image.
You know, my wife once explained to me the difference between people who manage down, that is, they manage their team, they look for results, they look for achievements, and people who manage up, the people who always try to impress the boss, the people who are always concerned about their next promotion.
Pete Buttigieg is very good at managing up.
He moves from one job to another without doing any of them particularly well.
He likes to be called Mayor Pete, but he was mayor in Indiana.
He's just transferred his residence to Michigan.
I don't know exactly why.
Michigan is sort of a swing state, so maybe he has presidential ambitions in mind.
But he's basically a fraud, a phony, a careerist who is not doing a very good job as transportation secretary.
We've got a baby formula shortage in this country he's not addressing.
We've got massive transportation problems in this country, canceled flights, all kinds of problems on the trains.
He's got a lot of money to spend now.
They gave him over a billion dollars, excuse me, over a trillion dollars with this infrastructure bill.
But, you know, he's just not very good at managing anything.
And one thought, I think, when he was appointed transportation minister or secretary of transportation, that he was smart enough to learn on the job.
I don't know what he's learned except to say a few buzzwords and catchphrases.
And this idea that Americans, let's get to the substance now, that Americans are going to switch to electric vehicles.
You put the problem exactly right.
The price of electric vehicles is staggering.
I actually just today was walking down the street in my neighborhood and someone was selling a Tesla.
They had a for sale sign in the window and it said for sale $69,000, book value $62,000.
They said, well, we're charging more because we've had some customizations done, et cetera, et cetera.
But that's the price for a used Tesla.
So people are paying premium prices for used electric vehicles.
There is a demand for these things because gas prices are so high.
But, you know, the little Subaru that I drive that's paid for that I've been driving for 10 years cost me just over $20,000.
Now, it costs me more in fuel and maintenance costs than the Tesla would cost me, but I don't have $69,000 lying around to just pay for an electric vehicle.
And here's the other problem.
While they want everyone to shift to electric vehicles, they're allowing the power generation capacity of our electrical grid to decline and deteriorate.
They're shuttering natural gas power plants.
They're shuttering coal plants.
They're not building new nuclear power plants.
And as a result, there are shortages of electricity in California, Texas, New York, and other places.
In Texas, during a heat wave last week, Tesla told its drivers not to charge their electric vehicles during the afternoon during peak demand.
That tells you that these electric vehicles are putting more strain on the grid than the grid can handle.
So if Pete Buttigieg, who's supposed to be all about infrastructure, is telling people to move to electric cars and is expressing kind of incredulity that Americans haven't done so already, maybe he needs to understand that the green policies of this administration and the blue states and even conservative states that have decided to add green energy too rapidly, those green policies are making demands on the electricity grid that make it harder to shift to electric vehicles in our consumer fleet.
So they have to decide what they want.
Do they want an economy that grows?
Do they want people to make the transition away from traditional fuels to electric vehicles?
If so, they have to be comfortable with using fossil fuels to power the grid.
It'll be more efficient than having people put fuel in their cars on their own, but they have to make that choice.
They have to actually accept that there's a transitional period and that ultimately it's the price mechanism that's going to enable that transition.
Once electric cars are cheaper, once solar energy, wind energy are more efficient and cheaper, then you'll see that transition happen naturally.
By forcing it down our throats, they're creating hardship for American consumers.
They're asking poor and middle class, working class consumers and taxpayers to subsidize the wealthy who get tax credits for these electric vehicles.
And it's a recipe for failure.
It's a recipe for power failures.
It's a recipe for all kinds of hardship that is completely unnecessary.
So Pete Buttigieg sits in his little bubble and pontificates, but this guy lives at a remote from reality, as do many of his fellow ministers in the Biden cabinet.
Advice For Inflation00:06:49
You know, you made me think of something I just saw today.
The CBC state broadcaster has a financial affairs consumer affairs advisor.
And she was asked, well, how do you get ahead with inflation?
So what should a young millennial worker do if all of a sudden you can't afford rent and food and groceries and gas in the big city?
And here's her advice.
Take a quick look.
Shelter and hydro in combination should be about 30% of your income.
And that is much higher right now, especially in cities like Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, where rents are much higher.
One way that you can mitigate that is by speaking to your employer about getting a raise.
With inflation, the way that it is going, it is completely reasonable right now, especially in this tight labor market, to go to your employer and say, I need you to bump my wage because it's becoming impossible for me to still survive in the city that I was hired in.
And if that doesn't work, looking for another job, especially if you've got skills that are in demand, will often give you the bump that you need in order to afford that apartment and that rent that goes with it.
I can hear a whole bunch of people at home going, so my boss will say no.
Yeah, and that is, and that's a fair point.
So there you have it, Joel.
Just ask for a raise.
And if that doesn't happen, get a job that pays for.
I mean, stop being poor people.
It feels like the same advice from Pete Bootig or Christia Freeland or the CBC.
Just earn more money, just buy a Tesla.
I think it's unhitched from reality, as you said.
But there is, I think, one grown-up in the Democrats, and his name is Joe Manchin.
He's from West Virginia.
Did he not pop the balloon on a lot of this stuff by saying, I'm not going along with the Build Back Better Green scheme?
What happened there?
Because we saw him make a statement and we saw the gnashing of teeth.
Is all this trillion-dollar infrastructure, Build Back, Better, Green stuff is actually still proceeding?
I thought he sort of ended that.
So there are three major spending bills that define the Biden administration.
The first was the American Recovery Act, which was Biden's big spending bill when he came into office.
That passed with Democrat votes, and Biden signed it into law.
It was additional COVID relief, $2 trillion in spending, even though all of the spending passed under the Trump administration hadn't yet been out the door.
So it was additional spending on top of what was passed in the latter days of the Trump administration.
Then you had the infrastructure bill, $1.2 billion.
Excuse me, I've done it again.
$1.2 trillion.
I have to get used to speaking in trillions.
$1.2 trillion.
It was bipartisan.
There were some moderate Republicans who went along with it.
And only about 10%, in fact, less than 10%, fixes roads and bridges.
But there was broader support for some kind of infrastructure spending.
We do have infrastructure projects that need to happen.
So that was more or less bipartisan.
Then there was the Build Back Better plan, which essentially was written by Bernie Sanders.
Joe Biden adopted it.
$3.5 trillion in additional spending.
All of the social spending and all of the pork projects and all of the pie-in-the-sky utopian schemes that Democrats have wanted to pass for centuries.
And that was that bill.
Many conservative critics said they vastly underestimated the cost of that bill, that $3.5 trillion was really $5 trillion or higher over the 10-year period of the bill.
Manchin put a spike in that several months ago.
And the Democrats now accuse him of negotiating in bad faith because he said he might be open to a smaller bill.
What the Democrats miss is that in the interim, inflation has become the number one issue for Americans.
Now, Manchin is from a fossil fuel producing state.
He's from a coal state.
So he doesn't like the fact that many of the Democrats' plans involve phasing out coal as a power source.
But in addition to that, he's got a lot of working class voters in West Virginia who are paying more but earning the same.
Or even if they are getting that raise or getting that better job, it's not keeping pace with inflation.
The number of Americans who say that they're having trouble affording major or just basic expenses continues to grow up.
The proportion continues to go up.
So there are many ordinary Americans who are deeply worried that more government spending is going to mean more inflation.
And they're not wrong.
The sheer amount of money being shoved out the door by the federal government.
And keep in mind, again, we're still seeing some of the spending from the Trump era, from the height of the pandemic, only coming into the market now.
So there's still cash flowing out from government.
And Joe Biden's proposing to spend more.
So Manchin understands this is a major problem for his constituents.
He comes from a working class state.
He represents the kind of working class voters who have increasingly been voting Republican, both for cultural reasons and for economic reasons.
And he was willing to negotiate.
Some of those voters do want more social spending.
They do want more help from the government, but they're also bitterly opposed to any phasing out of their industries.
I mean, Democrats seem to have this idea that when you close the coal mines, those coal miners can all become computer programmers or they can operate call centers from their homes in West Virginia or something like that.
I mean, Democrats have no idea how money is made, how jobs are held down by ordinary people.
I'm talking about the elected Democrats who have spent their lives in public service.
They have no idea how a business is run.
They don't know what it's like to get up, go to work, and hope you're going to have your job at the end of the day.
What's also happened is that until recently, the advice that was given just there in that clip, ask for a raise, get a new job, that actually wasn't terribly bad advice until recently.
But with inflation, there have been fears of a recession.
And with fears of a recession, a lot of the companies that were hiring very eagerly in the past have started to slow down their hiring.
We're not seeing it in the unemployment rate because most people are still employed who want jobs.
But I don't think we're going to see the expansion of jobs that was as rapid as it's been in recent months because I think a lot of employers, a lot of businesses are adopting a wait and see approach because they want to see which way the economy is moving.
So it's no longer quite as advantageous a labor market for workers as it was just a few months ago.
Things are heading in the wrong direction.
It's not that we're doing so badly, and there are a lot of positive things going on in the American economy, but people feel like things are heading in the wrong direction.
And all Democrats can talk about is what they want to regulate, what they want to cut off.
They're glad people are paying higher prices at the pump because maybe they'll buy electric vehicles and so forth.
We are dealing with an administration and a governing party that is out of touch with reality.
And that's the reason they're heading for trouble in November.
You know, I was adding up all the trillions you talked about.
Maybe my math is wrong, but I think you outlined between 6.7 and $8.2 trillion worth of spending.
I think I was adding that up right.
Things Are Heading Wrong00:14:16
And there's massive.
And, you know, not all of that passed.
The infrastructure bill passed, the American Recovery Act passed, but the big, the big one, Build Back Better.
It hasn't passed.
Yeah.
Right.
I take your point, but had it passed.
Okay, let's just deal with the ones that did pass.
A third of a billion Americans, roughly.
So for every trillion dollars, that's $3,000 per man, woman, and child.
Like, it's just such a staggering number.
So if you're at 3.2 trillion, I'm guessing that's what passed.
So that's, you know, that's $10,000.
Is that right?
Did I do my math right?
$10,000 per man, woman, and child.
Is my math right on that?
So for a family of three, that's a $30,000 U.S., which is real dollars.
That's why there's inflation because you're pumping this money.
You're printing this money.
I don't know.
It's just, it's really shocking.
I hope no one tells Biden the number that comes after billion, trillion.
No one tell him quadrillion because he'll start throwing that number.
I'm worried about here's here's what's on my mind here as a Canadian.
Donald Trump was amazing for energy, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, fracking, mining.
Like he was amazing.
America actually hit net energy surplus.
Like America became an energy exporter.
And I recall when Donald Trump went to Germany and told them, don't be foolish.
Don't buy your natural gas from Vladimir Putin.
And they smirked at him.
Here's a quick look at a video.
This is published by a left-wing social media site that was just mocking what a dummy Donald Trump was.
And look at the faces of the German diplomats just clucking their teeth like that.
And what an idiot Donald Trump was.
Take a look at this just a few years ago.
Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.
Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.
Yeah, well, who's laughing now?
I mean, I don't think Trump's laughing.
I don't think Trump's enjoying the I told you so, no one is.
But instead of developing American oil, gas, coal, he's going to Venezuela.
He's, you know, he's sending emissaries to Venezuela, an American enemy.
He literally goes to Saudi Arabia to fist bump the print saying, please produce more.
He won't open Keystone Excel, which would give 800,000 barrels a day of ethical oil to America.
It's just so strange to me.
He's trying to get more conflict oil from OPEC and Russia.
He won't get more ethical oil.
And he's leaving all these jobs.
Like there could be a million more jobs in America if he greenlit the kind of energy plan that Trump had.
It's all about appeasing the left wing of his party.
And they are ideologically committed to setting an example.
I mean, they know that canceling Keystone is not going to have any real effect on climate change, but they want to set the example.
You know, there's this idea that if we change the laws in our state or even just change the ordinances in our town, we become a climate-friendly town.
I mean, whatever little town you're from, whatever suburb, whatever liberal community, you're not going to have any appreciable impact on global climate or anything else.
But they want to set the example.
It's all gestural politics.
So they canceled Keystone, even though it passed every environmental approval under Obama, under Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State at the time at the State Department.
I mean, it passed everything, but they canceled it.
Donald Trump made America energy independent.
And as you rightfully point out, it's had national security implications.
We've gone cap in hand to the Saudis to ask them to produce more because we won't do it.
Now, there's a subtle racism there, right?
I mean, it's okay if these Arabs in a faraway land produce the same oil, but we can't produce it.
We, you know, Westerners in our green mansions, we don't want to be sullied by such a dirty business as producing oil.
I mean, we're going to park our Teslas in our battery-reinforced garages with our solar roofs, and we're going to feel good about ourselves while we're asking the Saudis to pump more oil.
I mean, it's a pantomime of liberal hypocrisy, but there you have it.
That's what Joe Biden has been reduced to doing.
And as a consequence, he's had to throw out all of his previous statements about Saudi Arabia.
He's had to swallow his words on human rights.
And the only good thing about his recent trip to the Middle East was that he reversed most of his policies.
I mean, he threw away most of his campaign promises, no consulate for the Palestinians, no immediate implementation of a two-state solution.
I think it was a great trip only because he adopted most of Trump's policies.
He starts talking about the Abraham Accords.
In the first months of the Biden administration, they didn't even use the words Abraham Accords.
They were opposed to using it because it reminded people of Trump.
Now they're embracing it.
They want to see it continue and so forth.
So, you know, I think it was a successful trip only because Biden abandoned his campaign promises.
But the broader point is we are not moving in the right direction on energy.
And there are still people in the Biden administration in the White House who are saying, maybe this is all good.
Maybe these high fuel prices are good because we want to move Americans off of their wasteful, horrible, gas-guzzling cars and move them onto the electric grid that is failing with their electric vehicles.
Yeah.
Well, Trudeau talks about that too.
He says, make better choices.
And because people won't do that voluntarily, he wants the painful price of gasoline to be so high that they're forced to choose between gasoline and groceries.
And that makes some better choice.
I don't know if you saw the news, but some major turbines for the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Europe, they were being repaired in Montreal.
And it was against Canadian sanctions to return those to Russia.
But Trudeau literally amended the sanctions to allow these gas turbines to go back to Russia.
And I can understand why, because, I mean, it's not Russia that would be throttled.
It would be Germany if Germany had 40% of its energy cut off.
I mean, Germany was begging Trudeau to allow it through.
But the one thing Canada actually has leverage over, I mean, there's no Russian oligarchs with sports teams here.
There's no Russian oligarchs with villas or yachts here.
They don't bank in Toronto.
So all his talk about sanctions was for show.
The one thing he actually could do, he immediately abandoned.
And I think it was actually the right thing to do.
But it shows that Trudeau won't do the one thing Canada could do.
We're not strong militarily.
We're not strong diplomatically.
But my God, we've got a lot of oil and gas.
But that's the one thing he will not do for Ukraine or Poland or any other European country.
He will not increase ethical energy to displace Russian energy.
I find it so telling.
It's just like Biden in a way.
Well, let me add this.
There's something else Canada could do, which is to call for negotiations to end the war.
I'm very hawkish on foreign policy, but when you're facing off against a nuclear-armed power, the calculations are different.
We now see both sides grinding to a stalemate in eastern Ukraine.
And by not reaching a negotiated settlement to end this conflict, Biden and the West have prolonged the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
They've prolonged this energy crisis.
They've prolonged the food shortage.
Now is the time to negotiate before winter, before Russia has more leverage with heating oil with gas.
And instead, the guy who promised diplomacy is back when he came into office is just sending more weapons to the Ukrainians, Western weapons that the Ukrainian soldiers are not trained how to use.
So we're fueling this conflict.
We're pledging more money, more weapons.
And to what end?
There's just a stalemate there.
We're frittering away the precious leverage that Ukraine fought for when they drove back the Russian soldiers out of Kyiv and protected their sovereignty.
I think the most important thing that Canada could do is to call for an international peace conference to resolve this in some way that provided adequate security guarantees to Ukraine, allowed Russia to save face and withdraw.
And we could get back to the business of producing wheat and exporting fertilizer and doing all the things.
People may starve around the world because of the prolonged conflict here.
I mean, I don't understand why there isn't more pressure for a diplomatic solution.
It's mind-boggling.
I think it's because the media are asleep at the switch.
But, you know, again, I'm a very hawkish person.
I think Israel should bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities.
I'm very much in favor of preemptive action against terrorism and so forth.
I'm very hawkish.
I've even supported Democratic presidents when they've ordered American soldiers or resources into combat for various reasons of national interest.
So I don't change my views based on administration, but this is a different circumstance.
We are not able to escalate to the point where we would want a nuclear confrontation with Russia.
So as long as Putin knows we're not going to go that far, he can just keep fighting until he wears us out, which is what he's doing.
And he's worn out the Ukrainian military.
They're losing ground every day.
I don't know why we're not immediately calling for a peace conference to stop this, stop the economic damage, the humanitarian damage that this is doing, not just there, but around the world.
So maybe Canada could speak up and tell Joe, hey, you know what?
We as Canadians are maybe a little bit better liked around the world than Americans are.
Maybe we'll host a peace conference.
We'll do something.
But this war is going to cause incredible hardship unless it's brought to an end.
I don't know if you know this, but Trudeau's deputy is named Chrystia Freeland, and she's a Ukrainian nationalist, which is fine.
She has a home in Kiev and visits it regularly.
I think she's been a driving force in a Ukrainian nationalist foreign policy.
And I, frankly, I don't know if you've told my viewers my great-grandfather came from Ukraine.
I mean, I have nothing against Ukrainians.
I just did mine, by the way.
Yeah, I think the invasion is improper and illegal and imperialist and deadly.
But my God, I mean, Justin Trudeau has more phone calls with Vladimir Zelensky than he does with Canadian premiers, than he does with the Canadian opposition leader.
I mean, it's very Zelensky to develop a set of false expectations.
And I think the right thing to do is to sit down with Vladimir Putin.
And even if it means giving up some portion of that eastern territory, Ukraine, up until recently, you could say Ukraine had won the war.
They had defended their sovereignty.
They had repulsed a Russian attack, a lightning attack, a blitzkrieg attack on Kyiv when everybody thought, including the Biden administration, they thought it was going to be over in 48 hours.
Ukrainians fought valiantly, et cetera.
Now it's a stalemate.
Ukraine is steadily losing its military advantage in the eastern provinces.
If Russia takes those by force, it will then be in a position to push once again into the rest of Ukraine.
And this time, it'll meet an exhausted Ukrainian military without the weapons and supplies it needs.
We are running out of supplies to give them.
Some of the things we've given them, like javelin missiles, are no longer manufactured by the companies that made them.
The defense contractors in the United States haven't made them for years.
So we are running into a serious problem.
Plus, winter is coming in.
Russia is going to have leverage over Europe.
The winter wheat crop is the most important wheat crop in global food supply.
It's not going to get planted or harvested properly.
There are fertilizer products that are not being shipped to the rest of the world.
Africa may see millions of people starve because of the lack of fertilizers.
We are already seeing what happens in Sri Lanka when you don't have fertilizer.
They went organic last year and people started starving, which is why the government was overthrown.
We are sitting on top of a major crisis and nobody is calling for an end to the war.
I'm not saying appease Vladimir Putin.
I'm saying come to some sort of reasonable agreement where he gets something that allows him to safe face.
Ukrainians have their sovereignty protected and move on.
There's no reason to push toward what the West seems to regard as some kind of victory.
They use this word, but they don't know what it means.
I mean, I used to criticize Obama and the Democrats for not seeking victory in Iraq, victory in Afghanistan, but at least we have some idea what that would look like.
We have no idea what it means in Ukraine.
And we also don't know that Vladimir Putin wouldn't do something much more drastic in response to a perceptive, to a perceived Western victory in Ukraine.
I mean, he's not going to leave with his tail between his legs.
You know, if he starts losing badly in eastern Ukraine, there's no telling what he might do.
He's already been unpredictable and vicious in this war.
So I think there's got to be pressure for a diplomatic solution.
Yeah.
I think Trudeau and Biden are willing to fight to the last Ukrainian on this.
I'm just not sure how that serves Ukraine.
Well, Joe, listen, it's great to catch up with you.
We covered so much ground, and I find it interesting to hear your take on Ukraine.
It is not being pro-Putin to say this war should end.
That's an absurd thought that I hear too much.
Anyone who says maybe we shouldn't prolong the war, maybe we shouldn't escalate the war.
Oh, that's just a Putin shield.
I don't think it is.
And it's a very strange thing.
And I think a lot of Republicans have war mania too.
It really felt like what Eisenhower described as the military-industrial complex, the speed at which a $40 billion military package was shoved out of Congress with no oversight.
I found that shocking.
I don't know.
I hope things make sense.
$87 Billion Tech Initiative00:08:10
It's great to catch up with you.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon, and we'll keep following your stuff in Breitbart.
Thanks for being here today.
Thanks so much, Ezra.
All right, there you have it.
Joel Pollock, one of my favorite guys, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Stay with us.
Your letters to me next.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Peter 6 of 9 says, yet with this going on, oil companies are still hiring at corporate level people who actively support this and donate money to political charities that attack them.
You know, you're talking about green extremism, cap and trade, Stephen Gilbo.
It's true.
I remember when I wrote the book Ethical Oil about 10 years ago, and I was often invited to speak at oil companies, often at like day-long staff retreats.
And I would be on the speaking list, but I would see the list.
And there were environmental extremists on the list.
I remember appearing once, and the head of the Pembina Institute was right there before me.
He's a leading anti-oil sands activist.
He was being paid big money by the oil companies to come to the oil companies and speak to their staff against the oil sands in Calgary.
True story.
Pass Me the Hummus says we're going down Sri Lanka's path.
The World Economic Forum promised them riches after they went 100% organic.
That's what Joel Pollock was talking to us about.
You know, these utopians with their schemes that sound great at TED Talks and universities, you think they've ever planted and grown any food in their lives?
It's incredible that Sri Lanka, of all places, let that happen.
Great White Pine says the only reason our population is growing is due to immigration.
Our reproduction rate is 1.6.
I think that's right.
And I think that's a problem.
I think the pandemic and the lockdowns and the fear made all those things worse.
But there are ways to encourage families to have kids again.
It's probably not going to happen, though, if the housing in your country is so expensive that no one can move out.
No one can get married and start their own family until they're in their 30s, as opposed to when it used to happen.
People used to get married in their early 20s.
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.
Keep fighting for freedom.
Adam Sausier for Rebel News at City Hall in Calgary, Alberta, where Calgary Mayor Gioti Gondek and her largely lackey city council have seemingly completely lost the plot.
Their plan to make Calgary a net zero city by 2050 is impractical and plausible and in fact largely undesirable even in concept for many in the heart of oil country here.
But when you find out how much they're planning to spend in pursuit of their pipe dreams, you'll truly wonder about their psychological stability and well-being.
That is, if you weren't already questioning their connection to reality after they declared a climate emergency in Calgary back in November of 2021.
Gondeck plans to spend $87 billion on this climate initiative.
That's right.
87 billion, not million.
There are dollars that will need to be spent if we don't get smarter about emissions and electrification.
That's indicated in the report as well.
And frankly, what we're trying to do is keep up with oil sands companies and energy producers who have long had plans for pathways to net zero.
We're just trying to do our part.
In other words, she plans to spend $62,000 for every man, woman, and child in Calgary on this unhinged climate initiative.
An initiative of this hubristic magnitude would be right at home in Mao Zedong's China, a China which in the 1950s launched their great leap forward, a plan to modernize the country.
And despite the fact that, well, the technology wasn't quite ready and the people weren't quite buying in, they went full force with this campaign, this initiative.
As a result, as many as 55 million people died.
Now, I don't want to be dramatic.
I'm not suggesting that if the government spends $87 billion on this initiative, we're going to lose our homes, starve, and very likely descend into an unprecedented era of totalitarian governing.
But then again, neither were the Chinese.
We all care about the environment, but at what cost?
So this is a pretty ambitious plan.
$87, $88 billion.
What is that going to cost the average Calgarian?
At face value, this just doesn't make a lick of sense.
People are losing their livelihoods, their supply chain issues.
And in fact, we are seeing costs and inflation skyrocketing to unprecedented levels, largely because of government spending initiatives like this one.
But these politicians simply don't care.
They don't give a lick about your average working class Joe or the family that's just trying to get by.
They are tipping their hats to their handlers.
This is very much the stuff of World Economic Forum dreams and working class nightmares.
Beyond the initial sticker shock of the price associated with this project, we also have to realize that the technology required to make net zero possible simply doesn't exist yet.
We will be spending billions of dollars on technology that is effectively prototypes and will be laughed at within a decade as absolute relics.
This is not a solution moving forward.
When that technology does become viable, make no mistake, it will run away with the free market.
If there can be renewable, affordable, sustainable energy, it will win on the open market.
It is categorically evident, much as we saw in China, that the technology simply isn't there yet.
Until the technology reaches a point where it is viable, we need to stop this climate hysteria.
We need to realize that we need Alberta oil and gas.
Most of these climate initiatives do nothing but line the pockets of politicians and their friends.
And that really is the rub of it.
That's what this is all about.
All you need to do is follow the money.
And mark my words, when these contracts for the $87 billion in spending go out, you can just watch the money and watch where it goes.
It's going to go to China.
It's going to go to perhaps Saudi Arabia.
It's going to go to California and some of these other states that play ball on progressive ideologies.
That is what you're going to see.
It'll certainly go east and to companies around Ottawa.
But I highly doubt we'll be seeing much, if any, of that business right here at home, right here where we need it.
These politicians want to turn Alberta into a have-not province because frankly, Alberta pushes back a little bit and they can't stand it.
They want us to own nothing, not even the $87 billion in tech we're about to buy, and they want us to be happy about it.
We have entered a troubling era of politics, and that is one where politicians are not accountable and they are unbridled in their spending.
It has gotten so bad that it's inevitable at this point, thanks to the efforts of people like Justin Trudeau and unpopular mayors like Gioti Gondek, that generations will be saddled with debt and we will endure economic and collective instability because of the actions of these people.
This $87 billion eco-spending spree is just a principal example of that, but there are countless others right across this country.
And that is because these people are would-be tyrants.
Thankfully, we have the remaining crumbling vestiges of the once great democracy of Canada still holding them in check to some extent.
But who knows how long that will last?
And with initiatives like this, like this $87 billion spending spree, how far are these politicians from a total lack of accountability?
They're already very far from being in touch with your average Joes and with the economic realities faced by most of us in this world today.
As always, I want to thank you all so much for tuning in for Rebel News.