Ezra Levant critiques media manipulation of Quebec’s Léger poll, where 51% oppose higher immigration despite editorial distortions, and warns of cultural dilution if Canada triples to 100 million. He ties Trudeau’s NATO spending gaffes, China pandering, and pandemic policies to Canada’s plummeting global reputation—now just 51% positive—while exposing a leaked Pentagon document confirming his failure to meet defense targets. On Twitter under Musk, Levant debates Yaccarino’s hiring, fearing censorship resurgence, but Chong defends Musk’s free-speech stance, citing transparency like Epstein memos. The episode shifts to property rights, contrasting private spaces (where owners like Notley can eject dissenters) with public sidewalks where removal is harder, and slams Western war rhetoric, arguing Ukraine-Russia conflicts would face more scrutiny if fought on U.S. soil while questioning stalled peace talks blocked by American interference. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm going to take you through a couple of opinion polls that you might find surprising, and then we have an interesting interview.
But before I get to that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this show.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month.
You get the video version.
I do the show every weekday.
Sheila Gunrid does a show behind the paywall every week.
But more than that, you get the satisfaction in knowing that you're supporting Rebel News because we don't take any money from the government and its shows.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, two opinion polls that the media party doesn't really like.
It's May 17th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Peter Thiel, the great Silicon Valley entrepreneur, one of the few conservatives in that city, which is why he left it, actually.
He had a question that he would ask in job interviews, and we often ask that same question in job interviews here at Rebel News.
This is an excerpt from Thiel's book called Zero to One, as summarized very well by Farnham Street Blog.
I've got the book, two copies of it, actually, but here's the succinct summary that I'll quote from on this treatment of it.
When Peter Thiel interviews someone, he likes to ask the following question: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
This question sounds easy because it's straightforward.
Actually, it's very hard to answer.
It's intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.
And it's psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular.
Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is even shorter supply than genius.
Isn't that true?
I'll just keep reading a little bit more because I love this.
The most common answers, according to Thiel, are our educational system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed.
America is exceptional.
There is no God.
These are bad answers.
The first and the second statements might be true, but many people already agree with them.
The third statement simply takes one side in a familiar debate.
A good answer takes the following form.
Most people believe in X, but the truth is the opposite of X. I'm going to come back to the news of the day in a moment, but let me read this insight.
And it's an insight into technology, which is where Peter Thiel is.
And it teals repeated entrepreneurial successes and to progress, but also to the field of ideas and politics, which is what we're concerned with here.
What does this contrarian question have to do with the future?
In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come.
We hope for progress when we think about the future.
To Teal, that progress takes place in two ways.
Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things at work, going from one to N. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like.
Vertical or intensive process means doing new things, going from zero to one.
Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.
If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress.
If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.
At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress is globalization, taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere.
The single word for vertical, zero-to-one progress, is technology.
Isn't that great thinking?
That is so true.
And when we interview people here at Rebel News, I'm, of course, interested in their background and if they have a resume.
Sure, I am.
They typically tell me that they went to school and what they studied.
That's interesting enough if they learn something real, especially a technical skill.
But if anyone has a general education, I'm interested more in their ability to think critically and not just to conform to a big bureaucracy, which is what a university or a college is.
I thought Jordan Peterson got it right when he talked about the real value of a fancy university education.
Sure, you're going to learn things.
Of course you are.
But it's really just a proxy for can you pass an entrance exam?
Can you follow rules for a few years and please assist them?
He says, and I think he's right, that the biggest value of going to university might actually be just finding a spouse that is socially and intellectually and economically headed in the same direction as you.
Here's Professor Peterson when he spoke about this last December at the Democracy Fund event.
So why pay $150,000 to go to university?
Well, how about to find a wife or a husband?
Right?
That might, just that alone, because you have a select pool then of people who are roughly your, say, intellectual and social peers.
The universities for a long time did a pretty good job of screening applicants, and so it might be worth $150,000 in four years if one of the things you accomplish between the ages of 18 and 22 is you meet the person you're going to spend the rest of your life with.
That's a big deal.
Well, it gives you four years to mature.
It gives you four years to learn how to be independent.
It gives you four years.
It allows you to purchase a socially sanctioned identity for four years that you have to make some sacrifices to maintain.
Let's say you have to go to class and study.
But while you're doing that, you can actually think a little bit.
You can learn to be a citizen.
You can contemplate your future.
You can experiment.
And you can all do that while you're becoming more mature and independent and looking for a partner.
And the universities do provide all of that.
Anyways, here at Rebel News, I want to know if someone has the courage to think differently, to be a contrarian, a non-conformist, not for technology reasons, but for idea reasons, to keep our democracy strong.
This was especially valuable during the pandemic, wasn't it?
When the entire world was saying the same thing, reading from the same talking points, it was very difficult and very valuable to be a dissenter and to be a dissenter in public.
How rare was that?
Being a Rebel News staffer, especially on camera, means saying unpopular truths every day.
To me, that's more valuable than someone telling me they got a degree in humanities from an Ivy League university.
In fact, your ability to get through four years of indoctrination and get a validation from that place after four years, get a degree, it actually plants some seeds of doubt in me.
Were you able to keep your own opinions through it all?
Were you able to stay true to yourself through it all?
Or did you just comply for compliance's sake?
Then it would impress me.
Contrarianism, individualism, freedom of thought, the right to dissent and make use of that right, that's valuable to me.
That's why I like Thiel's question.
Thanks for letting me tell you about that.
Of course, I have a dozen answers to that question myself, as you know.
I'm very contrarian.
But in Canada, in politics, what important truth do very few people agree with you on?
That's almost impossible for a politician to answer, isn't it?
Because by definition, if only a few people agree with you on it, you're not going to win in a, you know, first pass-the-post raw vote situation, which is what an election is.
But here's the trick, and it's something we've learned.
When the establishment tells you that very few people agree with you on something, they're often wrong.
Trudeau's Immigration Dilemma00:14:59
The media party may think everyone is in agreement about something.
Trump is evil.
We need more gun control.
Global warming is going to doom us.
They think everyone believes that.
Of course, you've got to take your booster shot.
But they're just talking in their own echo chamber.
Everyone they know says that, but that's just because they know a very closed loop.
In fact, in many ways, the media elites are the fringe minority they accuse us of being.
The Truckers proved that, didn't they?
They proved that millions of Canadians actually dissented.
They weren't happy with what was happening.
Do you know what issue is a double Peter Teal?
As in it's tough to say it in public for fear of being marginalized, but in fact, it's actually quite popular.
Well, mass open borders immigration and pumping the brakes on it.
That's the answer to the double Peter Teal.
Here, take a look at a new leger poll in the popular Journal de Montréal.
That's the largest selling newspaper in Quebec, actually.
Let me show it to you first en français.
This is how it appears on the website, Sandage.
That means opinion poll.
I'll click the translate on the page so you can read it in Google Translated English.
I mean, it's not a huge survey, but it's about immigration.
Survey, immigration target set by Ottawa.
Quebecers want to have their say.
But this is more than just a poll, but having a say or who gets to decide.
With all due respect to the initiative of the century lobby, a majority of Quebecers want to have a say on federal immigration thresholds before opening the doors of Canada-wide.
Now, that censury thing they're talking about, there's a crazy proposal to triple Canada's population to 100 million people, that's the century part, in just a couple of decades.
Why would you do that?
Why would you bring 60, 70 million people here to just do it?
Sure, Canada is the second largest country in the world, but most of it is uninhabitable.
Those migrants they're talking about, often from tropical countries, they are not going to live in Innevik.
And even if they wanted to, they couldn't.
It can't sustain it.
They're going to go to Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver and other big cities.
So imagine 20 million person metropolises, the majority of whom will have just arrived.
What a terrible idea in terms of housing and hospitals and schools and traffic and policing and cultural fit and jobs, everything.
It's just a crazy idea.
That's this censuring initiative thing.
And here's the reply of Quebecers.
Indeed, 73% of respondents to a recent Léger le Journal survey believe that Quebec should be consulted regarding the federal government's immigration targets.
The majority is confirmed as much among francophones, 78%, as among non-French speakers, 58%.
So Quebecers don't want some lobby group to make a decision.
They want to be asked about this decision.
But look at the question about raw numbers of immigration itself.
The issue of federal thresholds has come back in the news since the publication of our file on Ottawa's willingness to welcome 500,000 new permanent residents annually from 2025, double the number received in 2014.
However, only 22% of them want to raise the thresholds for Quebec.
By adding up the people in favor of the status quo, we still get 51% of respondents opposed to a decline.
Indeed, the idea of a decrease only gets the support of a minority with 41%, despite the many debates on the subject during the last election campaign.
Did you see that trickery there?
Did you see that trickery, though?
That's editorial commentary.
They're trying to fudge things.
Why did they add status quo people to the same chunk as people who want to raise immigration?
Why wouldn't they add it to the lower it and say 78% want the numbers the same or lower?
Obviously, to spin the fact that by a ratio of two to one, people prefer lower immigration to higher immigration.
Do you see the trick they did there?
They added the, oh, I don't knows to the, yeah, we want mores.
And they say, oh, it's a majority.
There's tricksters there, aren't they?
There are other points about Quebecer's desire that their immigration speak French.
Of course, they want that.
They want to preserve their cultural heritage.
I'm not sure it's possible to add 60 or 70 million people to Canada through immigration without swamping French as a language.
There are only 67 million people who live in all of France total.
You cannot bring in tens or 100 million people to Canada and expect French to have a future.
Just saying the obvious.
Like I say, Peter Thiel's question, what is a truth that few people agree on with you?
Well, reducing immigration is actually a demand by quite a few Canadians, including Quebecers, even if the Journal de Montréal doesn't believe so.
And for good reason, in the country of 100 million people, 8 million French speakers, which is approximately what there is now, that's a rounding era now.
It's not a founding nation anymore, is it?
Okay, I want to show you one more poll.
This one's in English.
It's by Angus Reed.
It's a different subject altogether.
Canada's global image, half of Canadians, believe nations' international reputation is on the decline.
Now, before I go further, in some ways, I don't really care what other people in the world think about Canada.
This isn't high school where you want to be popular to fit in.
We are who we are.
We're a country.
That said, if our friends and allies think less of us, it behooves us to ask why.
And if our enemies like us more, we should ask why also.
Why would we want dictatorships like China to praise us?
Here I'll read the preamble to the Angus Reed press release.
A cache of leaked Pentagon documents recently confirmed a secret that many have suspected for years as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reportedly admitted that Canada is unlikely to ever meet the 2% military defense spending target recommended by NATO.
Amid this, a new study from the nonprofit Angus Reed Institute finds Canadians less enthusiastic about their perception of the country's international reputation than they have been in recent years.
Half of Canadians, 51%, say Canada has a good or very good reputation abroad, while one quarter say it is poor or very poor, and one quarter say it is average.
Notably, there has been a 33% point drop since 2018 in the proportion offering a positive view.
That's incredible.
I remember when Canadians were amongst the best loved people in the world.
In fact, some Americans used to sew a little Canadian maple leaf on their backpacks when they traveled through Europe.
Not sure if that's happening anymore.
Not sure Canadians as citizens are disliked.
I don't think we are.
But our government, especially Trudeau, is giving us a bad reputation.
It's sometimes shocking to see it.
But whether it's the New York Post or the Daily Mail of London, England, or the European Parliament, a lot of people see right through Trudeau.
And unlike our mainstream media, they're not afraid to say it.
And I think it's shocking because we're so used to apologies from the media party.
We're shocked to see things like this.
That it would have been more appropriate for Mr. Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, to address this House according to Article 144, an article which was specifically designed to debate violations of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, which is clearly the case with Mr. Trubert Trudeau.
Then again, a prime minister who openly admires the Chinese basic dictatorship, who tramples on fundamental rights by persecuting and criminalizing his own citizens as terrorists just because they dared to stand up to his perverted concept of democracy should not be allowed to speak in this house at all.
Mr. Trudeau, you are a disgrace for any democracy.
Please spare us your presence.
Thank you.
All right, back to the Angus Reid survey.
Let me read a little more.
Let's start with a pretty basic question, pretty easy one here.
Overall, what kind of reputation would you say Canada has internationally?
It's an easy question.
As you can see, the question was asked in 2016, 2018, 2020, last year, again, just this month.
Until a few years ago, it was steady.
In fact, it briefly went up in Trudeau's first term.
Canadians, I guess, were feeling pretty good about themselves.
Our belief in our world reputation actually climbed a bit from 79% to 84%.
Then Trudeau's obsequious dealings with communist China took hold.
His mocking insults to India.
His general buffoonery started to get noticed.
Blackface.
And of course, his inner tyrant shone through during the pandemic.
The lockdowns and the banana republic-style martial law invocation.
That was spooky to a lot of people.
Look at that, from 71% to 62%, plunging to just 51% this year, saying we have a strong international reputation.
They're right.
Trudeau is deluding himself.
He only goes to tightly scripted, tightly controlled events where people are curated to love him.
But real people see through him, both at home and abroad.
Let me show you one more graph.
Look at this one.
All things considered, do you think Canada's reputation around the world is better or worse now than it was?
And then they check different times, 10 years ago, last year, whatever.
Massive, massive.
That red line is the people who say it's gotten worse.
That blue sliver is better.
Only 7% of people think it's gotten better over the last year.
That is crazy.
Here's another image here.
Even liberals aren't exactly thrilled with Trudeau's reputation abroad.
That's amazing.
But people are starting to see through Justin Trudeau.
But not just through Trudeau.
Through him and his media courtiers who decide what we can and can't talk about or can and can't even think.
Canadians are embarrassed by Trudeau's international antics, not impressed by them.
And Trudeau's plan to triple Canada's size through mass open borders immigration is unpopular, including with other new immigrants, and especially in French Quebec.
I wonder if Pierre Polyev will ever find the courage to talk about these things.
Stay with us for more.
Well, Twitter has been in the news.
It always is in the news, and it is the news itself, but never more so since Elon Musk took it over, removed thousands of deadweight staffers, many of whom were in content moderation and other euphemisms for censorship.
And in the process, Elon Musk has become an even more avid Twitter user himself.
And he sometimes says the most amusing or entertaining or provocative things in just a few words.
I mean, just today, Soros reminds me of Magneto.
That's just so funny.
And it tweaks the nose of George Soros, and it's a reference to pop culture, and it's apropos of nothing.
Are you not entertained?
Well, that is one of the purposes of Twitter.
Information is another.
And, of course, Elon Musk has plans to turn it into an important commercial app.
He seeks to expand its utility beyond just political chat and sports and entertainment.
He wants to make it like some Chinese apps like WeChat, WePay, where there's so many other functionalities there.
It truly becomes an everything app.
We'll see how he does it.
One of the things he did is he finally hired a new CEO that is not himself or his dog.
Linda Yaccarino is her name.
And immediately, people on Twitter who were concerned with the restoration of a censorship elite found that she was active at the World Economic Forum and had talked about content moderation before.
Was Elon Musk really going to go back to that way?
Well, joining us now to talk about it is a man who knows Elon Musk better than most.
He is an extremely online guy.
You can follow him on Twitter at stillgray, G-R-A-Y.
His name is Ian Miles Chong, and he works with Rebel News.
Great to see you again, Ian.
Thanks for joining us.
Happy to be here.
Happy to be here.
Well, I think Elon Musk is the world's most interesting man, and he is an outstanding entrepreneur and industrialist, but he's a very clever thinker.
And so help me understand his thinking behind hiring the new Twitter CEO.
Some people are worried that she is a retrenchment of the old, you know, elites know best, you can't say mean things censorship squad.
What is your take on it?
So my take on it is, well, first of all, don't worry, right?
Because she may be CEO, but her job title doesn't matter because at the end of the day, his job title is owner.
And so the reason he hired her is because of her wealth of experience in the advertising industry.
She was responsible for building NBC's Peacock online streaming service where she got a bunch of advertisers for them.
So clearly she knows the people who can monetize Twitter.
And bear in mind, Twitter cannot survive without advertisers as much as, you know, as nice, I said a deal as it would be for Twitter to simply survive on its own.
It can't, right?
We live in a world in which Twitter needs money to survive and advertising is the only way to do it.
And, you know, she knows her stuff, right?
I think her track record proves that.
So he doesn't have to deal with advertisers.
And furthermore, and this is probably more important, he doesn't have to travel down to Washington, D.C. to meet with the regulators every week because that certainly takes up a lot of his time.
And his job as a CTO, which is chief technical officer, will allow him to work on Twitter as a product, meaning, you know, bringing new features, tweaking the algorithm, things that, you know, the CEO doesn't really have a say in.
So keep in mind that Twitter is a tech company, first and foremost.
So the CTO typically in all these companies has more power than a CEO who, in this case, is only responsible for advertising and for dealing with regulators.
So I wouldn't worry too much about it.
The policy at the end of the day is still dictated by Elon Musk and his commitment to free speech appears to be unwavering.
And I think you can see that in his tweets about George Soros.
As inflammatory as they may be to some people, he's willing to say them.
And if this were any other platform, I don't think you'd be even allowed to criticize George Soros.
I think you're probably right.
And more seriously, there is an election in Turkey right now, and it is heavily contested.
Turkey is an authoritarian regime and a democracy at the same time and a NATO ally.
Elon Musk's Commitment to Free Speech00:11:53
It's a very unusual place.
And they have been telling Twitter to censor hundreds of tweets that are critical of the regime.
Twitter must comply with the local laws in every country in which it is situated.
That's why it doesn't operate in some countries like China.
But that's why in other countries like Germany, it takes down certain Nazi material that it wouldn't in another jurisdiction.
To his credit, Elon Musk has fought back against many of these Turkish censorship actions, including in court.
And they published a variety of these fights.
I think that's a sign of dedication to freedom of speech.
But we'll know.
I mean, we will know soon enough if the people who were revived by Elon Musk after having been suspended are re-suspended.
I think that's the canary in the coal mine.
Simply that someone worked for the mainstream media or the regime media before.
I don't think that's on its face a disqualification.
If so, you would never hire anyone with any experience.
I mean, if you're the head of ads at NBC Universal, you know ads and you know all the biggest brands.
And it's not actually surprising that you went to the World Economic Forum where the other titans of the universe are.
So I'm going to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, Elon, when he hires her.
And I'm going to notice that she actually served on a Donald Trump council.
I think it was on sports or something.
Yeah, the Fitness Council.
Yeah, the Fitness Council.
And, you know, that may not be politically spicy, but doing anything in association with Donald Trump when he was president was a black mark against a liberal, especially in California.
So if she were to have done that, I think that shows some independence of mind and some nonpartisanship.
To me, that's actually proof of her contrariness that she was able to be on a Trump council despite the fact that Hollywood hates him.
What do you think?
Yeah, more importantly, she follows me on Twitter.
And she follows lips of TikTok.
She follows Jack Bisobic.
I mean, these are accounts that by all, you know, well, by the left's measure would be considered far-right.
Now, granted, we're not far right, but the fact that she's willing to step out of the boundaries that they've locked her in, you know, she is a member of the establishment after all, shows that, you know, she's willing to leave her echo chamber.
And that makes her very interesting as a person, right?
I mean, how often do you see an establishment figure even speaking to a member of the conservatives, right?
I mean, they just don't do that.
But she's willing to do it.
And looking at her Twitter account, I can see that she is actually a conservative.
So I think that people are fine to criticize her and they're fine to be apprehensive of her.
But I would say give her a chance.
And obviously, if things don't work out, then Elon can always fire her.
So there's always that.
It's not like she owns the company.
Yeah, I agree with you on all those things.
And she may be following you and Jack Pisobic and Libs of TikTok to know, not so much out of personal interest, but to know where Elon Musk's lines are.
Because if he has interacted with those accounts and if he supports those accounts, that way she can, okay, so what's the four corners of acceptable discourse according to the boss?
Following those accounts shows that she's, even if she doesn't believe them herself, she at least is very attentive to what the boss thinks on censorship.
So I didn't know those details, but I'm encouraged to hear it.
Well, here's the thing that worries me the most is that when you tweak the nose of George Soros, it was just a joke comparing to Magneto.
It's not that interesting.
But boy, he says tough things about issues that you're not supposed to.
I mean, the man donated $100 million worth of internet to Ukraine, but he criticized some Ukraine policies.
He's sworn at by some foreign minister, defense minister of Ukraine.
You're not allowed to dissent from the military industrial complex there.
He did.
He's skeptical of so many sacred cows from transgenderism, as we talked about, to even climate extremism, even though he's in a green company.
The guy, I think he's hostile to the deep state.
And more importantly, he recognizes the deep state.
He even, he says its name.
And so here's my worry, Ian.
I don't care how rich, powerful you are, you are still vulnerable, God forbid, to whether it's, I shouldn't even say it, assassination, I shouldn't say that, but it's a possibility to blackmail, to extortion, to some, like you, It is very difficult to fight the kind of titans who are on the other side.
As I think it was Joe Biden who said, don't fight with the deep state.
They'll get you six different ways.
Or maybe that was Obama who said that.
I can't remember.
That's one of the stuff.
You fight against the CIA, the FBI.
You fight against the big censors.
They're going to get their vengeance.
I'm worried that they might come from in one way.
And one way is to try and implicate him in, for example, the Jeffrey Epstein matter.
Tell me a little bit about that subpoena and what you make of it.
They're trying to subpoena Elon Musk about Jeffrey Epstein.
What's that all about?
Yeah, I mean, it's not super clear what the subpoena is about, but it's the U.S. Virgin Islands.
So it's not the U.S. as a whole.
Clearly, they want attention to their case, and they're going after JP Morgan because JP Morgan allegedly financed Jeffrey Epstein and helped to cover up some of his misdeeds.
And I guess the subpoena for Elon Musk is because they claim that Jeffrey Epstein helped put Elon in touch with JP Morgan.
I mean, it's patently ridiculous.
I mean, if we just, you can just read news articles showing that JP Morgan had invested in Tesla two decades ago, right, in the 2000s.
They didn't need to go through.
I mean, he didn't need to go through Jeffrey Epstein to get in touch with JP Morgan.
They're just a phone call away.
It's complete nonsense.
And he himself responded to the reports on Twitter in which he said that Cretan, referring to Jeffrey Epstein, never advised me on anything whatsoever.
The notion that I would need or listen to financial advice from a dumb crook is absurd.
Yeah, I mean, this is a Titan of industry.
He doesn't need to listen to Jeffrey Epstein, who wasn't a Titan of anything.
He was, if anything, a con artist.
And, you know, in addition to being a predatory criminal.
And finally, JP Morgan let Tesla down years ago, down 10 years ago, despite having Tesla's global commercial banking business, which we then withdrew.
I have never forgiven them.
So clearly, he has no ties to either Epstein or JP Morgan at this point.
So it is quite unclear why they would subpoena Elon Musk.
It seems to me to be political in nature, or maybe just to draw attention to the case, because no one seems to be super interested in finding out, you know, what happened with Epstein.
Where's the list?
I mean, if anything, Elon Musk is the one, you know, shouting from the rooftops, saying, release the list, release the list of the Epstein names.
And yet they're not releasing those names.
We have the names.
You occasionally see snippets of it in the Wall Street Journal, but give us a full list.
I mean, I think that's important.
If you're really interested in going after these people, do that.
The Wall Street Journal has done some important reporting lately showing a connection between JP Morgan and Epstein, but the connection to Elon Musk is a laugh.
The subpoena refers, it says that Epstein, quote, may have referred or attempted to refer Musk as a client to J.P. Morgan, as you say.
There's no factual basis for that.
I think there's two things afoot.
Elon Musk is newsworthy.
It's like saying Kim Kardashian five years ago.
I mean, you say the name Elon Musk and you're going to get some media attention, including from him, which happened.
He responded to it.
So you're going to get some attention on a case that may not otherwise.
And second of all, this goes to my fear, they're going to take this guy down.
And who knows?
I mean, I don't know him personally.
I know he has different kids by different moms.
I know he flies around.
I know he's got so much money.
There's got to be schemers and scammers around him all the time.
You know, I'm sure his conversations are tapped not just by world governments, but by rival companies.
I mean, it must be very difficult to have any privacy if you're him.
And my chief worry about Elon Musk is they're going to get to him in some non-business way.
And I hope that doesn't happen because I think he has so much good to do, not just for the world as an industrialist and a wealth creator.
But I actually, and maybe I sound naive for this, I actually believe him when he says he cares about humanity and the importance of freedom of speech.
Maybe I'm just a sucker, but I believe in him.
I like him.
Last word to you, Ian, because I think you I wouldn't say you're close to him, but you talk to the guy, you interact with him, you communicate with them, which is something I think a lot of people wish they could do.
What's your sense of the man as a man?
Have you had enough dealings with him to come to form some mental image of him?
I would say so.
I would say that he is who he presents himself on the internet.
Most people don't.
I mean, well, maybe not most people, but many people put up a facade of themselves.
They want the world to think that they're something when they're really something else in private.
Elon Musk doesn't strike me that way.
He strikes me as an honest man, and I think he can't afford to be dishonest, right?
Because he knows that he's being botched all the time.
And so, and this is Elon, his entire life, where you can read him.
I mean, he's as transparent as a book, basically.
You can flip through the pages and recognize that he is who he says he is.
He is who he presents himself as.
I don't think he tries to be anything different.
I don't think he tries to manipulate the public.
And I think truth, if anything, is his highest priority.
And that's commendable, if anything.
More people, more businessmen in particular, could stand to be like Elon Musk and be more sincere in the way they present themselves to the public because he's got nothing to hide.
This is a man who is who he says he is.
That's my read on it.
And I think you can quite clearly see that in his interactions online, where he will simply say the quiet part out loud, even if it's unpopular, even if it gives him a lot of flack.
Calling George Soros, you know, Magneto has certainly earned him a lot of attacks today.
And so, you know, the fact that he's willing to say that tells you a lot about him.
He's not political.
He's not playing a game with people.
Yeah, well, to me, there were a few moments of truth.
One of them was he bought Twitter, and then he very promptly released internal memos that were embarrassing to Twitter about how they corrupted the process and how they were pawns of foreign and domestic intelligence agencies.
He released embarrassing things about his own company that he just bought.
Who does that other than a guy who actually believes in transparency?
Well, listen, I hope you're right.
And I think you're right.
And in the meantime, it's a hell of a show along the way.
Ian, great to catch up with you.
Thanks for taking the time.
And we'll keep following you at Stillgrave, S-T-I-L-L-G-R-A-Y on Twitter.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me on Rachel Notley kicking out Kian Bexti from a press conference.
Frosty Knight says, if the owner asks you to leave property, then you have to leave.
I am not a supporter of any of the main parties, but I do support private property rights.
I agree with you, and I'm not sure if you saw my conversation with Adam Sos and Sheila Gunread on the live stream the other day.
Property Rights in Conflict00:03:41
Here at Rebel News, our rule is if you're on private property, you know, conduct yourself in a good manner.
But if you are asked to leave, you have to leave.
You don't have to run off, but you have to leave at a reasonable pace.
That's our rule of thumb here at Rebel News.
It's very different if you're in a public place, like let's say outside City Hall or on a sidewalk.
Then hold your ground.
There's very few rules that allow authorities to kick you off a public sidewalk, for example.
In this case, Kian Becksty said he was invited there, and he argued with the NDP official for a while.
I agree with you that when the property owner told him to get out, he should have got out.
And that would have been what rebels would have done.
In the end, police did kick him out.
But I think he made the point that Rachel Notley is extremely intolerant to journalists she doesn't like.
Someone with a nickname Three Crack Cheeks says, Russia and Ukraine are like two fighting motorcycle gangs.
Both sides are odious and cannot be trusted, and there will be many innocent victims.
All the billions sent there by the West will simply vanish into this black hole of a war.
What a mess.
I want to distinguish between the government and the people.
I think this is an absolute human disaster.
It is a tragedy.
We know from leaked information that over 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers alone have died.
That's just soldiers.
I've got to think the civilian casualties are similar.
Russian casualties are smaller, and I would imagine that their civilian casualties are very close to zero because the fighting is being done in Ukraine.
But what really irks me is when armchair generals in the West talk about fighting to the last Ukrainian.
They never say that out loud, but that's really what they mean.
When I saw that clip of the U.S. spokesman saying they are absolutely, adamantly against a ceasefire, I thought, you wouldn't be saying that if the battlefield was somewhere in America.
I found that deeply depressing.
I hope that war ends.
Of course, I want it to end justly, but after a certain point in time, the losses are so massive.
You should at least sue for peace, don't you think?
Someone with a nickname Enoch was right says the failed comedian knows his time is up.
Ukraine is losing approximately 800 men every single day.
That's why this supposed spring offensive has been delayed repeatedly.
Their military has been completely gutted.
The Donbass is firmly in Russia's hands, which is what the majority of the people living there want.
Look, I don't know about those statistics if it's true that 100,000 people, soldiers have died on the Ukrainian side, given that the war has been going on for about 14 or 15 months.
You can do the math on that.
I think your number is a little bit high.
I think that there are countries that want to broker a peace deal.
From what we heard from Israel's former prime minister, Ukraine and Russia came close to a deal, but America vetoed it.
That's what the former prime minister actually said.
We know that countries like Hungary have proposed, which are pro-Ukraine, have proposed a diplomatic settlement, and so have old foreign policy hands like Henry Kissinger himself.
I just am frustrated by the fact that there doesn't seem to be a diplomatic track at all.
And if the desired effect is to grind down Russia's military, all right, mission is being accomplished, but at what cost in human life, especially civilian human life?