Ezra Levant and David Freiheit (Viva Fry) examine how Canada’s 2020–2021 lockdowns—mask mandates, canceled events like prom, and vaccine passports—destroyed childhood normalcy for Freiheit’s three kids, pushing him to relocate to Florida under a finite visa. He criticizes Bills C-11 (broadcast regulation) and C-16 (Quebec’s Youth Protection Act overhaul), calling them tools of censorship, while Ezra highlights the 2022 Trucker Convoy as a pivotal, organic protest against government overreach, later violently suppressed despite its peaceful nature. Freiheit’s live-streaming exposed media lies, like CBC’s false claims about convoy vandalism, and his work with Rumble—resisting demands to censor RT—shows a fight for free speech amid Canada’s shifting "Orwellian" COVID policies and legacy media’s declining influence. Their move reflects a broader exodus of dissenters, reshaping Canada’s political and cultural landscape. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, you'll recognize him for his big hair and you'll love him for his legal views on freedom, a feature interview with David Freiheit, better known as Viva Fry.
It's December 28th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
You know what?
During the darkest moments of the lockdown, a lot of people said, Ezra, why don't you leave?
Why don't you go to Florida, land of the free, home of the brave?
Why don't you go somewhere where they're not locking us down and where soft, creeping totalitarianism is not the new national identity?
And a lot of other freedom-oriented people were, especially people who had jobs that they could move with them.
Obviously, if you run a restaurant or a bar or an establishment, you are stuck with that establishment.
If you're a miner in a coal mine, you can't move the mine with you.
But these days in our information economy, I mean, a TV show, I'm in front of a green screen.
I happen to be in Toronto, Canada.
But really, if I were in Miami, would you know the difference?
My answer then was, I feel compelled to stay and fight.
I felt like the battle against the lockdowns was something I had a duty.
I felt like I had to be the last man going down with the ship, but I should tell you that a number of our teammates who don't have a job description that requires them to be in this city or that city, they chose to move to Florida.
Our accountant moved to Florida.
I still talk to him on Zoom and by phone all the time.
Our social media boss, he could do the job from anywhere in the world.
He was just sick of living, particularly in Montreal, the city of curfews.
You might remember him, Yankee Pollock.
He would go out in the streets filming the curfew and the police cracking down on anyone, sick or healthy, vaxxed or unvaccinated, who dared to go out in the streets.
He had enough and he moved and he's happy about it.
Well, I stayed and fought.
But there was a great freedom-oriented video blogger, a vlogger, if you will, who I think painfully considered this issue because he has deep roots in Canada.
He loves Canada.
But how much does he have to suffer for that love?
And could he fight for freedom?
I mean, he's a man who cares about the world beyond our borders as well.
And so I'm talking to one of my favorite Canadians now.
And it hurts me, but I understand why that I'm talking to him.
And he's in Boca Raton, Florida.
And part of the reasons it hurts me is because it's so bloody cold up here and it's warm down there.
Let me introduce to you, my friend David Freiheit, popularly known as Viva Fry.
Great to see you.
I can imagine someone who loved Montreal, like you're a very Montreal guy.
And you can tell a Montreal guy because he loves the city.
He loves the French and the English and the culture and the history and its place and fashion and restaurants.
It must have hurt for you to come to the decision you had to leave.
Ezra, I love, some people think it's traitorous to leave your country.
First of all, it's not permanent.
I'm on a specific type of visa, which is a finite visa that I can renew, or I could decide to apply for permanent residence, green card citizen status or whatever.
I love Canada.
It's not even, it's not a, I love everything about Canada.
Canadians, geography, the change of seasons.
But had I had no kids, you know, married with no kids, I would have stayed.
It would have been the inconvenience to me would have been bearable.
What we've just lived through since 2020 and going forward in Canada, but in Quebec in particular, I've got three kids, and it's not a normal way for kids to grow up.
But when you see what this type of lifestyle does to a kid, where they go into a building and get an evil eye for thinking that they're going to get in an elevator with another human being because children are vectors and to be feared at all costs, when they go to a second cup on Green Avenue and see people fighting with each other because they're standing too close to each other, face masks, lockdowns, no play dates, no sleepovers.
It's not a way that children are supposed to be brought up.
And I'll reassess in a few years, but in the interim, couple all of that with federal bill C-11, censoring the internet, which might cripple my ability to do what I do.
Couple that with Bill C-16 out of the province of Quebec, which removes, eliminates parental supremacy from the Youth Protection Act.
I mean, you've got a government that locks you down, abuses your children, and then claims ownership over them.
I said at some point, enough is enough.
We'll reassess and see if this, I won't say sinking ship, but if this ship of Canada that's taking on water doesn't right itself within the next few years, we'll reassess in three years.
Yeah, you know what?
Even as I was talking about it, I was thinking, well, should I have gone?
Like, I hope I didn't sound critical.
In fact, I was just trying to explain my own thinking.
I felt that Rebel News, I mean, you talk about grand themes.
You talk a lot about the law.
You interview, I mean, even when you were in Canada, you interviewed Americans about American legal cases all the time.
Montreal is so close to America geographically, anyways.
And I thought, well, why didn't I go?
Because you're right.
It was the kids who were the most punished.
Kids who, you know, lost years of not just schooling, but of so, I mean, you'll never, if you were in grade 12 and your grade 12 year was canceled, you'll never get that back.
The camaraderie, the prom, maybe a school trip somewhere.
You will never get those moments back.
You can't redo your childhood and the depression.
And like, it was a war against children.
You're exactly.
I sent my kids and my missus down to Florida for a bit just to get away from Toronto during the darkest lockdown.
They were lonely.
They came back up.
But you're right.
And the crazy thing is, everyone who left the old country, whether it was Italy or Russia or wherever your ancestors came from before they came to Canada, they would have said the same things you said.
They would have said it's for my children.
My great-great-grandfather came over from actually from Ukraine in 1903 and he surely would have said, I want my kids to have a better, freer life.
It's crazy that probably hundreds of thousands of Canadians left Canada saying the same things that their grandparents said when they came here.
And as I'll just clarify, I didn't take offense to what you said.
Oh, I know you didn't.
I just realized I may have sounded prickly.
I didn't mean to sound prickly.
In fact, there's a bit of jealousy in me because you are in a freer place.
You're in the freest place of North America.
People don't understand this.
When we started making the decision in my head, it was when there was a vaccine passport.
And luckily, my kid was 12 and didn't need this to play soccer, to go to school plays.
But my wife took my kid to school when this vaccine passport was in effect in Quebec.
And my kid was being asked to show papers to play soccer outdoors after school.
Luckily, she was 12 and didn't have to show the papers.
My wife went to the school play, and this kid's wearing face masks doing plays.
And she said, this is delusional.
This is abusive.
And then we're like, okay, well, we have this, we have the luxury, the freedom, but also then the business opportunity came up with the work that I'm doing for Rumble, which is actually what brought me to Florida in the first place.
Rumble, YouTube's competitor, which was based in Canada, is now operating in the U.S.
And lo and behold, I mean, they needed a lawyer.
I'm a lawyer, and things worked out well.
I didn't know you were affiliated with them.
You know, I have a, I should disclose, I have a tiny, teeny, tiny stake.
I bought a tiny couple of shares of Rumble.
It's actually the only stock I own because I believed in that.
I had the pleasure of meeting the guys.
You're right.
They were not too far down the street from us here in Toronto.
And I think business opportunities would have made them leave, anyways, because America is just the biggest market.
But I tell you, there was nothing holding them in Canada.
It was just so tough to live a normal life the way you described it.
I think anyone who could get away did get away.
Unfortunately, most people, that just wasn't an option.
You mentioned you got this gig with Rumble.
That would probably help get a guy into the States.
Tell me more about that because I love Rumble.
We use it because I'm terrified of YouTube censorship.
First of all, Rumble is the future.
I mean, it's the future of video hosting.
They don't just, I mean, Chris Poblosski, the CEO, this is not an ad for Rumble.
And I'll give you full disclosure: I don't own any shares in Rumble because when they brought me on to review their terms of service community guidelines to draft them as they would apply, I said, if I buy stock, it's going to, even if I buy it for myself, because I believe in the company, it will look fishy and I'm just not even entering that realm of perception.
So I own no stock in them, but we're working on drafting the terms of service.
I have an exclusive agreement with Rumble.
You know, they were based out of Canada, but it's becoming impossible to conceivably do business in Canada.
And if Bill C-11 passes, it will be impossible for Rumble to operate in Canada.
But the company is walking the walk and talking the talk.
When, for example, France says, take down RT, the way the Canadian government is saying, take down RT off of the platforms in Canada.
Rumble said, no, that's not how we do things.
And they said, well, we're going to ban you in France.
And they said, okay, so be it.
I mean, you're punishing your own citizens.
So the platform is as good as perfect can get in terms of non-politically motivated censorship, in terms of transparent rules, community guidelines, terms of service that I had a hand in drafting, crafting as we will continue to evolve over time.
And it's a company that I obviously believe in.
And it was just, you know, opportunity arose at the right time.
We had gotten to a point where I said, I'm not going back to another five months of curfew in Quebec.
The kids aren't.
We're not having underground sleepovers like we're committing some crime where the kids have to worry about being seen leaving their friends' houses because we might have been breaking the rules.
And, you know, knowing what I know now, however, moving is incredibly difficult, incredibly costly.
And, you know, I'm fortunate, but I do feel a bit like I've abandoned Canada.
But I also think that having come down here allows me to be a lot more vocal about the madness going on in Canada from Bill C-11 to Quebec stuff.
And now to the euthanasia stuff in Canada, which people outside of Canada don't seem to be aware of, and people inside of Canada don't seem to be aware of.
And it should shock the conscience of anybody with a conscience.
Yeah.
Well, it's very interesting.
And I literally had no idea you were working with Rumble.
I mean, I've got my notes here of things I was going to chat with you about: the trucker convoy, your law blog, the state of Canada.
And I'm fascinated that you hook up with Rumble.
And let me just come back.
You mentioned that they were under great pressure to drop RT.
That's Russia today.
That's one of the state broadcasters in Putin's Russia.
And it's obviously propaganda, even more so, I think, than the CBC is Trudeau propaganda.
But still, they're not breaking any laws.
It's another point of view.
And I'm curious occasionally to see what RT has to say about things because I actually want to know what Putin's thinking, what he's worried about, what he's sensitive about.
You can sort of read, the same reason I occasionally look at Al Jazeera or Erdogan's state broadcaster, TRT.
It's a fascinating, you have to sort of reverse engineer, well, why would they publish this?
Like, I find it fascinating to see Al Jazeera attack fracking in Canada.
What does Al Jazeera care about fracking in Canada?
Well, think about it.
They're owned by the government of Qatar.
They don't like competitors for oil and gas.
So anyways, back to Rumble.
When France said, when a lot of Western powers, like governments, not just lobbyists or advocates said, kick off RT from your platform, here, I'll put it on the screen here.
The statement from Rumble was so bold.
And so, no, that's not who we are.
We're just not going to do that.
I thought if you can resist sovereign countries and NATO allies saying censor, you've got cojones.
And that's when I knew Rumble was for real, because that must have been the most difficult decision they ever made.
And not even from a financial perspective, because, first of all, I don't know any inside stuff.
So what I'm getting is from the news as well.
It's not even from a financial perspective.
It's not like France was the biggest market.
It's going to devastate them.
From Rumble's perspective, the issue is cutting off, what's the population of France?
Like 80 million people?
What's the population of France?
That sounds about right.
70, 80 million.
I mean, you're cutting off access through your own decision, and you feel a little guilty about that.
Now, there's VPNs and there's other ways of getting around it, but it was a question of principle that once you compromise politically uncensored free speech, it's not free speech to run out saying the N-word.
It's just we're not making politically motivated decisions as to who gets hurt and who doesn't.
They're cutting off an entire nation and the people of that nation.
That is the hard part, not the financial aspect of it.
But they set a standard and they didn't dig in their heels.
They just live by principles.
We're not doing it.
This is not how we do it.
And I mean, more power to them.
It's why I think the company is walking the walk.
Very exciting.
You know, I just want to say one more Rumble thing.
I literally didn't know until this interview that you were working with them, and I'm thrilled.
That moment where they didn't bend to a government request for censorship was a key moment for me.
And the second was the opposite moment.
It was when Cantor Fitzgerald, which is a major U.S. hedge fund, actually, they became famous in a very dark way when their offices were devastated on 9-11.
They were in one of the towers and they lost a tremendous amount of life.
But Canada Fitzgerald still exists.
It's a major U.S. hedge fund.
And I tell you that because they don't care about left-wing or right-wing.
They care about money.
And when they made a $400 million investment in Rumble, I thought these guys, this is not a passion project.
This is not out of love or friendship.
They really think that this is a goer.
Day One Vote Missed00:08:41
They think this is a real competitor and that what Rumble is doing is commercially valuable.
Having a free speech place is a winner in the market.
I thought that's proof because that's not just guys like you and me who go with our heart.
That's absolutely cold-blooded capitalists on Wall Street going with their pocketbooks.
So that was an exciting moment for me.
Well, and people were fearing that if Rumble goes public, they're going to be beholden to shareholders and they're going to go the same way of YouTube when people say we're going to pull advertising if you don't censor certain accounts.
I will say I was critical of Rumble, but we were, I was very transparent in my opinion of Rumble, where Robert Barnes and I during our weekly streams, before any business relationship with Rumble, we said that's not necessarily so much of a risk because a company that goes to, you know, goes to shareholders to say, we're going to be the politically neutral version of YouTube.
We're not going to censor and they go public, and that's the warranties and representations they make to their shareholders.
If they violate that, they expose themselves.
So, you know, they go public.
They're sticking to their principles.
They also own, they merged with locals.
So they have this other, you know, the Facebook behind a paywall.
It's just, it is, and they're expanding.
And they want to, you know, they want to get involved in other platforms as well.
It's a phenomenal thing.
I got to know Chris Pivloski through the vlogs I was doing covering lawsuits involving Rumble versus Google.
And then, you know, the organic relationship blossomed into the business relationship it has.
And lo and behold, I came down to Florida for a few years.
So it's fun, but I do miss the changing of the seasons.
I don't know what month this is.
I walk outside and it's sunny and hot every day of the week.
I miss winter.
I miss ice fishing.
I miss mountains.
I miss cold rivers.
But, you know, seeing kids live a normal life for kids, you know, I say makes it worth it.
Sounds like a cliche.
It's a necessity.
Well, and, you know, it's interesting.
So many people, I think about a half million people a year have been moving to Florida.
I think that actually may be one reason, not just why Ron DeSantis had a 19% margin of victory.
I think the largest ever for the Republicans in Florida, at least since Reconstruction times.
But I think it's also a reason why some other states, the Republicans, underperformed, because every freedom-oriented person who cared about the lockdowns, well, you put a million of them in Florida, you're taking a million votes away from New York and other sort of like New York came fairly close to electing a Republican governor in decades, actually.
But I think that all the New York Republican voters now down in Florida.
It's a joke in Florida that everybody's from New York.
I mean, I think it's the same joke in Texas.
Everyone's from California.
It's a joke.
Jersey, New York, you could hear the accents.
Well, I bet there's a lot of other Canadians too.
I mean, just again, our own company, we've got two people who left for Florida, and that's fine.
I bet there's a lot of people who could move did move.
There's a lot of, I see the snowbirds now, but look, the amazing thing from what I understood about Florida is that, you know, the rental trucks were coming in from California from across country, but not going back.
People vote with their feet, they vote with their dollar, they vote with their vote at the end of the day.
And, you know, Florida's growing, and it's just an amazing thing to see what's going on in Florida compared to what I see now going on in Canada.
You got Kieran Moore in Ontario talking about bringing back mask mandates.
It's like it's actual Einstein insanity of these alleged experts doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
And at this point, like I've gone maybe a little bit too cynical.
I just think it's about control.
It's about dominating a country, dominating a people, getting them to be perpetually fearful and subservient to the government.
You know, we've spent, I've enjoyed the last 20 minutes for our conversation.
I should tell you, I've gotten to literally nothing on my list here because it's so interesting, both the move to Florida and Rumble, which was news to me.
But I want to talk to you about what I think, and I don't think there's any doubt about it, was the news story of 2022 in Canada, namely the trucker convoy.
It was riveting.
The whole world was fascinated by Canada, which is not a sentence you hear very often.
Canada was a leader for freedom around the world.
Again, that's something you don't hear very often.
It was so clearly organic and authentic.
No political party backed them.
I mean, Maxime Bernier was supportive, but his party is very small and had no representation in parliament.
There was no funding.
In fact, they cut off almost $20 million worth of funding to it.
The government and the advocacy group starved it of funding, and yet it happened.
And it immediately had effects in the conservative movement.
It toppled Jason Kenney.
It toppled Aaron O'Toole and improved both those parties' stances on freedom.
It actually broke the fever that people thought, oh, everyone's in this together.
I thought I was the only one against it.
Like there was this false unanimity.
The truckers broke that.
They ended some of the vaccine mandates very shortly thereafter.
It forced Justin Trudeau to overplay his hand and led to the commission of inquiry.
There is no doubt about it in my mind.
That trucker convoy was not only the most important news story, the most important political story, it was actually the best thing to happen for freedom in Canada in decades.
That's what I think about it.
Now, I was only there for a few days.
So our team was there longer, but you were there.
You were live streaming.
Tell me about your time there.
So this is, it's an amazing thing.
You live through it and you understand it so much better in retrospect.
I'm doing my Viva on the streets when we were, I'm pretty sure we were under curfew at this time in Quebec.
And this is year two of the curfew.
Last year in 2021, it was five months plus.
This year, it was a little over a month.
And I'm doing Viva on the streets, walking up and down Green Avenue with my dog because I'm allowed out of the house with a dog after curfew because science.
And people in my, in the chat, people in the comments are saying, Viva, why aren't you paying attention to the convoy?
And I'm like, what convoy?
Because I'm in the news.
I'm not in the news.
I'm immersed in the news and I see nothing about it.
And then I start Googling it and I see, okay, there's a convoy protesting road conditions in British Columbia.
And it's like, what's the big deal, guys?
It's like, no, it's cross-country.
The media is covering it or downplaying it, ignoring it.
And I lived through this progression where they were 1,000% right.
This convoy was brewing.
They knew it.
People involved in the convoy knew it.
The media was deliberately ignoring it at first, then misdirecting to this convoy protesting road conditions in British Columbia.
Then it got so big they couldn't ignore it.
And they got right into demonizing it.
Racist, extremist truckers on their way to Ottawa.
And I remember I was in Florida for a Project Veritas event the weekend it first went down.
And everyone says, Viva, you got to get down here and see what's going on.
You won't believe what it's like in reality compared to the media because that first weekend, CBC, all these dishonest politicians, you know, referencing that Nazi flag, the Confederate flag.
And it was like, Viva, you got to get down and see what's going on because it's not what you see in the media.
And it's like, okay, we're going to do it.
I'm going down.
It's a new thing for me.
People have been doing it, but I'm going to live stream.
And if I see Nazi flags and if I see Confederate flags, if I see violence, misogyny, extremism, everyone else is going to see it in real time.
I'm not there to protect anybody.
I'm not there to filter anything.
And day one, I'm like, I see this.
I was like, holy cows.
I heard there were Nazi flags, Confederate flags.
People were defecating on the war memorial.
I get down there.
There are veterans shoveling the snow off the steps of the war memorial.
It's the happiest, most boisterous.
I wouldn't even call it a protest because it didn't feel like it was available.
It felt like a festival.
And at first, I was reluctant to give hugs and this and that.
And they're like, day one, I was like, this is madness.
People need to see what's going on.
And then I just stayed there.
I kept on going back.
I was driving, what is it, like 400 kilometers a day because I don't like sleeping away from the family.
So I drove in the morning, live streamed all day, went back, did it like for 14 days.
And I saw the progression from day one to the violent suppression of this protest.
Had no idea what it was going to turn into.
You know, day one, few thousand people watching live.
Day two, more.
At one point, we were over 50,000 people watching live.
On YouTube alone.
And some of these live streams, which are six hours long, half a million views.
And the world, or at least those who are watching, saw it.
Live Streams Revealed00:03:13
And they saw the degree to which we were being actively lied to by Canadian media, how the media was weaponizing children.
They accused the protesters of using children as human shields.
They were using children as political tools, as weaponizing children to say, if you don't get out of here, we're going to take your kids.
We saw what the media did.
And then we saw what the government did.
And Ezra, you said it was the most invigorating, encouraging thing that you'd ever seen.
It was for me too.
And I said, depending on how this ends, it's either going to end the way it should, or it's going to end with a boot to the neck.
And it's going to be a crushing suppression of the most organic, beautiful, peace-loving, tolerant protest we've ever seen.
And it was a boot to the neck.
And I would be lying if I said I'm not deeply, deeply angry and maybe jaded as a result of how it ended.
We'll see if part two with this commission ends properly with an admonishment of Justin Trudeau.
I'm now not so confident that's even going to happen.
We'll see in the end.
It's not over yet, but we're going to see if the bad guys win.
You know, I don't know if the admonishment from that judge will happen.
I think that the judge did a pretty good job given the restrictions on him, the time limits, the government stonewalling, delaying the release of things.
But let's say he does admonish the government.
That's the part that scares me because I think there's going to be a collective shrug and you're going to see the regime media who are all on the payroll.
And we saw during the commission of inquiry how the government was massaging and developing fake stories like about racism and this is our January 6th insurrection.
I think you're going to see the regime media say, ha, it was a big nothing burger.
Everything's fine.
And Trudeau will just put on his sexiest voice and say, well, we made the decisions at the time in good faith.
And like he'll just like the five times he's been convicted or however many under the Conflict of Interest Act, he doesn't care.
Well, he'll just skate.
Even if he's condemned, he'll skate.
Twice convicted, thrice accused.
No, well, that's, but that will be the, that will be the end of a lot of things, in my view, if it turns into a nothing burger or worse, Ezra, because I thought the judge did a great job during the six weeks.
I started listening to that commission when they were going on the policy discussions the week after, and then I started getting terrified.
I'm like, holy, holy crap.
They're actually entertaining ideas of taking lists of protesters who are there.
And then if they don't leave, freezing bank accounts as policy, as practice.
They're actually entertaining the idea that this was domestic terrorism.
They're entertaining notions which should be offensive to anybody who has the slightest degree of knowledge of what happened.
And the other proverbial black pill for me in all this is I know a lot of decent, intelligent, educated Canadians who are on board with what happened.
It's like, yeah, well, they shouldn't have done it.
Oh, yeah.
Go ahead.
You know, it's deeply, deeply discouraging, where there's a big portion of Canadian people who love freedom and just love, leave me alone.
And there's a great portion of Canadians who say, how many times do I need to vaccinate my kids before they can get their freedom back?
Yeah.
Canadian Content Censorship00:15:17
You know, in our boardroom here, we have on the wall a picture.
You probably know the one.
It's a sea of people seekiling Hitler.
And then there's one guy with his arms crossed in front of his chest.
His name is August Landmester.
And he was angry because he had a Jewish fiancé and he was barred from marrying her.
I've tried to learn a little bit about August Landmester.
I don't think he ended well.
Both him and his wife, of course, died.
She was killed in a concentration camp, and he was sent in a penal battalion and died on the battlefield.
But that picture is very famous, at least in social media, with the implication, be this guy.
And I think so many Canadians think that would be me.
I would be the one guy standing up for freedom.
I would be the one guy pointing to the mob and saying, you're wrong.
And I know you can be wrong, even if I'm all alone saying it.
But I think the country failed that test.
And we saw what people would have been like because the conformity.
And not just the conformity, but the act of participation.
You talked earlier about, you know, in stores, people would take it upon themselves to be mask enforcers, to be social distancing enforcers.
Maybe it was out of fear or out of I need to do the right thing, or maybe this magic ritual will save me from this magic death.
But people not only didn't stand for freedom, they were happy to rat out their neighbors and to hold themselves as more virtuous for it.
Our country failed that test.
Not everyone, but the country as a whole failed the test at wicked speed.
It was shocking.
I mean, when we put in the vaccine passports in Quebec, and I have to be very sensitive about the fact that it's very easy for me to get angry at an employee doing, just following orders because they don't want to lose their job.
But they were very eager to do it.
You know, in Alexis Neon food court, in an open space, asking for your passport to sit down so you can eat in the food court, asking for vaccine passports to get into the Canadian tire in the basement.
And lo and behold, the people that were being excluded disproportionately tended to be of a certain race, which were statistically under vaccinated, less likely to have gotten vaccinated.
I went to a Walmart on DeCarry, and I wanted to be a pain in the ass.
And I said, I'm not putting on a mask.
I'm going to the pharmacy.
And then the manager came and escorted me from the door to the pharmacy so I could get whatever I needed and I didn't need to get anything.
I bought a bottle of rubbing alcohol and then escorted me out.
And it became in Canada very quickly that it became virtuous and brave to follow the government orders.
It became virtuous and courageous to defer all critical thought to so-called experts, even if they were wrong, consistently, and even if they were visibly delusional.
Dina Hinshaw, who lied about the 14-year-old boy dying of COVID, Dina Hinshaw, who got up there disinfecting her hands, taking a mask off her face like she's carrying the plague.
These were the people that people thought it was virtuous and intelligent to defer to.
And it became extremely discouraging to me.
I won't say I've lost a lot of friends.
I never had that many friends in the first place, but I've seen people that I know who should be smarter just basically surrender critical thought in the hopes that the ritual will save them or that they'll get their rights back quicker if they do.
You know, in the book 1984 by George Orwell, Winston Smith's job, it's a strange job.
This was before the internet times.
It was to cut out newspaper articles from the archives and glue in or replace it with revised versions of what happened in the past.
So they were constantly changing which countries were at war with each other, what Big Brother said.
And that was Winston's job is so you could never even know the past.
Who controlled the past controlled the present, I think was one of their slogans.
That's how it was with the rules.
Oh, don't wear a mask.
Oh, do wear a mask.
And the thing is, they didn't even have to delete what they said before.
People willingly said, oh, no, we've always had to wear a mask.
Don't you know?
It never prevented.
We never said it would prevent transmission.
That's the one that, I mean, it blows my mind because people are just turning into useful idiots.
We never said it would prevent transmission.
I've got a tweet from Albert Burla, April 1st, 2021, 100% effective in preventing cases in South Africa in our study.
And then you get people saying, oh, he meant cases of hospitalization from severe COVID, or it doesn't prevent you getting coronavirus, but it prevents you from getting serious side effects.
No.
And people have convinced themselves they never lied to us in the first place because it makes it easier for them to live with the fact that they had been deceived.
But two weeks to flatten the curve.
It's only after the last two and a half years of actually interviewing people who I know are smarter than me where they, one person said, how is it two weeks to flatten the curve if you don't know what your start date is?
I was going back through my Twitter timeline just to see when I started getting wise to the madness.
It was when they locked the outdoor dog run.
And I was like, oh, I'm no, I don't need to be a doctor to know that this is idiotic.
Period.
Yeah.
Incredible.
And no one knows where the six foot thing came from.
Arbitrary.
Arbitrary.
In some countries, it was one meter.
In others, it was two.
And to have people with measuring tapes.
Oh, it's just, it's five foot, six inches.
Like there was some inspector in a barbershop literally with measuring tape between chairs as if, you know, if you sit in a restaurant, you don't need a mask.
You stand up, though, you need a mask.
I mean, the whole curfew idea, crazy.
Hey, listen, I want to ask you one last thing.
You've been very generous with your time, and I appreciate your points of view, but you sound like you're fairly engrossed with C11, which is the name of a bill, the government to regulate the internet.
And there's other companion legislation, C18.
I think that's called the Online Streaming Act.
And then there's an Online News Act.
And then there was another law called Bill C36 that I don't think has been reintroduced yet.
If I'm adding that upright, I think there's actually four bills, each of which has some degree of censorship in them.
And by the way, I don't think Justin Trudeau has four bills in parliament about inflation or about, you know, housing prices or about the war in Ukraine.
I think he's obsessed with regulating the internet, obsessed with censorship, especially of guys like you and Rebel News and others who are alternative media, especially because of the Trucker Convoy, by the way.
I mean, you just showed us you would have a half a million viewers on a live stream that by some standards was sort of boring.
You were walking around just showing things.
But people try to hide out.
Go ahead.
I know I can make things exciting.
I can make paint drawing exciting.
It was exciting, but it was long.
And there's no question.
It exposed something that media and the government did not want exposed.
W5 goes out and runs a hit piece on me.
And their biggest critique of me is that I provide information without a filter.
That's what you should be doing.
That's your job.
That's not what the word media actually means.
Media actually means you're the middle.
You pass things through.
You're not a blockage.
You're a passage.
I never thought about that.
That's actually very good.
But just to add to your, you know, he's obsessed with censorship.
Trudeau's obsessed with two things, disarming and censorship.
And it's one can connect those dots if one is so inclined.
But the disarming a populace, making them live in perpetual fear of each other, of unknowns, of a virus that if you stand up, it'll get you.
And then to go to censorship so that you don't have access to the rebel news, to the true north, to the viva fries.
It's not an accident, but someone can accuse me of being conspiratorial for trying to connect the dots of government trying to disarm, suppress, censor, and control an entire population.
C11, I read it.
I know it's been through debates and there may be some amendments to it.
I should probably freshen up my understanding of it.
It may have some amendments since I read it last.
I see that as the gateway for government regulation of the internet.
I see it as a starting pistol.
There are some provisions in it that are concerning to me, but the most concerning thing is what it permits to come later, including C18, C36, et cetera.
And they haven't yet introduced what they brainstormed two years ago called the online harms, which so they've got so many things waiting in the wings.
Why don't you tell me in plain language for our viewers the two or three worst things that you think will happen if these C11 and other censorship bills become law?
Now, my understanding is based on reading other people's opinions as well.
C11 is the, what is the word for what comes after?
It's the predecessor to C10, which died in the last legislative session.
The biggest things, it's going to regulate online accounts, individual social media accounts, if they're big enough, and subject them to the criteria of the Canada Broadcast Act in terms of Canadian content requirements, CanCon requirements, financial obligations, financial penalties.
It's going to require platforms like YouTube to potentially downgrade, upgrade, suppress exposure.
I mean, what we've seen with the Twitter censorship, it's going to do it as a matter of policy for Canadian content to ensure that the platforms that carry the content are in compliance with this law.
It's nothing shy of trying to give the leg back up to legacy media, which had this monopoly on radio and television, but lost their monopoly to gatekeeping because of the internet.
It is nothing but a disguised attempt to reestablish state-captured media as the gatekeepers to the internet.
I don't know what the impact would be on individual my content.
I don't know if it's mostly Canadian, but in as much as I was a Canadian content creator, I would presume most of it should be deemed Canadian content.
But the way these things are weaponized, it's undoubtedly, I joked at the time that it should have been called the rebel news bill because it is an attempt to penalize independent, not content creators, independent news outlets to give that advantage back to captured legacy media.
And the fact that they lied, and they did, they lied.
Gilbo, the Minister of Heritage, I think he is, lied when they said it's not going to go after your social media accounts.
That's why we're including this specific amendment that excludes social media accounts, which in the dead of night they remove.
And then they admit, yeah, it's not going to go after individual accounts unless you're big enough acting like a broadcaster.
And you say, like, well, what does that mean?
I don't know.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
We're not interested in that.
But they're interested in that.
It's just, it is the last level of censorship that will effectively prohibit.
It'll make impossible independent content creators to make content in Canada, which will result in them either leaving, which would be the win for the government, changing business, which would be the win for the government, and the government's going to suppress what Canadians can see that comes in from abroad.
Trudeau is turning Canada into China in real time, and too many people don't appreciate it.
Well, I might just join you yet in Boca Raton.
You know, you jokingly called it the rebel news law, but it really is.
I remember when we named our company, part of rebel was part of the word rebel was to rebel against the ideology of the dominant media.
Part was to rebel against the technology, the expensive cameras, the expensive studios.
But part of it was to rebel against the regulatory authority, which I believe is what killed Sun News Network.
I mean, they spent 40, 50 million bucks.
They weren't short of money, but they had regulatory problems with the CRTC.
So part of rebel news, what were we rebelling against?
The fact that the man could decide.
And we've had eight great years.
We turned eight years old in February.
And I truly think it's taken eight years for the regulatory state to say, hey, it's not just rebel news out there.
Look at this entire thriving world.
And they're not listening to us.
And how dare Viva Fry get half a million views of what's really going on?
We want them to Google Trucker Convoy and get something about road conditions.
And so I think they're coming to kill the internet.
There's no doubt in my mind.
They want to kill it or just take it over, which will be the same thing as killing it.
When CBC was saying protesters were dancing on the war memorial and peeing and pooping on it, and then I get there and I do a 360 live and there might have been coffee, which someone might have thought was urine, when they said the protesters were defiling the Terry Fox Memorial.
And I go there and do the 360 and the defiling consists of a Canadian flag in Terry Fox's hand.
I think Terry Fox would have been very proud of that.
I mean, when you have Zot, I mean, I don't know if you know who Zot was, another walking, talking live streamer of the convoy, Uttawa Scotty, Travel Fund 69.
You had, I'm saying nobody's, not in a derogatory debating sense, but people unknown to the media crushing the media in real time because they were doing nothing more than democratizing the access to information.
And that is what the Canadian media is absolutely not about.
They want the monopoly.
They want the framing.
They want to tell you what to think instead of giving the information so that you can come to your own conclusions.
Wow.
Well, listen, it's great to catch up with you.
Thank you for all this.
Tell our viewers again, I think a lot of our viewers know you, but just for those who don't, what are the best ways and best places for people to get their Viva Fry fix?
Well, if you want angry Viva Fry, it's Twitter at VivaFry.
Viva Fry is taken by another account, but VivaFry on Twitter, Rumble, YouTube, VivaFry, on this platform where I work with Robert Barnes, viva barnslaw.locals.com.
That's on locals.
And that's basically it.
But you Google Viva Fry, you're going to find some stories on the internet.
You'll find some stories and some tweets that have made their ways into recent articles.
But those are the best places to find it.
Well, that's great.
And we'll put links to those underneath this video for folks who want to go deeper.
Great to see you.
Thanks very much for doing this.
I'm sort of jealous that you're down there.
And God forbid things really go the way that they look like they're going.