Ezra Levant returns after surgery, warning free speech’s recent gains—like Elon Musk reviving banned Twitter accounts such as What Is A Woman?—face EU backlash under the Digital Services Act (DSA), with fines up to 6% of global revenue or service blocks. He and Mark Morano critique Ireland’s cattle culling, France’s flight ban, and Germany’s 90% meat reduction, linking them to Bill Gates’ synthetic meat push and WHO/UN net-zero agendas, mirroring historical famines like the Holodomor. These policies, they argue, prioritize ideological control over practical solutions, risking economic collapse and corporate dominance while eroding liberties. [Automatically generated summary]
Special thanks to my colleagues who filled in for me while I was away.
Today, we've got a great show.
We're going to talk about freedom of speech.
We're going to talk about the Daily Wire and Twitter and Elon Musk and calls for censorship in Europe and Canada.
I've got some news to share with you.
And then we're going to interview Mark Morano about a crazy scheme to kill hundreds of thousands of cattle in the name of climate action.
It's outrageous.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's our video version of this podcast.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe, it's eight bucks a month.
And in addition to getting that video content, you support Rebel News because we don't take any money from the government and it shows.
All right.
Here's today's broadcast.
Tonight, free speech has had a good few months, but now the empire is striking back.
It's June 5th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious thug.
Hey, it is great to be back in the studio.
I apologize for being away so long.
I don't want to get into the details, but I had an elective medical surgery, and I was fine in a couple of days, but my face was not presentable.
And I'm not particularly vain.
I just didn't want to come back on the show looking all like a chipmunk.
But I'm in fine form now, if I do say so myself, or at least good enough.
And it's nice to be here.
And I really appreciate the whole team filling in for me when I was away.
So great to be back.
And it is my goal to be here as often as possible.
Sometimes I have to travel.
Once in a while, there's a family event that pulls me away.
But mainly these past months, I've just had to go for some elective medical events, but nothing to be worried about.
I want to talk to you about my favorite subject that I know is important to you because it's an existential issue for our company, but it's an issue of deep principle for our country.
Talking of freedom of speech, I was sort of blackpilled on the subject, as the kids say.
I felt like we were doomed, that all of the controls were held by the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world who are slowly bringing us towards a kind of matrix involvement like the old movie.
But then Elon Musk surprised everyone, shocked people, and bought Twitter for $44 billion of his own money.
Took it private.
And not only did he reveal the censorship secrets of the past, but he revived people who had been doomed and banned for life.
He really turned back the hands of time to a freer era and exposed the wrongdoing that his company had done.
Binary Non-Binary00:04:49
I've never seen anything like it.
He's obviously been targeted for that by the political class that now demonizes him.
And a lot of people who care about free speech have been dipping their toe back in the pool after having writing off Twitter.
Tucker Carlson, for example, has done one monologue since leaving Fox News, and it wasn't on YouTube or even on Rumble.
He put it on Twitter.
And the Daily Wire put Elon Musk's belief in freedom to the test, too.
You might know that Daily Wire had a very successful documentary film.
I call it a documentary with a comedic edge.
It wasn't meant to be funny.
It was Matt Walsh asking the absurdly childlike question, What is a woman?
Just to remind you what the movie's like, here's a clip from their trailer.
I love this scene in Africa where Matt Walsh is trying to use Western language about transitioning and binary, non-binary genders.
And it barely makes sense in English and trying to translate that into an African language.
I'm not sure which.
You hear the chuckling.
Here, watch this.
This gives you a flavor for the film.
What if a man decides that his gender identity is woman?
A woman has its own duty, and a man has its own duty, and a lady cannot do the duty of a man, and a man cannot do the duty of a woman.
Can a man become a woman?
No.
No?
No.
What about a transgender?
Transgender?
No.
No?
It looks like if you want to become a lady but you're a man, you have something wrong, something wrong.
Something wrong in your family, something wrong in you.
What about if someone was non-binary?
Non-binary?
Do you know?
Like non-binary.
Like someone is.
You're not a woman, you're not a man.
Yeah, someone's like, someone is neither.
There's something else.
He's saying we have never seen things like those.
For a man, he has a penis, for a woman, he has a vagina.
So we know this is a lady, this is a man.
What if it's a woman with a woman with a penis?
What?
Zegura.
Kedemane beagering grow.
Entaboh.
People are laughing.
Is that...
Is that a dumb question?
I want to show you the contrast between those very real men in Africa and these absolutely absurd professors in the West.
And Matt Walsh is not a trickster.
He doesn't engage in any verbal sleight of hand.
He's not trapping people.
He's just asking that extremely blunt question: what is a woman here?
Just watch a clip from when Matt Walsh goes from talking to severely normal people in Africa to severely craze people in the West.
Sometimes there are things so stupid you need a PhD to believe them.
Take a look at this.
A woman is not anything in particular.
There is not one particular thing.
It could be many things to many people.
Some women have penises, right?
Some men have vaginas.
I like scented candles.
I've watched Sex in the City.
Yeah.
How do I know if I'm a woman?
That's a great question.
So, what is a woman?
Why do you ask that question?
I'd just really like to know.
What do you think the answer to that question is?
Well, I'm asking.
That's why I came to a college professor who's this is your kinds of answers.
Have you gotten a lot of like this, where you're where you're not answering?
And I've gotten a lot of that.
So I think it's interesting that you that you say that some of the people you've you've um interviewed have been um reluctant to answer it, and I think that has a lot to do with the way, the questions that preceded it and the the way that you've conducted yourself in the interview.
Those are outtakes from the larger movie What Is A Woman?
Twitter Chooses Confrontation00:14:42
And Daily Wire made the decision to air the movie in full on Twitter.
Now, Twitter is taking full movie-length videos.
So this was a dramatic moment for Twitter to have a feature-length film put up on it of that caliber.
And also a big statement from Daily Wire about their belief in freedom.
Because remember, one of the most dangerous censorship hot buttons on Twitter for years was the transgender issue.
If you misgender someone, that is call someone who was born a man and then transitions to be a woman, if you call them a man, if you call them the gender they say they are not, that is such a serious offense, you can have your account suspended.
If you also dead name someone, which is use the name their mother gave them as opposed to whatever adopted trans name they've taken on, that was the harshest censorship in all of Twitter, more even than, I don't know, vaccine skepticism.
And so imagine taking a film called What is a Woman and putting that on Twitter that used to turn off your account if you just misgendered someone.
This was quite a moment.
And for the first little while, it looked like Twitter was failing.
When the movie was rolled out on Twitter, it was immediately appended with a warning that it was hate speech and it was throttled.
It was not allowed to trend.
It was only being shown to people that were registered followers of the Daily Wire account.
It couldn't go to people outside of that.
By definition, it could not go viral.
It was high drama.
Matt Walsh and other leaders of the Daily Wire and Jordan Peterson was down in their head office too.
They were tweeting about this.
They weren't abandoning hope that Elon Musk would save things.
They were saying, what's going on?
This is exactly the opposite about what Elon Musk said.
And all the free speechnicks on Twitter in unison said, hey, Elon Musk, this is the opposite of what you wanted.
You just dropped $44 billion on Twitter.
Why are you letting it be the same?
Elon Musk looked into it.
You could see him operating in real time.
And by the end of the day, mere hours later, in a very dramatic day, all the throttling was removed from the tweet.
It was allowed to go viral, not just viral, but super viral.
And in fact, at the end of the day, Elon Musk himself weighed in saying that every parent should watch it.
So it went from something that was being banned, throttled, defamed as hate speech, to one of the most viral tweets of all time that the proprietor of Twitter himself said everyone should watch.
There were a couple of staff exits over this kerfuffle, but I don't think Elon Musk cares much about that.
Last I checked, more than 150 million views of that movie.
And think about that.
That would be more views than almost any box office Smash of the year.
Of course, it's a global number, but just a staggering, staggering success, one of the most watched films in the world.
And I think it would have been successful in any event.
But the fact that they targeted for censorship and they fought and won, well, that's what they call the Streisand effect.
If you know that old story, someone was taking photos of beachfront properties in Malibu and in passing captured Barbara Streisand's house.
No one knew it.
No one was clicking on it.
But when she took the photographer to court, all of a sudden everyone wanted to see what all the fuss about.
And thousands and thousands of people watched the photo, whereas I think the number was only three who had looked at it before.
That's called the Streisand effect.
And I think that's exactly what happened here.
I have no doubt that had Twitter allowed it to go viral in the first place, it would have had 5 million, maybe 10 million views, no doubt about it.
Maybe it would have had 20 million views, like our viral video of the Pfizer CEO when Aviamini and I were walking with him in Switzerland.
But to get almost 10 times that number is just so stunning and an enormous success to the Daily Wire and for free speech.
Such an important battle fought and won.
Well, not everyone is impressed.
You know, there's a voluntary European censorship group.
Well, of course, it's voluntary.
You'd better volunteer for it or else.
Well, Twitter announced that it's going to be leaving.
At least that's what this report says.
And here's the European Union Commissioner, Vera Jurova, said Twitter's compliance with the new Digital Services Act entering force on August 25th will be scrutinized vigorously and earnestly.
Good morning, everyone.
Welcome to this press quantum at Vice President Vera Jorova.
We believe this is a mistake of Twitter.
Twitter has chosen the hard way.
They chose confrontation.
This was noticed very much in the Commission, and I know the code is voluntary.
But make no mistake, by leaving the code, Twitter has attracted a lot of attention, and its actions and compliance with EU law will be scrutinized vigorously and urgently.
Now, Vera is a Czech bureaucrat, and she was elected by no one to the European Union.
She grew up under communist censorship, but now she does it for the EU, not the USSR.
Same difference, though, but at least the USSR didn't claim to be able to censor American media companies.
Very interesting to me.
Here's a story in Behrens.
Twitter chose confrontation on EU disinformation code.
Twitter chose confrontation by exiting a voluntary EU disinformation code of practice that lays ground rules for an incoming European law on digital services.
A European Union Commissioner said Monday.
We believe this is a mistake of Twitter.
Twitter has chosen the hard way.
They chose confrontation, Commissioner Vera Jurova told journalists.
She said Twitter's compliance with the new Digital Services Act entering force on August 25th will be scrutinized vigorously and urgently.
The European Commission announced May 27th that Twitter had decided to leave the code of practice, to which other major online platforms such as Google, Microsoft, and TikTok continue to adhere.
The voluntary pact, which was launched in 2018 and strengthened last year with input from industry players, contains over three dozen pledges, such as better cooperation with fact checkers and not promoting actors that distribute disinformation.
It serves as a test feeder to the DSA, which will impose legal obligations on big platforms and impose penalties that could go up to 6% of a company's global revenues in case of violation.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, it has cut more than 80% of the workforce and got rid of many moderators who vetted content for disinformation and harmful messages.
Let me read a little bit more.
Jurova said, I can't predict what conclusions the Commission might make about Twitter's possible distribution of disinformation once the DSA comes into force.
But she said that signatories in the code of practice would have an easier situation because they would already have cleared the burden of proof.
There is an interplay between the code of practice, which is a voluntary agreement, and the Digital Services Act, which is enforceable.
In other words, we're going to go a lot hard on you.
There's no rule of law here.
This is Europe.
I would like to give Twitter the chance to defend the right to make business in Europe without any sanction, she said.
That's what she thinks is in question.
Not the right of European people to speak on Twitter or listen on Twitter.
She's not interested in those rights.
Just her right to stop Twitter.
So they're in trouble.
I wonder what they make of the Daily Wires movie.
Here's the Wall Street Journal story on the war against Twitter.
Twitter to face stress tests this month, top EU tech regulator says during Silicon Valley tour.
EU team will review social media platforms' content moderation to measure compliance with new law.
So this is just another take on the same story.
The first was from the Association France-Presse, and this is from the Wall Street Journal.
European Union regulators plan to subject Twitter to a stress test to determine how well it complies with Europe's new digital content law, a top EU tech regulator said, ramping up the blog's preparations for enforcing the West's most far-reaching digital content law.
Hopefully it will just apply to Europe like right now.
Turkey or Pakistan have extreme censorship rules and Twitter has to comply to survive in those countries.
But this rule seems to imply that they would block out Twitter in all of Europe and they would claim the right to fine Twitter for revenues it makes around the world.
I'll keep reading.
Look at this.
This is my favorite line.
What's a digital specialist?
No one knows, but the Wall Street Journal uses a word.
A team of roughly five to ten digital specialists from the EU plan to put Twitter and possibly other companies through their content policing paces during a visit to San Francisco in late June, Tieri Breton, the blocks commissioner for the internal markets, said in an interview.
A specialist, eh?
Do you go to school to be that, to be a Twitter specialist?
Or is that just something you say?
The test is voluntary.
It's another voluntary test, wink wink.
And Twitter has agreed to be subjected to it.
It won't carry any fines or other enforcement consequences.
It will offer companies a dry run for how the EU's Digital Services Act, or DSA, will be enforced.
Twitter officials in Europe and the U.S. didn't respond to requests for comment.
Twitter owner Elon Musk has said the company plans to comply with the EU law.
The law takes effect in late summer, empowering European regulators led by Britain to levy a maximum penalty of 6% of a company's annual revenue in case of violations.
The EU has the power to block a service in the case of certain repeated infringements.
It really is Soviet style, isn't it?
I don't know of any social media companies that have started and thrived globally from Europe.
Do you know of any?
TikTok is communist Chinese.
VK is Russian.
But Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, they're all American.
And I don't know if Europe is good at creating social media companies, but they certainly seek to be world leaders at regulating and censoring them, are they?
They want to regulate the West because maybe they don't have any of their own.
Look at this part.
The EU team will also look at why certain content might slip through the cracks, he said, citing a hypothetical example of, quote, fake news that caused disturbances but was promoted because it generated virality and advertising.
Did you have enough moderators beforehand?
Was it promoted by the algorithm? Breton said.
We want to do this for real, in the real world, so they see how it happens.
And above all, so they prepare, Bretton said, of the companies.
Disinformation, fake news that goes viral.
Does that include the fake news that the CBC and other state broadcasters spread, and politicians mainly, about the origin of the coronavirus?
Does it include the fake news about the efficacy of masks?
First they didn't work, then they did.
Now we know they never did.
What about the lockdowns that they were medically necessary?
That's fake news.
New study out today shows it.
Or what about the vaccines themselves?
We were told were safe and effective and long-lasting, but they had to literally change the definition of vaccines to even call these short-term therapeutics vaccines.
I wonder what disinformation they'll be measuring for.
And all this brings me back to Canada.
One of my favorite news sources is called Blacklocks.
It's an expensive subscription, but we pay it because we believe in it.
Look at this story today.
Mandate CBC as mouthpiece.
The Privy Council in an access to information memo proposed a legal requirement that the CBC broadcast government messaging in a national crisis.
Cabinet aides complained they had to buy advertising during the pandemic.
How much more on Trudeau's narrative could the CBC even possibly be?
I don't think they have any problem with the total compliance of the CBC.
They just think that they shouldn't have to pay for ads, I guess, which is weird since they're paying for the CBC in other ways.
But, you know, if you give the government tyrannical dictatorial powers during an emergency, it'll always be an emergency.
In the past, services such as producing and broadcasting public service announcements in times of national crisis were covered under previous agreements with CBC Radio Canada, said the report, the way forward, lessons learned.
Currently, the government of Canada pays the CBC and Radio Canada, like any other media, to air ads, but there could be new possibilities to create partnerships to respond to future crises.
How much closer could their partnerships be?
And like I say, the CBC literally called the truckers Putin terrorists.
They would use any crisis, whatever they say as a crisis, to command government control.
Let me read a little more.
Perhaps the government of Canada could explore legislative amendments to the Quarantine Act to ensure that in the future, federally funded organizations like the CBC Radio Canada support communications efforts during a national health crisis like the CBC, sorry, like the COVID-19 pandemic, wrote staff.
This could include partnerships and the provision of free placement.
Climate Crisis Farm Wars00:15:21
If you think no one trusts the media now, and very few people do, well, this is a good recipe just to finish it off, isn't it?
Yeah, like I say, Freedom of Speech is having some very good moments in recent months, but I warn you, the empire is striking back.
Stay with us for more on these eternal crises that the left is fomenting with our friend Mark Morano.
What's next?
You know, dogs are man's best friend.
You'll never convince me or half the world otherwise.
But other than dogs, and let's put cats aside because that's a very divisive subject.
I think something that we can all agree on is that cattle are humanity's best friend.
And domesticated cattle have been our friends for centuries, for millennia.
Whether it's meat or milk and dairy or leather, it's the cows that have helped civilization grow.
In fact, the Latin word for cow, pecus, is rooted in pecuniary or impecunious.
If you don't have cattle, you don't have wealth.
So tied to our civilization is the humble cow.
Who hates cows?
No one I would trust.
In fact, the country of India rather reveres cattle.
And imagine my shock when I see the news out of Ireland that they are planning to cull, to kill, to euthanize hundreds of thousands of cattle for no reason other than cattle emit greenhouse gases.
By that, when they chew and digest the grass they eat, they burp and release some methane and apparently killing hundreds and thousands, hundreds of thousands of cattle in Ireland, which isn't even a speck in the world's emanations of greenhouse gases.
Apparently that is the moral outcome, so much so that their government seems dead set on enacting it.
Well, if it's an idea in Ireland, you better believe it's an idea elsewhere.
Joining us now to talk about this insanity is our friend Mark Moreno, the boss of climatepot.com.
Mark, great to see you.
Of course they're doing this in the name of the climate, aren't they?
Yes, I mean, and it's not just the culling of cows.
We're seeing it going after high-yield agriculture.
We're seeing it go after particularly the climate compliance regulations going after the small-time farmers.
But we just saw last week France beginning their climate lockdowns, banning short-haul flights.
At the same time, we're seeing Germany talking about massive meat restrictions down to one sausage a month.
I mean, this is since January, the acceleration of this agenda for us, the unwashed masses, has nothing I've ever seen.
It's almost as if they think their time is limited and they're rushing all of this through almost all of it without any vote of democracy.
They're going after collapse of energy, food, transportation, and yes, free speech as well.
If you dare to complain, it's immediate misinformation.
But the animal thing goes back to the net zero commitments.
This has been on the table for decades.
I was working in the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
2007, I believe, they had the report about how cow emissions were more damaging to the planet than the entire transportation sector, planes, trains, automobiles.
So for decades, they've had cows in their sites.
And guess what?
2023 is the year they're doing something about it.
It's crazy to me.
And you're right.
I mean, we covered to the best that we could the Dutch farmer rebellion.
Yes.
And I just couldn't understand it.
Like, why would going after energy is insane?
Energy poverty.
They want to jack up the price of energy.
They want to get us off cheap, plentiful, clean energy and onto unreliable, climate-friendly energy that's not friendly to any.
Like, that seems like madness to me.
But to go after food, to go after the Dutch farmers, I didn't know that Holland was the second largest food exporter in the world.
You wouldn't think it for a rather small country.
The madness of it, and that came to Canada, the war on nitrogen.
Like they're seriously going through the periodic table, the war on carbon against energy, the war on nitrogen for fertilizer.
But I saw on your website that story that you'll only be able to have one sausage a month if you're a good boy.
And of course, the story that France is banning short flights, it really is all of the same master plan.
And you dare call it a conspiracy theory.
They'll call you a nut.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
It's actually happening.
It's a conspiracy fact.
Yes, that's what's so shocking.
This is the quiet parts out loud.
This was, by the way, the German build, the daily newspaper, literally on their huge article, only one sausage per month for everyone.
The German Nutrition Society, I'm sure steeped in the whole climate agenda, corporate wokeness, and the whole net zero agenda, is now recommending over a 90% reduction in daily meat eating.
And by the way, when these unelected boards recommend something, usually it's bureaucrats that are fast to impose this on every single society.
And it's the same thing we saw during COVID.
If it's a recommendation by Lord Fauci or a public health official, then by golly, it's the law.
And there's never a vote on it either.
It's just sort of imposed.
And what they're doing in Germany is what they're doing in France.
And what they're doing in France and Germany is what they're doing in the Netherlands, is what they're doing in what they did in Sri Lanka, what they're doing in Australia.
I talked to an activist there.
They're decimating Australian farming.
They're doing the same thing now in the United States.
John Kerry announced last week, our U.S. climate envoy, announced that they were going to be coming after agriculture, that agriculture had to be part of the climate.
He doesn't even call it climate change.
He calls it the climate crisis.
So what this means, and we're seeing it now, EPA, Al Gore's group, is pushing these methane restrictions.
They're going after animal agriculture, period.
Bill Gates' stated goal in being America's single largest farmland owner is to make us all eat what he calls synthetic meat.
Now, depending on how you want to define it, that's the vegetable oil process things.
It's also Bill Gates and Richard Branson have invested billions in this lab-grown meat that's grown in a steel vat in a laboratory from the stem cells and then additives, then get this as printed on a 3D printer as the final coup d'état, yeah, final end of the thing.
So, this is where they're headed.
Bill Gates has stated the quiet part out loud: no one in the Western world should be eating actual animal beef anymore.
That's his stated goal.
And guess what?
As America's number one largest farmland owner, according to NBC News, he's got a lot of sway in agricultural policy.
Yeah, it's crazy.
And, you know, I don't want to be too goofy about it, but Germany loves sausage.
Yes.
I mean, brought worst, knockworst.
Even look at some of the, we use words like Frankfurter.
Well, that's named after Frankfurt.
Or hamburger.
That's named after Hamburg.
They love meat.
Wiener comes, that means someone, something from Vienna.
You know, Germany is known for their meats.
That would be like saying to the Brits, no more pubs.
And I just think it's absolute madness.
And by the way, they're not just going after cattle, they're going after sheep as well.
Yeah, all animal.
Yeah, actually, we need to clarify that.
I mean, yeah, this is all animal agriculture that's done on for these net zero goals.
They're claiming methane is a potent greenhouse gas, which in certain laboratory studies it can be, but in terms of the climate, it's been called the irrelevant greenhouse gas.
They're going after the nitrogen fertilizer, the high-yield agriculture, claiming that turns the nitrous oxide and it's going to destroy the planet.
Now, we've been farming for thousands of years, right?
And suddenly now we can no longer farm.
Interesting, the German Daily, the Build newspaper actually quoted the Lower Saxony Chamber of Agriculture, and they said, even if this plan of 90 plus percent meat reduction were fully complied with, you'd have less than 1% point closer for Germany to reach the climate goals.
In other words, they're going after the middle class.
They're going after the general public.
They're not going after the same as with France with the two-hour flight, two and a half-hour flight bans.
They're not going after the private jets.
They're not going after the rich 1%.
And by the way, in case you're worried about all these sacrifices we're making in energy and transportation, giving up our gas-powered cars, giving up plentiful food and plentiful energy, Prince King Charles announced yesterday that Buckingham Palace, as a show of solidarity with the sacrifice needed to fight climate change, they're going to now lower the temperature in their swimming pool, turn their heated pools down a little cooler.
So we're all in this together.
I'm happy to report to you, Ezra.
We are all in this together.
You know, I follow James Lindsay, who's quite a radical thinker on woke issues.
And whenever I talk to him, my mind spins for a day.
I try and digest everything.
And he said something so shocking, I want to talk to him about him.
And I'm just going to lay it out here.
And I'm open for you to disagree or agree because I'm still trying to come to terms with something he said.
He was talking about this war on cattle and war on farmers and war on farms and war on carbon and war on nitrogen.
And he compared it to something I'm going to shock you now, or at least I was shocked, Mark.
The holodomor, which is a Ukrainian word for famine, for a manufactured, fabricated, man-made famine as a weapon.
I don't know if you know the history, but Joseph Stalin forcibly collectivized the farms in Ukraine, Ukraine, the breadbasket of the region.
And it was such a disaster, this forced collectivization, that there was a mass, man-made Soviet-enforced famine that killed literally millions of people in the name of this abstract ideology of communist Soviet farms.
And I want to talk to James Lindsay more about this, but I think he's saying this ideologically driven, centrally planned, anti-human ideology in the name of climate now or whatever may actually have the same result.
Actually create famines.
I mean, some might say that's sort of what happened in Sri Lanka.
And it's such a shocking idea.
But why would we think our authoritarian, centrally planned economy meddlers today are any more or less?
I mean, why are they any different from Stalin's five-year plan experts, Soviet experts, who claimed they were doing it for a noble reason too?
That's what James Lindsay says.
I want to talk to him about it directly, but what do you think about all that?
Well, I think he's exactly right.
And not just Stalin's five-year plan, but there have been analysis by a historian Helen Raleigh, who talked about Mao's great leap forward in China with aggressive deadlines, with massive targets, with a rush, and we're all in this together mentality forcing this sort of transformation of Chinese agriculture.
And what happened?
Millions starved, mass starvation under Mao.
It was a disaster.
And to answer your question point blank, why is it going to be different this time in their minds?
The same reason when you say Marxism fails and socialism fails, and you know what the answer always back, and you know this, Ezra, is, well, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Cuba, they didn't do it right.
They didn't apply right.
We've learned from their mistakes.
And here's the other problem: when they have a vision, a net zero vision, a Green New Deal, a climate utopia, it is a Garden of Eden, utopian vision of the world.
That's going to compete with a free market, private property one that's going to have warts and all.
Those things are, you're never going to really win that, especially in the hearts and minds of these activists, because they're seeing a utopian vision that's not based on reality.
And you're arguing from a reality position.
So you're going to lose.
Their vision's going to win out a lot of hearts and minds.
And that's one of the ways they can recruit people because they lay this out.
And It's incredible because we're watching it happen throughout history.
Our ruling class, governing class, has literally invented reasons why the rest of us can't be free.
We've seen it, whether it's terrorism, wartime rationing, and sometimes you could say it was justified on very short time scales, particularly at wartime.
But then you see the war on terror, how that led to essentially a lot of the COVID stuff with domestic surveillance and declaring, like as you saw with your own prime minister declaring Canadian citizens to be terrorists for trucker revolt.
So, what they've done is they believe somehow that we're in a unique time in history, but they're not.
They're just following the tyrannical dictates of every previous historical example of a declaring a crisis and taking over.
And that's what this is all about.
The farm, by the way, food crisis, there is no food crisis.
Every metric you can look at, NASA, greening of the earth, crop yields going up across the board.
The only reason we would have a food crisis is because of climate policy, not because of climate change.
And they're making sure that happens.
It's about nationalizing and taking over all of these industries.
They want to nationalize energy, nationalize food, nationalize transportation.
And they only just nationalize it, they want to make it subject to corporate international governance.
And that's what the WHO pandemic treaty is about.
That's what the UN treaties are about.
So we are in for it because we are the most knowledgeable and most accessible to information of our generation in world history.
But maybe it's information overload because we are fighting back horribly so far.
We're accepting all of these premises and narratives.
You know what?
I have 20 things I want to say in reply to you.
And you know me, I got to get through them.
Let me whip through them.
All of this is being done in the name of the climate.
Meanwhile, China, which is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, if you think that's a problem, and John Kerry claims that's the problem.
They're building more coal-fired power plants than the rest of the world combined, not just in China, but they're building them around the world.
And I can't get over these pig farm urban skyscrapers.
I don't know if you've seen these images, Mark.
Literally skyscrapers where each floor of the skyscraper is a thousands and thousands of pigs in a pig farm.
And I'm not against pig farming.
I don't eat pork myself, but that's a religious thing.
China couldn't be going further, faster, harder on emissions.
Pig Farm Skyscrapers00:10:27
And imagine Ireland or the Netherlands saying we are going to shut down our farms out of good faith here while China is going full tilt without criticism.
But there's so many when you reference to the Great Leap Forward, Mao thought every Chinese family could have a little steel mill in their backyard.
They had to have a little brazier to make iron.
He literally thought that.
Mao sent intellectuals into the countryside to till agriculture when the land was still frozen solid.
And what do these things have to do?
These super wise, super expert VVIPs with their utopian idea who are so stupid they don't know how it really works.
Stalin probably had well-meaning PhD experts on farming, but the peasant farmers in Ukraine actually knew how to do it.
Mao probably had experts saying, oh, you see, we can get these little foundries in the backyard of every Chinese family.
No, that's not how it works.
And here we have our own super smart idiots, intellectual yet idiot, as Al-Taleb says, who have no bloody clue how it works and are going to wreck everything.
I feel like we're about to relive some very dark chapters of history.
Go back to you, Mark.
Sorry, I took up so much time.
Back to you.
Oh, that was absolutely spot on.
I mean, the Great Reset, the World Economic Forum, one of their visions is you'll own nothing, be happy.
But they actually have a detailed analysis of this.
You'll live in a place that during the day will be rented by a business, and so you'll get free rent.
And then you won't even own appliances because you can just order, you'll be able to order up your appliance like a blender on an app, and a drone will come deliver it.
You'll use it for an hour, and then you'll put it out, and then the drone will take it away.
They actually believe that they can plan these thousands, millions of interactions globally through their masterminding expertocracy.
And this is, if you look back at history, and I'm not going to be accused of Godwin's law, but particularly Germany is a good example, is you have to look at how people fell prey to this.
And it's because they're told these are the top brightest people.
These are experts.
They know more than you.
Think back to COVID.
You have a parent who's upset that their six-year-old is wearing a mask eight hours a day.
Well, they go to a school board and complain, and the school board's like, wait, what are you?
You're a plumber.
You're not an expert.
We have epidemiologists with PhDs and 30 years government experience telling us that kids need these masks to be safe.
Who the hell are you to tell us about public health and what your kids should or shouldn't do?
That's that mentality.
And if you go back, I think it was March 9th.
I was on your show in March 9th of 2020, Ezra.
I was trying to lay out this vision because I saw all the same things happen in the climate debate, the exact same debate.
They used COVID and then they were so excited about how well COVID went.
In the words of a UK House of Lords member, he actually said it was amazing how compliant the public was.
They've immediately shifted over to climate now.
And this is where we're getting this energy restrictions, the food restrictions, the meat restrictions, and the travel restrictions happening right now.
And by the way, everything we're reading about in the last week or so, minor.
France two and a half hour flight ban, they originally, Greenpeace is calling for a six-hour EU-wide flight ban.
In this most latest example of the 200,000 cows in Ireland, they're talking about a million cows in some of the proposals.
So this is just to wet the public's compliance and to soften us up.
Their plans are much deeper.
I've had so many people come back and say, well, what's the big deal?
I don't fly under two hours anyway.
It's too short.
It's like, no, the big deal is they just banned it in the name of the climate and they've admitted it won't even affect emissions.
You're not in charge anymore.
That's the whole point.
They're locking you down.
This is what a climate lockdown looks like.
This is what the great reset looks like in action in 2023.
We're not talking about theoretical scaremongering.
We're living in it right now, Ezra.
Yeah.
Let me come back one more time because you say so many interesting things, Mark.
I think some people are well-meaning but deeply misguided.
And these are the people who have all their plans and calculations and they think they know how to farm.
They think they know how to do energy, but they just have never lived in the real world and they've forgotten certain things that they didn't check.
So there are some well-meaning idiots, but then there are people who are not idiots.
They are just simply malicious.
They know exactly what they're doing.
They saw how the COVID lockdowns worked splendidly, not to stop COVID, but to give government power.
And so they're inspired now with climate lockdowns.
And you made me think of something, and I want to end on this because you and I could go back and forth all day because every time you say something, I want to reply in some way.
But I would like to read a paragraph from an old book written by a French politician and economist born about 200 years ago.
His name was Frederick Bastiat.
And he was a real thinker about freedom and economics.
And he wrote this about Paris, which has always been one of the world's great cities.
And it's a story about spontaneous order versus planned chaos.
It's a story about central control versus allowing ordinary people to make decisions.
A commissar of agriculture or thousands of individual farmers.
Let me read just a little bit from Bastiet.
And I know that sounds high-minded, but I've remembered this since I read it as a teenager.
On coming to Paris for a visit, I said to myself, here are a million human beings who would all die in a few days if supplies of all sorts did not flow into this great metropolis.
It staggers the imagination to try to comprehend the vast multiplicity of objects that must pass through its gates tomorrow if its inhabitants are to preserve from the horrors of famine, insurrection, and pillage.
And yet all are sleeping peacefully at this moment without being disturbed for a single instant by the idea of so frightful a prospect.
What then is the resourceful and secret power that governs the amazing regularity of such complicated movements, a regularity in which everyone has such implicit faith, although his prosperity and his very life depend on it?
That power is an absolute principle, the principle of free exchange.
In fact, he goes on to talk about if one person or one team or one government tried to replicate the thousands, the millions of individual decisions and transactions, they would fail for sure.
No one person knows enough, is smart enough, has good enough judgment, but you have a million people making individual decisions of how to get ahead and what to do and what's best for themselves.
And what could it's precisely because it's not centrally organized that Paris doesn't starve.
Whereas the Holodomor starved everyone.
And what they're trying to do, Mark, is they're trying to centrally control not just millions, but billions.
It's, I don't want to seem alarmist, but if you're not scared about this, I think you're hitting the snooze button.
I'm done, Mark.
Last word to you.
All right, well, last word, let me just tie that theme in directly.
What happened in the Netherlands, there ended up these climate compliance laws, and Bloomberg News had an article on airline flights: cheap airlines, a thing of the past due to climate compliance laws.
Is what happens is the small family-run independent farmers get crushed.
Up to 12,000 in the Netherlands would face just extinction if these rules come through.
Who can absorb these costs?
Big, multilateral, Bill Gates, China, equity asset firms.
And all that's happening is it's a centralization of power.
But keep in mind, this is a globalization of power.
And that is what is so frightening because it's a concentration of power and decision-making into fewer and fewer hands every day because no small business can keep up with the compliance regulations that they're going to hit, whether it was COVID, whether it was climate, whether it's critical race or transgender, all of those things decimate the small businesses and subject them to all sorts of rules and lawsuits, et cetera.
Whereas the big corporate chains can afford it.
So what we're seeing is the late stage.
And some actually call it disaster capitalism, but I don't think it is anymore.
I think it's now an oligarchy and corporatism that have taken over.
And I think that's where we are headed.
And, you know, we are literally now run by international corporations.
That's where the power is.
And if you can talk to poor people in African nations now, they know the government doesn't even control these corporations anymore.
And the corporations are working through things like the World Economic Forum, through the UN.
They're getting their goals and agenda out, and only they can absorb the costs.
And they're crushing their competition.
This is why ExxonMobil supported the Paris Agreement because they could absorb in carbon trade.
They could absorb the cost.
This is why big companies support national health care and mandates because they can absorb all the costs and the small companies can't.
This is late stage.
And this is why, and this is, I'll end with this.
This is why the resurgence of guaranteed and minimum incomes have arrived.
Even people like Elon Musk supporting it.
That middle class is disappearing.
You're going to have the wealthy ruling class, and they're going to keep the peasants happy by a guaranteed income.
That's where we are right now.
Every day, it's getting worse on every front.
And of course, the biggest now is collapsing our transportation and food.
But the transportation is interesting because going back to your last theme on China, Europe and the United States, Australia, we're getting decimated as we get more and more EV mandates.
Guess who's taking over global car production?
China.
They've now passed the U.S., South Korea.
They're going to dominate just like everything else.
Just like when you walk in a Walmart, everything made in China.
Pretty soon there'll be no such thing other than a Chinese car if we continue on this path.
And I see no reason why we're not going to continue on this path.
Yeah, well, certainly up here in Canada, Justin Trudeau couldn't be a more categorical asset to the Chinese Communist Party.
I think that's becoming, unfortunately, going to be his legacy.
Pride, Sports, and Catholic Players00:03:15
Well, Mark Morano, you and I could go another three rounds on this.
I've been thinking of things I want to say, but I better cork it now or I'll never let you go.
My friend, it's always so nice to see you.
Folks, as you know, we have Mark on all the time, and it's because he's the absolute best informed battler on these issues.
His website, of course, is climatepot.com, and we enjoy bumping into him at the global warming conferences when we go.
We were not allowed into the last one in Charm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
That's the first global warming conference we have not attended since our company was started.
We were told by lawyers in Cairo that the risk of arrest was simply too high, and I did not want our people to suffer that risk in a fairly authoritarian regime like that.
But we will be at the next one with Mark.
Mark, great to see you again.
Thanks for your time.
Thank you, Ezra.
I appreciate it.
All right.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Don Portaghese says, hi, Ezra.
I was extremely angry reading the story of Blue Jay Anthony Bass, who foolishly apologized for his personal beliefs and comments.
In present-day Canada, your beliefs cancel your ability to play professional sports.
First of all, the baseball team and stadium have no business in engaging in Pride Month or anything related.
This has nothing to do with sports and baseball.
The Toronto Star was quick to interject, saying Bass must go and stating his advocating Bud Light and Target boycotts go against themes that do not comport with his religious beliefs.
You know, there was a sports team in L.A. that not only declared it Pride Month, but celebrated Pride Month with an anti-Christian, I'm going to call it a hate group because they say they're motivated by hate.
They hate the Catholic Church.
So they're drag queen activists who are gay, but the expression of their politics is anti-Catholic bigotry.
And I'm not sure why that's any better than anti-Jewish bigotry or anti-Muslim or anti-secret, anti-black bigotry, or frankly, anti-gay bigotry.
They hate the Catholic Church.
And so this LA team, they did a tweet about it.
They had a special day with this satanic anti-Catholic group.
And then I guess they realized that Los Angeles actually has one of the largest Catholic communities in America because they're just thinking, oh, I hate that Catholic school mom who taught me 30 years ago when I went to Catholic school.
No, the Catholics in LA are Latino immigrants who love their church and take it very seriously.
And all of a sudden, and by the way, a lot of their players are Catholic too.
They miscalculated and they tried to patch that up.
I see there's been some other crazy pride moments too that have then be walked back.
I think it's always instructive to look at Twitter accounts from companies like BMW or Mercedes that during Pride Month make their Twitter account in the West rainbow flag-ish, but would never, never, never make their Twitter accounts in Saudi Arabia rainbow flag-ish.
David's Physical Assault00:02:20
I mean, come on.
Why would they?
That's nuts.
Justin Trudeau scolded Georgia Maloney. of Italy for being anti-gay.
She's not, actually, but would never say the same thing to, say, Turkey's president.
It's quite astonishing.
One more letter from Bike Infinity who says, hi, Ezra.
I thought David Menzies crossed the line recently by entering a room of Halton School Board secondary school teachers for the purpose of accosting Mr. Lemieux, a.k.a. Busty Lemieux.
David was not invited to this meeting.
Personally, I think Lemieux is a disgrace to the teaching profession, as is everyone aiding and abetting him.
That would include his teaching colleagues and the board and administration of Halton School Board.
I hope Lemieux gets the help he clearly needs.
I think David Menzies' excellent journalistic skills could be put to better use.
Well, I mean, I appreciate your opinion.
I appreciate you sharing with me, and I recognize your username, and I know you've been a longtime fan.
Busty Lemieux, as David calls him, is a figure of public interest in a public position and in a position of public trust.
And he has abused that public trust in the classroom.
And no one's held him to account, not his fellow teachers, certainly not the board.
He's also ran away from any questions about his public role.
And so at a public teachers' convention, open, I mean, it wasn't invited to the public, but David walked in.
David didn't make a big scene.
He didn't shut the event down.
He wasn't protesting.
He just asked Busti Lemieux some questions.
And within seconds, David was physically assaulted.
You can agree or disagree with the lengths David went to get that question, but I think Busti Lemieux is hiding from journalistic scrutiny.
And I think he is absolutely a legitimate subject for media inquiry.
The disruption didn't, David didn't disrupt that meeting.
I suppose he did for the one teacher.
It was the extreme jackal-like attack on David that actually did the disruption.
David wasn't violent.
David didn't swear.
David didn't shout.
But all those things were due to David, and he was beat up.
Let's see what the court says, because, of course, we have filed a lawsuit against the teacher who physically assaulted David.