Ezra Levant and Ben Weingarten examine Missouri v. Biden, a July 4th federal ruling blocking U.S. government censorship of online speech—including pandemic and election debates—after evidence revealed collusion with platforms like Twitter to suppress dissenting voices, often targeting conservatives. Canada’s lack of legal pushback against lockdowns or QCJO license denials (e.g., Rebel News) contrasts sharply, while Ray Epps’ uncharged January 6th involvement and defamation lawsuit against Fox News raises questions about selective prosecution and potential government informants. Historical cases like CESIS’s infiltration of the Heritage Front and alleged CIA overreach underscore a shadowy "military-industrial complex" of agencies and censors, now weaponizing narratives to justify crackdowns. Legal and cultural resistance must unite to counter this coordinated assault on free speech and Western values. [Automatically generated summary]
A very special conversation with one of America's smartest commentators, Ben Weingarten.
We're going to talk about an amazing 4th of July court case in America striking down government censorship of the internet.
Well, we Canadians can only dream of that.
But before we get to that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to the video version of this podcast.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month, which might not be a lot of dough to you, but it really adds up for us.
And that's how we stay independent of the government.
We do not take, we do not ask for, we would not accept money from Trudeau.
And it shows.
That's RebelNewsPlus.com.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Freedom and Censorship in America, a feature interview with Ben Weingarten.
It's July 18th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
You know, I can't get over the fact that in Canada, our Supreme Court has yet to hear a single case involving infringements on civil liberties during the lockdowns, during the pandemic.
The pandemic started three and a half years ago, almost three and a half years ago, and our Supreme Court just, you know, really couldn't be bothered, more important things to do.
And really, what would the point be, given that very early on, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court announced his own vaccine mandate for the court itself, for the building itself.
If you weren't jabbed, you couldn't work there.
I mean, there's no guessing how he would rule on that issue.
He ordered his own staff to be jabbed or be fired.
Really, what's the point of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms?
I say this because I look South and for all their problems and for all their scandals and all their corruption, which of course is endemic in most modern democracies, at least they have some checks and balances.
At least their Supreme Court does step in every once in a while and stop out-of-control government policies.
At least their version of our parliament, their Congress, has some ability to investigate the powers that be, unlike our system here.
And so while today we're going to delve into the American crisis, Canadians should have no sense of righteousness about it because everything we're going to talk about today is worse in Canada.
Not just worse in terms of the depth of the problem, but worse in terms of the reporting on the problem and the response to the problem.
And you'll see that as we go through.
Today, we will deal with four American issues and who better to walk us through These, then Ben Weingarten, a friend of ours.
He's the senior contributor to the Federalist and the columnist at Newsweek.
He joins us now via Skype.
Ben, great to see you again.
And I know you're in the thick of what feels like a corruption parade, but at least you know about it.
At least it's exposed.
Am I right?
Well, great to be with you.
And we had a massive July 4th Independence Day treat here in a federal judge down in Louisiana defending free speech, the First Amendment on which all of our other liberties and justice in this country rely, delivering a massive win in a landmark case, freezing our federal government-led speech police here.
And so, to your point, we do have a system of checks and balances.
We do have three branches of government.
Sometimes the courts are able to bail out some of the worst inclinations of the other branches of the government.
Other times not.
Sometimes the legislative branch steps up, does its oversight duties, and sometimes even legislates and remedies real problems.
Other times not.
But the trajectory, the trend is at an accelerating negative pace.
And we are, I guess, in many ways following in the footsteps of the rest of the West.
Thankfully, our progressives are slightly behind.
The system itself is an exceptional system.
And I love this country.
And so for anything that I say about corruption of its institutions and such, to me, it's not a reflection on the country.
It's a reflection of institutions and people not living up to the rich heritage and the incredible history, doing injustice to the founders of this place, who, in my view, created the greatest country in the history of mankind.
And that's one of the reasons why I feel so compelled to expose when institutions and individuals do not live up to it, because there is no other place for people who love liberty and justice to go ultimately.
And if the U.S. loses its birthright, then so too will the rest of the West.
So it's a long-winded way of saying great to be with you.
We have problems here, but we also have a model that provides more than all the solutions.
Yeah, you're right.
And of course, I'm a Canadian, born and bred, and I love Canada.
I mean, that's why I'm a critic.
During the depth of the lockdowns, some of my friends, including some of our staff, relocated to America.
They just said, I'm not built for this.
I don't want to live under a curfew.
Government Censorship and Media Loss00:15:27
We had an entire province that was under a curfew, Ben, like they were children.
And this was a curfew for people sick or healthy, vaccinated or not.
I mean, imagine a province of 8 million people under a curfew.
And no challenge to that.
And certainly no rebuke by the courts.
Just astonishing.
So, yeah, and the censorship issue, you talk about what a glorious day, what a symbolic day to have that volley for victory.
And I know the case you're talking about.
You recently wrote about it in the Epoch Times, one of our favorite newspapers.
Your coverage of it was headlined: U.S. government says inability to censor you causes it irreparable harm.
And you're talking about, I think we're talking about the same case, which was basically a lawsuit brought by in part by our friend Janine Yunus, who we used to interview a lot, challenging the government for pressuring social media companies into silencing critical voices.
Are we talking about the same case, Ben?
We are.
Well, why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Because we've heard of that case.
We haven't had Janine Yunus on.
Sure, she's available anymore because she's no longer with the new Civil Liberties Alliance, which was like a civil liberties law firm.
She has actually gone to work in the Congress on a government committee against the weaponization of the state, which is just incredible.
I'm so glad she's there.
But I think that means we can't chat with her about things in the same way as we did before.
But why don't you tell us a little bit about the case?
Janine told us about the case as it was filed.
She told us that it had a certain focus, especially on the pandemic.
But maybe you can tell us about the ruling because we haven't had a full briefing on that yet.
Tell me what the court said, how it said it, and how quickly it enforced it.
There were some wonderful parts about it, and I don't think it's got enough news up here in Canada.
Yeah, so first of all, the context for this case, which I would describe as maybe the landmark digital free speech case to date, a historic one potentially, and one that may ultimately end up at the Supreme Court here.
This case, Missouri v. Biden, was brought by multiple state attorneys general.
They were joined by some of the key signatories to and brains behind the Great Barrington Declaration and then some groups, one conservative media outlet, and then another anti-sort of draconian COVID regulation organization.
And basically, what they alleged was that the government, in tandem with, and when I say the government, I really mean almost the entirety of the federal government, in tandem with certain putatively academic slash research organizations that bill themselves as anti-disinformation outfits,
but in reality serve as government surveillance and censorship cutouts, coerced, cajoled, and ultimately colluded successfully with the social media platforms to surveil and ultimately censor and mass Americans and non-Americans tweets, Facebook posts, et cetera.
And what they revealed in just the discovery in this case, which led up to this initial ruling from the judge, revealed the greatest censorship regime, arguably, in the history of mankind.
And that is sort of how the judge himself described it in saying that if what the plaintiffs allege is accurate, and he, by the way, in this ruling, which I'll get to in a moment, says that they are likely to prevail on the merits of their case, that this has been a massive First Amendment violation by government authorities.
So what exactly did that regime entail?
And this is laid out in massive court filings, which have more than enough smoking guns if we had a real media for people to win Pulitzers over, but they don't cover it.
And they say this is a nothing burger.
At least they did until this ruling came down.
What this shows is a coordinated effort led by the national security and public health apparatus to, again, work with and in some Cases help foster the creation of these third-party cutouts at prestigious institutions like Stanford University, for example, to work with the social media companies to essentially identify specific stories, entire narratives, accounts, individual pieces of content,
show them that those ought to constitute violations of terms of service, hoover up and mass these examples of putatively offending content that constitutes quote-unquote missed diss and malinformation, and then feed it to the social media companies and tell them: kill these accounts, undermine these narratives, silence and mass effectively millions of Americans, prevent people not only from speaking, but from listening.
And the evidence in this case is overwhelming and unbelievable.
And again, it's only based on preliminary, limited discovery.
That discovery has included depositions from many of the government agents who led this effort to go about censoring wrongthink.
And this goes to a broader worldview that we've talked about before, which the government has effectively codified through this public-private censorship regime of saying wrongthink ideas, opinions, and not just opinions, but inconvenient facts that we don't like or that conflict with our favorite narratives threaten national security or will get people killed because they won't be vaccinated.
And consequently, that gives us a right to push the social media companies to engage in quote-unquote content moderation.
This started all with the idea that there was foreign influence operations using social media to undermine democracy, quickly turned to domestic wrongthinkers, and it exploded in a few different realms.
First with the Hunter Biden laptop story, the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story, which in and of itself constituted maybe the gravest American national security information operation in American history on the eve of an election.
Election interference, effectively, in grooming the social media companies to censor that story, which is part of this case.
Then it moved to election integrity and outcomes.
You're not allowed to question mass mail-in balloting.
You're not allowed to question irregularities, historically outcomes that you've never seen before, et cetera.
And then expanding to virtually every aspect of COVID-19 from its origins to mitigation techniques, draconian lockdowns, and then to a whole slew of other issues.
And you had federal authorities, again, working hand in hand with the White House, who was publicly and privately using its bullhorns to yell at essentially the social media companies, you got to do something about this misdis and malinformation that's killing people, on top of lawmakers who threaten, obviously, with legislation and regulatory remedies, pursuing the big tech companies, and then these third-party cutouts as well.
So it was a concerted effort.
It led to probably hundreds of millions, if not more, of pieces of content being censored.
This case exposed it all.
So for those who think that the Twitter files were revealing, I urge you to check out the case docket in Missouri v. Biden and specifically this ruling that this judge, Judge Dodie, put forth.
Now, to that ruling with that long-winded wind-up for it, what the judge said was, again, the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits that this was a massive First Amendment violation that took place.
And what he did was he issued a preliminary injunction freezing government speech policing directly and by proxy.
Said that all manner of defendants, again, myriad government agencies, the White House, and basically prevented them from continuing to communicate with social media companies about wrongthink.
Overwhelmingly, of course, they targeted conservatives in the wrong think censorship operation, as well as even coordinating, including with their third-party private quote-unquote cutouts, private cutouts who often themselves had incestuous relations with the government agencies and, again, consulted with them in the creation of these outside, quote-unquote, anti-disinformation organizations.
So the judge said, we are freezing federal government-led speech policing.
And this led to, of course, two responses from the government.
One was to appeal the injunction, and that appeal is pending right now.
The other was to seek a stay, freezing the freeze of the speech police.
And that freezing of the stay prompted this piece that I wrote, which argues essentially that what the government is saying and seeking to freeze this injunction is they want to keep violating your First Amendment.
They believe that what they did was not the greatest, not imposed the greatest censorship regime in world history, arguably, but that they ought to be able to continue doing it.
And that actually, and this is a legal term of art, but I think it should be understood plainly, that it causes the government irreparable harm for the First Amendment to be defended because it could lead to threats to, in the government's word, democracy and therefore irreparable harm to the government.
So the government is essentially unrepentant in its censorship.
It sought to freeze the freezing of this censorship regime.
And thankfully, Judge Dodie smacked the government down and rejected, denied their motion for a stay.
And so that injunction is in place right now.
We know this in part because FBI Director Christopher Wray testifying before the House Judiciary Committee himself noted that his agency had issued guidance for complying with that injunction.
Now, I'd really like to see what that guidance looks like.
I think every agency implicated in this lawsuit ought to show us what the guidance looks like and how they're complying with it.
But nevertheless, this is a massive victory for free speech in America and really free speech in the world when you're talking about these platforms, which, of course, have customers that are everywhere on the planet.
Well, you're so right.
I mean, even here at Rebel News, the very things you said the government was tackling, they tackled in us.
We lost our YouTube monetization.
The last straw was a Donald Trump comment that I think, like it was when he was president.
He made a statement as president.
We reported it as the news.
It was questioning the validity of the 2020 elections and the fairness.
We weren't even taking sides.
We were just showing what the president said.
That was the excuse to turn off about a million dollars a year from rebel news.
We were also lost our ability to do what's called super chats, which was 400 grand a year, because we said things we weren't supposed to about the pandemic lockdowns.
So, you know, our YouTube rep is based in America, but we're here in Canada and we suffered the same thing.
And I have no plans, but Ben, if that censorship was illegal and that censorship basically contracted out privatized government censorship, so the government itself didn't issue a court order.
The government just leaned on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram to do the censoring for them.
But here the judge is saying that's the same thing.
I wonder if companies, maybe not in Canada, but in the United States, look, we're surely not alone.
There's countless companies who have been truly damaged by this government action.
We always assumed there was some government pressure there, but it sounds like this ruling proved it.
I wonder if American versions of our company would be able to sue YouTube and or the government for the loss of revenues caused by illegal government-imposed censorship.
What do you think of that?
I think this certainly opens up a strong legal argument for it.
To your point, for example, I mean, there's a class of people, mainly but not always conservatives, who simply for expressing their legal opinion lost millions of dollars because of this government infringement.
Sorry, I interrupted you.
Go ahead.
No, and there actually is an aspect of Missouri v. Biden where there was an attempt to turn it into a class action suit.
The judge did not rule in favor on that effort, but that doesn't mean that it can't necessarily be brought by other parties, maybe in another court.
And to your point, what this case points to is that in U.S. law, based on case precedent, the government can't get a private actor to do what the government itself legally cannot do.
And so, you know, there are many on the government side who are arguing, well, look, there's no coercion here.
We're just pointing out, we're just talking to social media companies about how, you know, have you looked at your terms of service around hacked and leaked materials?
And, you know, then in the run-up to an election, say, be on the lookout for hacked and leaked materials.
By the way, did you update your terms of service about it?
And then, oh, you know, watch out.
There might be something around Hunter Biden.
According to Yoell Roth, this is one of Twitter's former chief censorers.
He wrote an affidavit, a sworn affidavit, saying that the government was tipping Twitter off to the coming of something like the Hunter Biden laptop story.
And then that story comes out.
And then under their hack and leaked policies, they censor the story.
This is the government saying, well, we're just forwarding along en masse Twitter and Facebook accounts and specific posts to the social media companies and saying, take a look at this.
And then we'll follow up and we'll say, did you take any action on that?
And the government's saying, well, that's not coercion.
Okay, leave aside the fact that you're talking about the most powerful agencies in America, that they have regulatory authority and legislative authority and all manner of other authority, implied or explicit, and that this is essentially the mafia saying, nice business there.
Same if it'd be a shame if something happened to it.
What Philip Hamburger, who you mentioned, the NCLA, Philip Hamburger leads that organization, I believe.
What he's argued in a Wall Street Journal editorial that I think everyone ought to read is that even if there isn't a smoking gun of coercion, and by the way, there are many smoking guns, again, in this case, abridging free speech, abridging the First Amendment itself, of course, is a First Amendment violation.
And so you have that in spades here.
Abridging means to shrink, to in any way infringe upon the free speech right.
And obviously, that has happened en masse, as this case has illustrated.
So I think to your point, look, there are millions of people who have been harmed as a consequence of the censorship regime.
Their business models, as yours has been, have been upended.
People have lost their most basic right to speak freely and to listen.
And again, to your point, thank God there is a First Amendment.
First Amendment Defense00:03:30
You look at the history of it, and many of the founding fathers here didn't even want a Bill of Rights.
They didn't believe it was necessary because the Constitution said, here's what the government can do, and then went silent about all the things it cannot do, precisely because it was not supposed to be able to do them.
But some founders felt, as a matter of compromise, they needed to codify these natural rights that were assumed and that the government should have never had any business infringing upon.
And yet still you've had this raft of violations of it.
So thankfully it's codified in the First Amendment.
Thankfully, we still have some judges who have some intestinal fortitude and fidelity to the Constitution, but the federal government is fighting this.
It's going to an appeals court, and this may end up ultimately the Supreme Court, as I noted.
And this term, Justice Gorsuch noted sort of offhanded in one of his opinions, the idea that the Supreme Court might have to deal with essentially issues around censorship of speech, for example, on COVID-19.
So that may have been teeing up what is to come in a future Supreme Court term.
And I hope the Supreme Court, well, I hope the Supreme Court doesn't have to rule on this, that it never even gets that far and that this is dealt with at lower courts.
But if it does, I hope and pray that they're the defining word on this and upholding and defending the First Amendment for Americans and people around the world.
Yeah.
Well, we can only dream of that outcome up here.
Rebel News itself has been a litigant in some free speech battles, and we've had some good luck, by the way.
Twice we beat Trudeau when he tried to block Rebel News from attending our version of your presidential debates, our national leaders' debates.
Twice we beat him, and we're in court against him on a number of other matters.
You probably don't know this, Ben, but Trudeau introduced a journalistic license in Canada called the QCJO, Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization.
It's administered by our version of the IRS.
We call it the Canada Revenue Agency.
You have to apply for this journalism license, and a government panel investigates you.
They turn down Rebel News saying we weren't real news.
We weren't trustworthy news.
Yeah, Justin Trudeau certainly cannot trust us.
I'm very proud of that.
So we are moving through the courts on that.
That's what it looks like in a country that does not have a First Amendment, Ben.
Literally applying for a journalism license.
You know, I recall that during the Cold War, you needed a license to have a typewriter in Romania.
You needed a license.
And they took a sample of, because I don't know if you remember the old time typewriters when the actual keystrokes.
So each typewriter was a little bit different.
The letter R was a little bit higher.
So it was like a fingerprint.
So they would take typing samples from your typewriter when you register it with the police.
And the reason was if they discovered Samizdad, if they discovered illegal political comments, they could trace which typewriter was used.
That is a true story.
I invite you to read the history of licensed typewriters in Romania.
And that's where we are in Canada.
You need a government license to do journalism.
It's just completely outrageous.
I am jealous because for all of the flaws that you describe in your system, at least you have some parts of it that are working.
January 6th Protests00:14:13
I could spend the whole show talking about that case, Ben, but I do want to talk about a few other things just to fill up on American news because there's so much going on down there.
I want to show you a video.
And my favorite congressman by far, it's not even close, is Thomas Massey of Kentucky.
He's so great.
He's so smart, first of all.
I think he's got a master's degree in science.
He's just such a, he really is a deeply educated, intelligent man, but he's got old school values.
He's also a farmer.
He's a carpenter.
He's a renaissance man.
He's got a great sense of humor.
And he loves freedom.
I don't know what you think of him, but I think he's the number one congressman.
And here's a video of him a few months back pointing out that the instigator of the January 6th great meandering through Congress Caught on video exhorting people to go inside to storm the place.
Ray Epps was his name.
He was on an FBI Most Wanted promote poster, still is, and he's never been arrested.
Here, take a look at my favorite guy, Congressman Massey, raising the issue.
Take a look at this.
There's a concern that there were agents of the government or assets of the government present on January 5th and January 6th during the protests.
And I've got some pictures that I want to show you, if my staff could bring those to you.
I'm afraid I can't see that at all.
Is that a new video?
All right, you have those images there, and they're captioned.
They were from January 5th and January 6th.
As far as we can determine, the individual who was saying he'll probably go to jail, he'll probably be arrested, but he wants every, but they need to go into the Capitol the next day, is then the next day directing people to the Capitol.
And as far as we can find, this individual has not been charged with anything.
You said this was one of the most sweeping investigations in the history.
Have you seen that video or those frames from that video?
So as I said at the outset, one of the norms of the Justice Department is to not comment on impending investigations and particularly not to comment about particular scenes or particular individuals.
Okay, without, I was hoping today to give you an opportunity to put to rest the concerns that people have that there were federal agents or assets of the federal government present on January 5th and January 6th.
Can you tell us without talking about particular incidents or particular videos how many agents or assets of the federal government were present on January 6th, whether they agitated to go into the Capitol and if any of them did?
So I'm not going to violate this norm of the rule of law.
I'm not going to comment on an investigation that's ongoing.
Looks pretty suspicious.
Everybody else was arrested.
A lot of those January 6ers are still in prison for what Gavin McInnes calls the great meandering.
I got a real kick out of that.
It was not a riot.
There were some windows broken and someone took Nancy Pelosi's lecture and it's true.
But to call that a riot is a disservice to the mostly peaceful riots that the Black Lives Matter movement spent so much energy doing.
This was a meandering.
But that same Ray Epps, that's the name of him, is suing Tucker Carlson and Fox News for saying what Representative Massey said.
Here's the headline in the New York Times.
Arizona man cited in conspiracy theories sues Fox News for defamation.
Ray Epps, a two-time Trump voter, sure is, says Tucker Carlson repeatedly and falsely named him as a covert government agent who incited the January 6 attacks.
What do you make of this, Ben?
Well, first of all, let's briefly talk about Ray Epps.
It strands credulity, or it's hard to imagine someone caught more red-handed in, from the government's perspective, provoking an insurrection, a massive domestic terrorist attack, a domestic terrorist attack that is on par, according to senior Democrats in America with the depths of the Civil War or Pearl Harbor or 9-11.
This man is on camera screaming for people to do that.
two days in a row, including on January 6th.
He's at the start, the very start of the breach.
He's coordinating with people seemingly on the ground during that day.
This is someone who I believe used to be the leader of the Oath Keepers in Arizona and the Oath Keepers has been treated as tantamount to a domestic terrorist organization and had their members who participated in the Capitol riot or even, you know, purportedly were coordinating the riot subject to prosecution.
So how in God's name is this person not pursued by a Justice Department that's pursued dozens of people truly for mulling around essentially inside the Capitol and then people who weren't at the Capitol, who has pursued nonviolent offenders, people with no criminal records, people who didn't destroy anything, et cetera.
And here, as you know it, you have a person who was there right when the breach occurred, who was clearly calling for this with his rhetoric on camera, who's affiliated with an organization that's been pursued.
Why isn't he pursued?
And that has led to questions of, well, look, we know, according to court filings and then according to reporting, that there were substantial federal assets on the ground.
And there's a question of were there just informants on the ground or were there actually agent provocateurs on the ground?
And then you start getting into the issue of, okay, were cops provoking people to try to further incite that riot.
And this is cast as conspiracy, conspiracy theory and such.
You know, this is MAGA extremists talking about false flag attacks and such.
But to the extent there's any conspiracy theory here, leaving aside the fact that we know that there were assets, that there were informants on the ground in court filings, and that we know, by the way, that many of the groups implicated in this were penetrated by government authorities historically.
Set aside all of that, why won't government authorities give straight answers about whether and to what extent there were informants, other assets on the ground?
What were they doing that day?
Were they coordinating with people who engaged in violence or other acts of criminality that day, et cetera?
And every single time these questions come up in congressional hearings, FBI officials, Justice Department officials, they stonewall.
They stonewall time and time again.
And so that will only fuel conspiracy theories.
The fact that Ray Epps himself, after all this time, has not been charged only further fuels conspiracy theories, particularly because it's not only that he hasn't been charged, but he is lauded by the likes of the January 6th committee.
He's lauded by the New York Times and defended by those kinds of publications.
Now, as for this filing against Fox News, there are many interesting aspects of it.
One of them I just point out off the top is that Epps is represented by a lawyer who's associated with David Brock, who's one of the Democrat hatchet men par excellence in America, which is kind of a curious thing because Epps in this filing is described as a two-time Trump voter, an avid Fox News watcher, I think a former Tucker Carlson fan, et cetera.
I don't know any two-time Trump voting Tucker Carlson fans who would go about hiring Those who are colleagues of ultimate Democrat hatchet men like David Brock.
But okay, set that aside for a moment.
Interestingly, in this filing, he says that the DOJ contacted him and essentially said charges were forthcoming.
Now, I believe that this filing was from May.
So we don't know yet whether charges have been filed, but by all appearances, they have not been filed.
So are they forthcoming?
What are those charges going to look like?
As many observers have noted, including Revolver, by the way, and Revolver has done some of the best investigative work on who all the people were in these groups, like Oath Keepers, who were pursued, why some people were not pursued, which is very curious and leads to the question of, you know, were these informants or other protected government assets that had infiltrated these groups.
Set that aside for a moment.
Revolver has a very good deep dive into the filing.
And, you know, what they kind of point out is, can you, the question, and this is me paraphrasing here, but can you find anyone similarly situated to Ray Epps who has not been charged?
And then also, when the government pursues people, oftentimes they do it with these raids, these shock and awe, SWAT team kind of raids.
Ray Epps gets a call essentially, and his toller charges are likely forthcoming.
Now, maybe those charges have been handed down.
Maybe they will be handed down.
Are those charges going to look like the charges for those who engage in similar acts?
We don't yet know.
Laughably, one of the things that Epps raises is that he was likely to be charged because of the notoriety that Tucker Carlson gave him.
So the implication there then is that Merrick Garland snaps to attention when Tucker Carlson covers Ray Epps, who's on camera multiple times, who testifies before the JSICS committee, et cetera.
Very striking.
And, you know, in the Revolver piece, they go into kind of what are the legal angles here and what is the point of raising Tucker Carlson's name in connection with this?
Why go after Fox News and why go after Fox News right now?
There are all manner of interesting threads there.
But Ray Epps presents the ultimate curious case in a scenario where the government is pursuing literally everyone and their mother and their grandmother and their grandfather associated with January 6th.
Yet this person who couldn't be caught more red-handed in the way of calling for storming the Capitol and then being right there literally on the front line somehow seems to skate free.
We'll see what happens ultimately if and when he is prosecuted, but it's certainly a case worth watching because January 6th, as I noted within days of it occurring, and I wrote about it, the Federalist, I believed would be used, exploited to engage in a jihad against wrongthinkers in America.
And that's absolutely what has happened.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny, the New York Times article, when they talk about Ray Epps, they soften the language.
They say it was a pro-Trump demonstration.
Ray Epps would never be part of a riot or a terrorist attack.
When he's involved, it's just a pro-Trump demonstration.
I love that.
You know, in Canada, Ben, Trudeau was trying to replay the theater of January 6th, violent, far-right MAGA.
He was trying to graft that American narrative onto the Canadian truckers.
And I really think he would have gotten away with it were it not for citizen journalists who were embedded with the truckers and showed how peaceful they were.
In fact, I should tell you, Ben, that there were tens of thousands of truckers, hundreds of thousands of people who came out along the way.
I believe that as many as 1 million Canadians either participated or physically watched as the truckers went by.
Like even in Toronto, the largest city in Canada, overpasses were jammed with people who just wanted to see, is this real?
Like it was a phenomenon.
It reminds me, our Canadian viewers don't know what I'm talking about, Terry Fox.
People just wanted to see with their own eyes.
And were it not for citizen journalism, they would have been called violent, uprising, insurrectionists.
And it's a terrible factoid, but we should never forget it, that there was only one shooting in the entire trucker convoy.
There was a shooting in the Capitol.
A security guard shot an unarmed U.S. veteran in the Capitol.
So there was a murder, or at least a killing, you could say, in the January 6th, there was one person shot, Ben, in the whole trucker convoy and all.
And I don't know if you know who that was.
It was our reporter, Alexa Lavoie, who was standing with a camera filming a tense but peaceful standoff in Ottawa.
And a policeman took a riot gun, aimed it at her, and shot her.
The only person over weeks and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who were showing.
Now, a fellow could come up with a conspiracy theory about that.
Or you could just say that's a hell of a coincidence.
But I think that they wanted a replay of January 6th in Canada, but they didn't get away with the narrative because the truckers were completely peaceful.
In fact, the Ottawa police said that crime fell in Ottawa because you had all these do-gooders in town.
Beyond Galling Coercion00:04:56
They were tidying things up.
They were shoveling the snow.
I was there.
It had a festival feeling.
And forgive me that detour, but I wanted to tell you that they wanted to replay that story in Canada, but they failed.
And I think our coverage was the reason why.
But you're right.
There are historically infiltrators and agents provocateurs in all these groups.
In Canada, and Ben, forgive me for going on, there was something a generation ago called the Heritage Front, which was a racist neo-Nazi group.
And it turns out that the man who literally led it, who recruited members, was an agent of CESIS, Canada's version of the CIA.
The boss, his name was Grant Bristow.
So there's such a paucity of actual terrorists, actual racists, actual Nazis, that the government had to create one.
In Canada also, the Canadian Nazi Party, you'll find this hard to believe, was literally financed by the Canadian Jewish Congress.
They admitted it in McLean's magazine.
I find these things so distressful because we're such peaceful, friendly, happy societies, but these government agencies need chaos, violence, threats, and fear to justify their own existence and their budgets and their crackdown on people.
And I think it's in both countries.
It's just that in your country, it smoked out a little bit better.
Thanks for letting me go on a five-minute rant, Ben.
What do you think of all that?
It's beyond galling, and it causes you to take a fresh look at history and the narratives that are put forth.
A narrow point, but a big one, is you talk about licensure necessary to be a journalist.
Precisely because social media platforms permit unlicensed journalists are why governments loathe the social media platforms and seek to use them essentially as intelligence assets and as information operation assets to propagate favored narratives and suppress disfavored ones.
The notion of entrapping people.
And the most remarkable thing is that most of the terrorist attacks that happen in America, legitimate terrorist attacks, to a man, almost every single person is on federal authorities' radars.
So how is it that they are able to strike?
And in many instances, it's incompetence, but in other cases, you do have substantial evidence of the government is working with someone, tailing someone, et cetera, and then they end up engaging.
Or to your point, you have something like, for example, the Governor Gretchen Whitmer case right before, of course, the 2020 election, where it certainly appears that people were entrapped.
And you've had cases dismissed or missed trials, I believe, in connection with that.
But that was heralded as a, this is what right-wing extremism leads to in America, kidnapping attempts against the governor and threats on her life, et cetera.
And it calls into question your views on the fidelity of all these agencies.
And right now, conservatives in America, and even beyond conservatives, agencies like the FBI have totally lost the confidence of the American people.
They've lost the confidence of people in Congress.
We'll see how far Congress goes beyond its oversight duties in terms of, for example, there's funding on the table for a new FBI headquarters.
You have House Republicans here saying not a single penny for that new headquarters.
That's sort of a starting point in this.
But where does it go in terms of reforming agencies that end up being turned against the very values and principles they're supposed to defend and uphold?
And it's beyond galling and distressing in part because you need the country defended.
There are adversaries out there working every single day, day and night, to undermine us, erode our freedoms, infiltrate and coerce people into undermining the country.
And, you know, my fear is I've been long focused, for example, on communist China.
I know you are too, in terms of the existential threat it poses to the West.
But we won't even get around to combating communist China if our own government institutions are turned against the very, in our case, republic that they're supposed to defend.
And so that's why one of the reasons why I am so laser focused on the weaponization of these institutions, because you can't survive long term with these imperative institutions being not only woke, but weaponized against 50% plus of a country.
Yeah.
You know, we're almost out of time and you're very generous to spend so much time with us, Ben.
Weaponizing Institutions00:04:45
But I think more and more about RFK Jr., who's running an insurgent campaign in trying to get a Democratic primary.
I don't think they're going to let him win.
I think they're going to be more brutal towards him than they were towards Bernie Sanders challenging Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
I listened to RFK Jr. and I don't agree with him on everything, but he talks about these things and he talks about censorship.
He is being censored.
He talks about the deep state.
He doesn't really use that language, but I mean, he believes that his family was killed.
And he has some evidence to support it.
And it was Dwight D. Eisenhower who first warned about the military-industrial complex, if I'm not mistaken.
Who was it?
Was it him or was it John F. Kennedy who said the CIA needed to be smashed into a million pieces because it became, took on a life of its own?
The CIA, the FBI, these other agencies, the fact checkers, the censors, they are a shadow government.
And that's not conspiracy theory talk.
They are the ones who have been doing this.
The censorship that you started our show with today, Ben, it was not passed in a debate in the Congress.
It was not subject to committee hearings and votes and lobbying.
It was all done in the shadows.
And that's not a conspiracy theory.
That is a conspiracy.
Ben, you've been great as always.
Last word to you.
We've been pretty pessimistic because we're talking about all the bad things, but there are some good things out there.
The important 4th of July court case in Missouri.
Sorry, the Missouri case that was heard in, I think, Louisiana.
There are some flickers of hope.
I think Elon Musk is cause to be hopeful.
I don't want to get my hopes too high, but they're rising.
There are some positive signs out there.
Is there any?
What's your prediction?
Are we going to win this one for freedom or are we just going to become like the Matrix?
Well, I think to your point, there are positives that we can point to.
We are probably more knowledgeable about the level of corruption and deceit than ever before.
I'm keeping an eye on here beyond the court cases, also legislation, because court cases, while great and while incredibly impactful here, at the end of the day, you need legislation to codify it.
And in my view, it's crazy that we're talking about needing to codify the First Amendment because it's right there.
And as the founders felt, you shouldn't have even needed it in the first place.
Clearly, we did, however, you shouldn't need to codify it, but I'm looking at legislation right now.
There are spending bills out there and some other legislation percolating that will push towards defunding and dismantling the federal government-led part of the censorship regime.
Now, by the same token, the longer-term problem that we have ultimately is that this doesn't come from nowhere.
This comes from a culture which increasingly among the elites subscribes to the view that conservative speech or dissenting speech from ruling class orthodoxy is harmful, and that therefore the answer is we have to censor.
And there's a limitless array of reasons why censorship is justified under that sort of worldview.
So, ultimately, at the end of the day, you can have great court cases, you can have legislation, these factors matter, but you need a culture to sustain it.
And the left side of this is very organized.
They never stop fighting.
They're engaged in a million-front war.
And we are just waking up to it, probably don't fully comprehend the reach and the extent of it.
So, the optimistic side is: look, we've barely even begun to marshal a counteroffensive here.
The downside is they're way ahead and they control all of these influential institutions.
So, you have to hope that what is good and what is right ultimately prevails, that you may lose a series of battles and it may be hard fought over time, and you win the war.
But the other aspect is there's no other choice.
If we want to live in a free, truly Western society, then you have to fight for these values and principles.
And it's our generation's turn to rise to the occasion.
Ben, what a beautiful way to end our conversation.
Thank you for giving so much time and thoughtful comments to us.
We've been talking with Ben Weingarten, senior contributor at the Federalist and Columnist at newsweek.com.