Ezra Levant exposes Justin Trudeau’s June 12th meeting with Andrei Melnik, Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister and Holocaust denier, who downplays Nazi atrocities against Ukrainian Jews and defends WWII-era fascist leader Stepan Bandera—sparking protests from Poland and Israel yet no public pushback from Canada’s Jewish lobby (CEJA, B’nai Brith, Simon Wiesenthal Center), despite millions in government grants. While Canadian media falsely labeled German conservative MEP Christine Anderson a Nazi, Trudeau’s ties to controversial figures go unchallenged, raising questions about selective accountability. Levant warns this silence risks normalizing attacks on dissent, mirroring the U.S.’s weaponized legal system against conservatives—like Trump’s unprecedented espionage indictment—threatening democratic norms and future political freedoms if unchecked. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, I saw a picture of Justin Trudeau meeting someone in Ukraine, and I had no idea who he was because no Canadian journalists identified him, but the man identified himself.
His name was Andrei Melnik, and that name probably doesn't ring a bell, but he's a prominent Holocaust denier.
What was Trudeau doing meeting with him?
I'll tell you the details.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
It's this podcast, but with video.
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I want to show you these pictures of Trudeau swanning around Kiev with this Nazi Holocaust denier.
You won't believe it unless you see it.
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All right.
Here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Justin Trudeau meets with Ukraine's leading Holocaust denier, and both the Canadian media and the Jewish lobby are silent.
It's June 12th, and this is the Answer Levance show.
shame on you you censorious bug on the weekend justin trudeau made a trip to ukraine Here's a photo of it arriving, being greeted by a Ukrainian politician named Andrei Melnik.
I'll talk about him a bit more.
It was a surprise trip to Ukraine for Trudeau, but in a way not surprising.
Trudeau is far better received there than he is here in Canada, where he's heckled mercilessly whenever he appears in public spaces that aren't controlled by his staff.
Fuck you!
Fuck you!
You fucking piece of shit!
Fucking pedophile!
Fuck you!
But it's not just the common people in Canada who are turning against Trudeau, the fancy people.
Well, they're giving Trudeau a hard time too.
Dave Johnson, the disgraced former governor general hired by Trudeau to make his Chinese corruption scandal go away.
Well, Johnson resigned and it looks just awful.
A new poll by Abacus Research, which is run by a liberal activist, by the way, so they're certainly as pro-Trudeau as they get.
They found that only 20% of Canadians think Trudeau deserves to be re-elected.
That's incredible.
That's the little red bar at the bottom there.
20% of Canadians think he's doing well.
So basically, I don't know, that's all the government employees, Chinese diplomats, and CBC staff, and that's about it.
I mean, who wouldn't want to go to Ukraine to be treated like a rock star?
Trudeau just gave away another half billion dollars to Ukraine's war.
No debate in the House of Commons about it, let alone a vote.
I mean, there was no debate or vote about giving $13 billion to Volkswagen to build a battery factory in Canada.
Half a billion here, $13 billion there.
Pretty soon you're talking real money.
Gee, I wonder why we're having inflation and high taxes.
The media that accompanied Trudeau on his trip to Ukraine were gushing over him, of course.
Look at this tweet from the Globe and Mail's Mark McKinnon, just as one example.
He says, at the Canadian embassy in Kyiv, I asked PM Justin Trudeau whether he would take a phone call from Vladimir Putin after a long pause.
Oh, I bet it was very dramatic.
He said he'd never considered the question.
Quote, he is not someone that I have a particular level of trust or interest in at this point.
That's your question for Trudeau.
Look, whenever you think of Putin, there are various reasons why he might call, I don't know, Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky, or American's Joe Biden, or France's Emmanuel Macron, or the UK's Rishi Sunak, or Xi Jinping of China, or Erdogan, or Germany Schultz.
In what possible scenario could you imagine, either a good or a bad reason?
Can you think of any reason why Putin would call Justin Trudeau?
I mean, is there a less consequential leader on the world stage?
Is there a weaker lightweight than Trudeau?
I'm truly curious in what scenario the Global Mail thinks Putin would telephone Trudeau.
I mean, for good or bad reasons.
Can you think of one?
Even the United States and the United Kingdom and Australia have just set up their own foreign affairs club called AUKUS, so they don't have to include Canada anymore.
Here's that same Mark McKinnon when Trudeau arrived this weekend.
He tweets: In standing up for press freedoms during his visit to Kiev, Justin Trudeau rediscovers Canada's historic role in Ukraine.
My take.
Simon Wiesenthal's Legacy00:15:11
Yeah, really.
Trudeau standing up for press freedoms.
That's a new one.
But for now, just look at that photo.
Again, you see that man there again, that Andre Melnik.
He met Trudeau and was touring him around the capital.
Now, I read Mark McKinnon's entire story in the Global Mail, and it doesn't mention Melnik.
Same with every other media company that covered the trip.
None of them mentioned Melnik.
But there's no chance they didn't know who he is.
He's the deputy foreign minister of Ukraine.
That's why he was meeting Trudeau and touring him around.
That's why he was the official greeter.
But he's much more than that.
He's a notorious Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer, for real.
I mean, a real Nazi, not a Nazi, like Trudeau calls anyone who disagrees with them.
Andrei Melnik is a passionate defender of the Nazis, and he has caused international incidents over it.
I mean, watch just for a couple of minutes as he goes on a rant about how the Jews are lying to him about the Holocaust and about how Stepan Bandera, Ukraine's leading Nazi during the Second World War, was actually a good guy and don't believe the lies about him.
This is an excerpt for a much longer show.
This wasn't a gaffe or an accident or a secret recording.
Andrei Melnik was on the record very proudly and stubbornly defending the Nazi project in Ukraine.
Watch for a bit.
Denken wir sich das aus.
I think we had to go to the bottom.
And we are talking about Bandera.
The whole world can see that Bandera is at the killing of the 100.000 Jews.
No, that's true.
There are no evidence that Bandera-Trucks have 100.000 Jews killed.
There are no evidence.
This is the narrative.
That Jerusalem and that industry and in Poland and Israel also is a very important thing.
I think this is also the Judiciary when Bandera is not a very good question.
That Moscow, Poland, Ungarren, and Juden, this is a nichty, that's the first thing, dine Stepan Bandera.
What's that for?
When the Germans were right there, they had to tell them that they had to tell them that they were still under other rulers.
They had to tell them that they were still with the Germans.
That's clear.
Also...
I mean, I understand...
Also, I'm going to tell you today not to say, that I'm going to distance myself from this.
That was yeah, that's what that is.
That's why I first murder von Juden and Pol Bandera war key mass murder von Juden and Poland.
That was part of a lengthy conversation.
He denies that the Nazis killed 800,000 Ukrainian Jews.
He said there was zero evidence of it.
He said that Germany and Poland and Israel were all lying about it.
In effect, he said those countries were faking the Holocaust and that it didn't actually happen that way.
Those countries were shocked.
Poland and Israel lodged an official diplomatic protest.
Germany, which doesn't take kindly to Holocaust deniers, pressed Ukraine to dismiss Melnik as their ambassador to Germany, and they did.
Melnik literally caused an international incident by championing the leading Ukrainian Nazi leader.
It was so serious, Ukraine actually caved and fired him, else Germany would have deported him, I suppose.
And that's literally the first man Trudeau met with when he arrived in Kiev.
That's the man who toured around the city with Trudeau.
Oh, and look who was there too: Christia Freeland.
You might recall that Freeland's own grandfather worked for Bandera, the Ukrainian Nazis.
Freeland's grandfather actually published a Nazi newspaper in Ukraine that he had expropriated from a Jew.
Actually, I'm not blaming Freeland for her grandfather, how could I?
But she kept his identity a secret and whitewashed it and claimed it was Russian propaganda.
She literally tried the same tactic as Andrei Melnik of claiming that any concerns were fake.
Christia Freeland's grandfather was a Ukrainian Nazi, and she tried to hide it.
And there she is on the weekend proudly touring around Kiev with Justin Trudeau under the guidance of Ukraine's most senior Nazi sympathizer, Andrei Melnik.
He's not shy about his views.
He's not a nobody.
He was the former ambassador to Germany.
He caused a multinational scandal.
It's still scandalous that he's in the Ukrainian government at all, but for Trudeau and Freeland to choose to be toured around with him publicly, no less, is so utterly gross.
Before Melnik had his video rant against the Jews in Israel, Trudeau and Freeland might have been able to plead ignorance, but after, no.
The only possible explanation is that they're fine with him.
Either they're fine with him and they don't mind spending time with him, learning from him, being led by him.
Either they're fine with that, or God forbid, they actually agree with him.
It's got to be one of the two.
And not a word from the media other than Mr. Trudeau, if Putin called you on the phone, what would you say?
That's a child's question.
That's a flattering hypothetical question that puffs up Trudeau.
It's never going to happen.
But it's a lot easier to ask a dreamy question than that than why are you meeting with Ukraine's leading Holocaust denier?
Did the reporters who accompanied Justin Trudeau on this trip genuinely not know?
Or are they simply afraid?
Vladimir Zelensky has banned opposition media, just as he's banned opposition political parties.
And he's suspended elections in Ukraine indefinitely.
He's literally suspended elections until the war is over, until the emergency is over, which isn't happening anytime soon.
No wonder Trudeau likes this guy.
Oh, and he's even cracking down on churches that he thinks are insufficiently loyal.
That's his move.
Anyone in the media, in politics, or religion who doesn't support him, he says is a traitor working for Russia.
So yeah, maybe journalists just don't want to ask about Henri Melnik because they're afraid of being detained or jailed or worse.
But what's the excuse of Canada's official Jewish lobby?
I say this as a Canadian, and I say this as a Jew, and actually as a former director of one of these groups, for years I was on the board of the Canada Israel Committee, which is now part of Canada's largest Jewish lobby group called CEJA, or the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
If you skim their website, you can see they claim to fight anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
Really?
It's the same for the B'nai Brith, which is a kind of competitor to Cija.
And then there's even a special Holocaust-oriented Jewish group called the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
I was checking their Twitter feeds all weekend and today, all three of these groups, and there's simply nothing on Trudeau meeting and greeting and touring and learning and praising Ukraine's leading Nazi.
Not one word.
Sija's busy, though.
He's busy tweeting about an Israeli soccer team.
Thanks for that.
And here's a tweet from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
They're upset about a spray-painted swasker.
I get it, me too.
But which do you think is perhaps more momentous, Trudeau meeting with Ukraine's leading Holocaust denier in public proudly and giving him half a billion dollars or some anonymous spray-painted graffiti on a fence?
Look, it's pretty obvious what's going on here.
These Jewish lobby groups don't dare criticize Justin Trudeau.
In fact, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's new president just happens to be Michael Levitt, a former Trudeau MP.
Maybe that's why he was tweeting about golf this weekend instead of his former boss.
Mustn't upset the boss.
Hey, do you remember a few months ago when Christine Anderson, the member of the European Parliament from Germany, came to visit in Canada?
Do you remember when she was denounced as a racist by everyone?
Everyone in the media, all the so-called human rights groups, frankly, even Pierre Pollia's office denounced him.
Do you remember that denouncing her?
I know Christine Anderson a little bit, not personally, but I know her politically.
I've interviewed her a few times before.
She's great.
She was really strong on freedom and the truckers.
It's just a reminder.
It goes out to all the Canadians, especially the Canadian truckers.
I am so very proud of you.
I applaud your bravery and your determination to stand up for freedom, democracy, and the rule of law.
She was universally condemned as a Nazi, but that's the thing about Germany, and it's a reason why they kicked out Melnick and refused to give him, to have him as Ukraine's ambassador.
It is literally a crime to be a Nazi in Germany.
So you can say a lot of things about Christine Anderson.
You can say she's wrong or you don't like her or whatever.
But the accusation that she's a Nazi is actually not only untrue, it's legally impossible.
It is a crime in Germany to even say Heil Hitler or to fly a Nazi flag.
Holocaust denial is a crime.
If she had said or done anything that this Nazi Melnick had said, she would be ejected from her role and prosecuted and jailed.
The insane and defamatory smears against her were built on nothing, really just a factually false smear of her published in the Toronto Sun by liberal opposition trickster Warren Kinsella.
But nonetheless, Cija, the biggest Jewish lobby group in Canada, they went nuts over her.
Here's just one example.
We're deeply concerned by Conservative Party of Canada MPs, Leslie Lewis, Dean Allison, Colin Kerry, meeting with Christine Anderson, a member of the far-right German AFD party known for Islamophobic and anti-immigrant views.
We raised this directly with Conservative Party headquarters.
So naming and shaming Conservative MPs for meeting with a Conservative member of the European Parliament.
Not just condemning them in public, but demanding that Pier Polyov discipline them.
That's what Sija was doing there.
Nothing about Jews, by the way.
Nothing about the Holocaust, by the way.
She's never said or done anything like that.
She's actually a philosophite.
She likes the Jews.
She likes Israel.
But these Jewish groups were raging against her.
Not a peep about Trudeau, though.
Not from Sija, not from the V'ne Brith, not from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Isn't that funny?
I wrote an email to those three Jewish groups, and I have some connection to each of them.
Two of them, Sija and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, didn't even write back.
I mean, why would they?
They've decided to stay quiet.
They're not going to feed the fire here.
The third group, the V'ne Brith, they wrote back.
I'll give them credit for that.
They said, hi, Ezra.
Thanks for your email.
We have researched Andrei Melnik and found one contentious statement.
It's a highly disappointing statement.
For certain, we denounce in the strongest possible terms any remarks that have the capacity to distort or diminish the facts of the Holocaust.
However, our research did not produce any evidence that suggests Mr. Melnik is a notorious Ukrainian Nazi and Holocaust denier.
Signed, Marty York, Director of Communications.
Really?
Did you not see the video?
Germany kicked him out.
When was the last time Germany kicked out a diplomat?
It created an international scandal.
Poland and Israel put up public statements condemning him.
That's not really enough to move the needle for the B'nai Brith.
Would they be making any public comment at all?
I wrote back to Marty and he said, Ezra, just to re-articulate my remarks in my previous email to you, based on the evidence available to us, we don't share your interpretation.
We will not be making a public statement on this.
Really?
A private email telling me they don't like his one contentious comment, but they're not going to even tweet about it.
But even that is more than Michael Levitt, the former Trudeau MP who now runs the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
But of course, I mean, he knows his job, used the Simon Wiesenthal Center as a forum to call conservatives anti-Semites.
He'd never say that about his boss, Justin Trudeau.
His job there is to smear conservatives, don't you know?
And Sija.
What a disappointment.
Not a peep from them.
But why?
Is it that important that they ingratiate themselves with Trudeau?
Will they literally abide a Nazi Holocaust denier just for that?
Well, that and a lot of money.
You know, you can search online all the grants from Trudeau to different groups.
Here's a list of the grants given by Trudeau to the three organizations.
25 grand, 25 grand, 25 grand, 113 grand, 53 grand, 150 grand to the B'nei Britt.
There are literally 72 checks.
It actually goes back, predates Trudeau.
I haven't at all added all up, but it's millions.
Maybe that's why the B'nai Brith won't criticize them publicly.
Criticize a Nazi, get millions of dollars from the government.
Here's the Simon Wiesenthal group, 15 grand, 27 grand.
I added it up.
More than $200,000 from Justin Trudeau since Michael Levitt, the Trudeau MP, took over a couple years ago.
No wonder Michael Levitt won't say a word about Trudeau's new Nazi friend.
And then there's Cija, the biggest group.
Here's a list of their grants.
Quarter of a million under Trudeau.
Quarter of a million dollars, including a huge chunk for, quote, fighting racism, just not Andre Melnick's racism.
That's an enormous amount of money, but in another way, it's a tiny amount of money.
I mean, is that really all it takes to make a Holocaust remembrance group accept a Holocaust denier for Jewish groups to stay silent from someone who says the Jewish community is lying about the Holocaust?
Is that all it takes?
Charges Against Trump: A Qualitative Difference?00:11:55
What do you think?
Do you think it's fine for Trudeau to swan around with a Holocaust-denying Nazi apologist?
And for Canada's regime media to ignore it?
And for the Jewish lobby to abide it or excuse it?
I'm stunned, actually.
I really am.
But I tell you one thing.
The next time Trudeau accuses a trucker of being a Nazi, you'll know he's just using the Holocaust and the loss of 6 million Jews as a partisan talking point, as a political weapon.
Trudeau doesn't give a damn about actual Nazis or actual Holocaust deniers.
He just finished spending the weekend with one of them.
He's fine with them.
And so is the Canadian media.
And shockingly, so is Canada's official Jewish lobby groups.
That's what's sad here.
You just can't take them seriously anymore.
When they cry wolf about anti-Semitism, how could you possibly believe them?
Stay with us for more.
Hey, you want to be careful about accusing your political opponents of criminality, and you don't want them to accuse you of the same easily because we don't want to criminalize political disagreements.
That's what I say whenever people say we should get Trudeau for treason.
I say, well, first of all, I don't think he's actually committed treason.
He's done some atrocious things.
And who knows?
Maybe there will be some revelations in his secret deals with the Chinese Communist Party.
He's certainly trying to stop those facts from coming out.
But we do not want to too easily criminalize a difference of opinion.
First of all, we want to have a freewheeling political public square.
And second of all, don't think for a second that it wouldn't be weaponized against our side first, because the other side has no compunction about these things.
They don't play by the Marcus of Queensbury rules.
I look at the legal troubles of Donald Trump and I compare them to the absolute immunity by the Democrats.
Here's Hillary Clinton, who tweeted this photo of herself the other day wearing a hat that said, but her emails, a reference to the illegal storage and use of a private email address on a private email server and then deleting tens of thousands of those contrary to the law.
Do you think she was charged, detained, searched, fingerprinted any of that?
Of course not.
And she's so confident that she won't be, she'll literally have a taunting ball cap pointing out her immunity.
Well, not so Donald Trump.
And joining us now to talk about his latest legal travails is our friend Ben Weingarten, the senior contributor for thefederalists.com.
Ben, great to see you again.
I'm trying to understand if these charges against Donald Trump are just more noise like the last 200 allegations against him, or if there's something qualitatively different about these because it's the legal system as opposed to just journalistic and political hatchet jobs.
Can you give our viewers, especially those of us up here in Canada who maybe aren't following it super closely, what exactly is going on with Donald Trump and the courts these days?
Well, this federal indictment is qualitatively and frankly quantitatively different from anything that we've seen in American history.
And as you noted, the use of the legal system to criminalize political dissent, certainly something that has no place in a free country, in a free society, and certainly something that is relatively anathema when you look at American political and legal history.
Now we have the first federal prosecution of a president, an indictment of a former president and leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
And the charges are very serious.
And if you take all the counts and the years associated with them together, you're talking about potentially hundreds of years behind bars.
So that is qualitatively and quantitatively different from what we've seen before.
This case, however, is consistent with what we've seen before in the sense that it represents the height of the weaponization and hyper-politicization of the national security and law enforcement apparatus and can be seen as one act of a running tragedy for America and for the free world in which there have been efforts to sabotage and subvert, quote unquote, our democracy, but really to undermine our republic.
First, beginning with RussiaGate, which sought effectively to halt the peaceful transfer of power to President Trump, then continuing with UkraineGate and the exploitation of January 6th and continuing with a slew of frivolous suits now to this one.
But again, this is different because these are espionage act charges, which not to get too into the weeds, but there's a very strong, I believe, case to be made that that's wholly inapt, that this case should have been, if it was going to be brought, that the relevant statutes would have been the Presidential Records Act.
And then on top of that, there's obstruction case of a non-crime, I would argue, layered on top.
And this is something that is meaningful for many reasons beyond being clear election interference and this arising at the very same time that Joe Biden faces charges of allegedly taking a bribe and massive revelations about his family's own dubious dealings, influence peddling, potentially criminal influence peddling with America's worst adversaries that could have really compromised national security.
But beyond that, what this reflects is essentially a bureaucratic squabble and unhinged bureaucrats launching a case against the president,
which was a phishing expedition on grounds we've never seen before applied with very odd machinations as well, given that this investigation and the grand jury originally and many of the major decisions leading to this indictment were made in a DC venue, which would be favorable to the DOJ, not in Florida, where the case is ultimately going to be heard.
So there are many in the weeds aspects of this, but I think at the highest level, we've never seen a prosecution brought like this, an investigation executed the way this investigation was executed, and a president be held, not just treated unequally, but below the law.
And you mentioned Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton was a secretary of state dealing in such information.
This is a president, and a president does have different powers from any other government officer as a commander in chief when it comes to being able to retain documents, access documents, share documents, et cetera.
So no one has ever been treated as far below the law, I would argue, as Donald Trump has been at such a senior position in the government, the senior most position in the federal government.
Yeah, it's my understanding that by nature of the office, a president may declassify anything at any time for any reason without any oversight.
It is his power alone.
And I mean, correct me if I'm wrong on that.
But also, this wasn't in, like, for example, one of the things that the Clintons were doing when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State is husband Bill was running the Clinton Foundations that was simultaneously raising donations, $10 million, $25 million from other countries that Hillary Clinton was operating with as Secretary of State.
So Hillary Clinton was making decisions as Secretary of State, and Bill was collecting literally eight-figure checks from the same countries.
Donald Trump, it sounds like, just has some paperwork at Mar-a-Lago.
He's not trying to hustle $20 million grants from Russia or Ukraine.
It just seems so qualitatively different, but they're going after him and not her or Obama or any others.
I don't know.
Let me ask you this.
Does it have a chance?
Does this have a chance of success?
Or is this such an obvious attempt to make something out of nothing that it'll fail, if not at the first instance, certainly in any court of appeal?
Does this have any chance of succeeding is what I'm saying?
Well, before I go there, let's also just note, and then there's Joe Biden, who had records from his time as a senator and a vice president when he had no authority to declassify them, let alone take them.
And they were in his possession.
His garage.
I even hasten, I even hastened to go into this double standard aspect of it because such a case has never been brought against a president or a vice president or anyone else at this level on these kinds of grounds, investigated in these ways with the shock and awe raid on his estate, et cetera.
There's nothing else like this.
And so that's why I hasten to even go into, let's look at precedent or there's a case, judicial watch pursued against Bill Clinton about tapes that were hidden in his socks drawer, which show that he basically had clear free reign to do with them as he wished.
Without even going there, this gets to the broader point that you're asking about, not so much is there merit to this necessarily, but where does it ultimately go?
And luckily in this case, unlike in many other cases, particularly in D.C., a hostile, deep state-dominated venue, it does appear that the judge presiding over this case, Judge Cannon, who was a Trump-appointed judge, made rulings with respect to a special master reviewing the documents that the FBI had taken originally from A-a-Lago, made judgments that seemed to hold merit and that seemed to challenge the government's position in certain instances,
and rightfully so.
However, what I would say is that we don't know what this jury is ultimately going to be composed of.
I mean, I trust a jury of Floridaans in a southern district, probably over in Washington, D.C.
But you know that the prosecution will be as zealous and as enraged as they could possibly be.
And the special counsel, Jack Smith, obviously does not want to lose this case.
So I wouldn't put anything past them.
Now, ultimately, where does this go?
This may ultimately end up being appealed upwards, and it could potentially end up in front of the Supreme Court.
And one of the things I've been speculating about is that one of the reasons they are now attacking Judge Cannon, they being many in the media aligned with the prosecutors bringing this case, is that ultimately this is telegraphing what they will do with the Supreme Court, which they've been attacking, as you know, mercilessly for years now, particularly as the composition changed and became more conservative under Trump,
to attack that court and call it illegitimate and to try to claim these trumped up ethics violations that are not there with respect to the likes of a Justice Clarence Thomas, for example.
And I believe that ultimately, if and when this case or several other cases, because there's other prosecutions ongoing, do end up at the Supreme Court, that there's going to be a massive campaign to try and coerce and threaten those justices directly or indirectly to rule rightly as the progressives who dominate here would like them to rule.
And I think that's where this is ultimately going: if and when any or all of these cases go to Supreme Court, and there may be other indictments forthcoming, there's going to be a massive pressure campaign against whoever is perceived to be weak knee to try and get the court to go along and make what, in my judgment, would be a grossly negligible and horrific ruling for a republic.
Walls Closing In?00:05:36
And again, more broadly for the free world.
You know, I have a question for you.
There's so many of these things, and they all sound the same to me.
This one's going to bring down Trump.
Stormy Daniels, this, you know, the Russians that look, there's just, there's been so many of these, and they all feel the same.
And I know they're all a little different, but it's such a blur.
And every time Democrat cable news whips it up, this is the walls are closing.
And we've probably all seen the TV mashup of journalists using that turn of phrase: the walls are closing in.
The walls are closing in.
They really said that for four years when he's president.
So to me, I start to tune it out as noise.
I say, oh, yeah, they're going after Trump and he's quarreling back.
I'm not even going to look at the details.
I believe that the deep state, so to speak, is out to get him.
But I guess on the other side, there's a lot of people who are either Democrats or some independents who are saying, another one of these.
I'm not going to look into the details.
I just know that Trump equals chaos.
Trump equals, you know, he's talking about himself.
He's defending himself.
He's calling for vengeance.
He's showing his emotion.
I'm not even going to look at the details.
It's just a bunch of quarreling, quarrelsome people.
So for me, I tune it out and say, oh, that's just the deep state.
But I suppose the other side tunes it out and say, oh, that's Trump.
We know he's guilty.
He's just never not in trouble.
And I guess that's a PR win for the other side.
Is there's probably more people on, there's probably enough people who are just sick of the Trump moving festival of oddities and curiosities that they say, I just got, I just don't want that anymore.
Biden is awful, but at least he's not, you know, he stumbles and he forgets his words, but at least it's not like a moving thunderstorm all the time.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, I think that's part of the point.
I think they want to instill Trump fatigue so that even people who view the deep state's attacks as egregious or who voted for Trump once or twice might say, you know, enough is enough.
I don't want to deal with the headache.
But what I would argue, the counter to that is, if you let Trump be victim of this system, you are next.
And we've already seen, and to think that someone who would be purportedly unimpeachable and have none of Trump's foibles wouldn't still be subjected to an equal assault to the extent they presented a real threat to the powers that be is beyond foolish and beyond an underestimation of what we're up against.
I mean, we've seen something akin to in Canada where you have parents concerned about their kids being indoctrinated in racial Marxism in schools or who oppose draconian COVID-19 related policies who are targeted literally as domestic terrorists.
You had a bulletin put out by an FBI office calling for potentially trying to implant spies in local Catholic churches.
This is stuff that is totally anathema to our system.
And then, of course, obviously the J6 prosecutions where you have the lowliest of people with non-criminal backgrounds who are treated as domestic terrorists.
And sometimes the federal prosecutors try to slap them with terrorism enhancements and such.
So Trump is the tip of the iceberg here.
It's potentially millions of Americans that are under threat, their liberties under threat.
And to your point, however, I do agree as well.
It's easy to become desensitized to these assaults because it's just perpetual.
But there is something different here, which is it's one thing when it comes to impeachment and removal, let's say, which is the highest of all political remedies.
Now we're talking about federal prosecutors with weaponized law at a time where any and all conservative lawyers, by the way, in America are under assault by organized pressure from the left.
There's something called 65 Project, where they target for personal and professional ruination any and all judges who might represent conservatives, for example, in election integrity cases.
The group gets its name for the 65 lawsuits that were tossed around election integrity in 2020.
So there's not necessarily people out there willing to provide defense in a federal prosecution.
It's easy to slip up and be caught on a technicality.
And essentially, you have to be 1,000% right.
And the other side can still concoct things to make you look wrong or bad and create unease within the jury.
And, you know, that's why I think a lot of people got a very weak need when they saw the indictment, because if you look at the indictment, you know, presents things that make it appear as if Trump has tried to mislead or throw investigators off from some heinous crime.
And that is what is different here is that you have the strongest, most powerful law enforcement apparatus going after him now.
And you don't know what's going to happen in a court and when it gets kicked up potentially to higher courts.
So the legal peril is more, potential legal peril here is significantly more substantial.
And of course, it's in the middle of a presidential election as well.
So on the one hand, yes, it's a never-ending assault and the walls are perpetually closing in, but not really closing in.
On the other hand, this represents kind of the heightening to its apex of the assaults because you're talking about Trump behind bars at the end of the day.
Assaults at the Apex00:10:05
You know, I see Trump has made a statement on his own version of Twitter called Truth Social.
And I'm just going to read a little bit about it.
It says, this is Trump.
Now that the seal is broken, he's talking about the information about the Biden family taking bribes.
In addition to closing the border and removing all of the criminal elements that have illegally invaded our country, making America energy independent and even dominant again, and immediately ending the war between Russia and Ukraine, I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family, and all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, and country itself.
And I read that, and I can't help.
And by the way, I think I was the biggest Trump booster in the entire country of Canada, other than maybe Conrad Black in 2016.
I mean, well, there was only two of us, us and Conrad Black.
So it's not hard to be the biggest or the second biggest.
So, I mean, and there was a lot of things I loved about Trump.
But when I read this, I think you had four years, brother, including when you had strong support in the Congress.
You didn't build the wall.
Yes, he did make America energy independent, but he didn't fight hard.
He didn't prosecute Hillary or Obama, and maybe he shouldn't have, but he was not using all the levers of state that he could.
And, you know, especially the wall rings, the wall does not ring true to me.
He had four years.
And yes, I know the problems he faced, but I know a Democrat would have forced it through.
And I don't think that Ron DeSantis is going to be able to beat Trump in the primary.
But the one thing I'll say about DeSantis is he was Democrat-like in his commitment to use all the tools available to him, all the legal leverage.
There was one prosecutor who would refuse to enforce some law.
I forget which one.
DeSantis fired him.
Like that's an unthinkable act of political power to most Republicans.
Democrats don't think twice about it.
You know, he would take on Disney and rip up their agreement.
And frankly, right or wrong, he showed a chutzpah, a willingness to do dramatic things because he had that power.
And he wasn't shy about using that power.
And I think the problem that America has, and definitely we have it in Canada too, is that the other side has no limits on their ambition and their quest for power, and they will literally do anything.
And I don't want to become like that.
I don't want to be an ends justify the means totalitarian.
But I think our side could use a little bit more courage and audacity in using the legitimate legal and constitutional authority we have.
When I look at Trump's statement, I think, I don't believe you, sir, because you didn't do it for four years.
I don't believe if he's reelected, he's going to go after Biden.
I just don't believe it.
Yeah, what I would say is I think kind of looked at from the opposite perspective, the other side, so to speak, acts with total impunity precisely because they feel they will pay nothing even remotely close to a commensurate price to the kind they inflict on their political foes.
And so it's incumbent upon anyone who wants to be the next Republican president to lay out not only concretely what their agenda is to wield power in service of just and true ends consistent with law and consistent with liberty and justice.
And at the same time, also to explain how they're going to overcome an administrative state that has become a state unto itself that acts with total impunity and that is going to be 99.999% at your throat from well before day one and throw at you everything they threw at Donald Trump in his first term and then subsequently plus, how are you going to overcome that?
And I think those are massive questions to anyone who wants to be president.
And by the way, it may be an intractable problem, at least in one or two terms, when you have an administrative state that is wholly antithetical in its views to yours, that knows it will outlast you or is confident that it will outlast you, and that holds views that are diametrically opposite and will do anything and everything to stop you within and without the law.
And that is the real challenge to anyone who wants to be an executive.
It requires the utmost thinking and prudence with respect to all of your cabinet picks and beyond.
But even that, still many layers down, you're going to be facing people who want to subvert and sabotage you.
And that's a massive challenge to overcome.
And it's why civil service reform has to be among the first items for anyone who wants to be the next Republican president.
Yeah.
Well, that's all terrifying and depressing.
You know, I saw an analysis of George Soros when he went after the district attorneys and when he went after the secretaries of state positions.
And someone said, well, that's Soros.
He is an arbitrager, and he realized you could spend $50 million or $100 million in the presidential race or $20 million in a Senate race and maybe make a difference, but you could spend $1 million in an election of this prosecutor or half a million dollars for the Secretary of State of this small state.
And on the state level, Secretary of State is not about foreign affairs.
It's about things like running the election.
So Soros thought I could spend $100 million and not win, or I could spend $1 million in 100 little races, win most of them, and make a disproportionate difference.
I don't know if there's anyone on our side who even thinks that way.
And by the way, now Soros has formally handed his empire over to his even more radical son, Alex Soros, who his first announcement, he's going to be even more political than his father.
I am worried about these things.
And if America can't resist them, well, then how could any country like the UK or Canada resist them?
I'm a little bit afraid of that.
Last word to you, Ben.
Yeah, I would just say our side has not, I don't know if it's something that it is ill-equipped to do or just has not developed the reflexes for, but the left almost definitionally has been about organizing, overtaking institutions, wielding power.
That is not something that the right has been comfortable doing.
It doesn't have muscles that's built up over generations doing so.
But I think you have to ask the question: what would a conservative George Soros do?
What would a conservative Nancy Pelosi do?
What would a conservative Chuck Schumer do?
What would a conservative Barack Obama do?
If you're not thinking the way the left thinks and operating with an equal and opposite sort of gusto and shrewdness and seriousness in your strategy and tactics, then ultimately you're going to lose.
Almost definitionally, you're going to lose.
So the right has to think more like the left, to your point, in terms of its ambitions and in terms of how to wield power in ways that are actually durable.
Because of course, if it's just executive action, we know that can be very quickly unwound while the other side is dominating all the institutions, the cultural institutions, the social and political institutions, and it sets itself up to be the dominant power, regardless of these temporary interregnums that we might have.
So we need to be thinking very ambitiously, very strategically and shrewdly and over a long term.
And that may mean taking some tactical losses in the interim to compete and ultimately triumph over the long run.
Well, that's a big, that's a tall order, but it took 30 years or maybe 60 years to get into this pickle, and maybe it'll take as long to get out.
Ben Weingarten, great to see you again.
Ben is the senior contributor for thefederalist.com.
I'll see you again soon.
Thank you.
All right.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your emails to me.
Golden Retriever says no mainstream news outlet will touch the video with the Muslim kids.
But if Catholic schools don't want pride flags, the PM has to comment on it.
Oh, absolutely right.
I mean, it reminds me of when those 50 Catholic churches were torched or vandalized.
Not a peep from anyone in the establishment, by the way.
Not from the RCMP, no politicians, no media crusade.
It was just, oh, well, you know, they sort of deserve it.
JC510 says, forcing LGBTQ doctrine down people's throats, it's going to hurt their community in the long run.
And then when will people start, and then when people start with the hate towards these groups, the progressives will move on to another political issue and abandon them.
I think they want to provoke.
I mean, There's this thing in different cities of painting crosswalks in the rainbow flag colors.
And obviously crosswalks are on the street and obviously people drive on them.
So paint a crosswalk, if there's tire marks on it, claim that it's a hate crime, rinse and repeat.
It's crazy.
On April Hutchinson, Heidi B says, I remember a time when unions actually protected their members as for athletes feeling safe and respected.
Clearly that is not happening here.
Well, there's different ways to look at it, but one way that's increasingly clear to me is that this really is a war on women.
I mean, my whole life, I thought feminism was overreaching.
I thought, you know, you have equality before the law and, you know, right to vote, right to hold any office, the right to go to university, right to do things.
War On Women00:00:52
And if women choose not to do that and they choose to be homemakers or some other path, that's their choice.
I thought feminism should take a victory lap and, you know, okay, we got what we wanted.
But incredibly, they are actually losing ground in women's spaces, whether it's a prison or a battered women's shelter or a sports team or a changing room.
Women today actually have fewer rights than women did in 1980.
Women are actually losing rights.
And I think a lot of people who would call themselves feminists are staying silent about that.
I find it very strange that me, a right-wing guy, is more feminist than most feminists.
That's our show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night.