Ezra Levant slams the Stratford Festival’s Much Ado About Nothing for rewriting Hero’s purity into a feminist lecture, calling it a "counterfeit" of Shakespeare’s intent while hiding Aaron Shields’ adaptations. He ties this to wildfire narratives, citing Edward Wackerman’s alleged Yosemite arson and Hamas’ fire balloons in Israel, warning of eco-terrorism or media-driven climate emergencies—like Australia’s 2019-20 fires—to justify crackdowns on energy industries. Veranda’s letter highlights cherry-picked summer heat as climate proof, while JNM Cross compares it to COVID lockdowns, fearing future "flatten the curve" climate rhetoric. Banzo Bean exposes Trudeau’s cabinet tokenism, linking Gerald Butts’ return to his 2019 removal of Jody Wilson-Raybould over judicial interference. Levant’s critique reveals how progressive rewrites and climate alarmism both distort truth to push agendas, undermining public trust in institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I'm going to give you a bit of a rant about a play I saw over the weekend, but I'll explain to you why it's much worse than just a few wasted hours.
I feel it's terrifying, like the Taliban destroying sculptures they don't like.
I feel like that's happening to our Shakespeare, and I'll tell you what happened to me.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month.
That really helps us float the boat here, because as you know, we don't take any government money.
That's RebelNewsPlus.com.
All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, the Stratford Festival rewrites Shakespeare, and it's as bad as you think.
It's July 31st, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Why do we love art?
Well, I guess we each have our reasons.
Maybe because it elevates us, brings us out of our daily grind, think about higher things, brings out the best in us, shows us something more than human, some wonder, some imagination, some love, some faith, some hope.
The world at its best, maybe?
I don't know.
I mean, take a look at these images.
Easy to find.
This is a particular Twitter feed called Culture Critic.
The sculptures that they show here.
How can you make stone do that?
The churches, no wonder they inspired people.
How?
Music.
Is it not the emotional soundtrack of your life?
Does it bring out your feelings?
Architecture, how you feel in certain buildings.
I mean, compare a beautiful church from the medieval ages to the brutalist architecture of the 1970s.
I don't know.
There's a million reasons to love art.
I believe that Shakespeare is an important artist, one of the most important.
He wrote 39 plays, 154 sonnets and more.
I think that in a way, his art is more useful, more approachable than even a Mozart music or even a painting.
I think you can use it, deploy it, aspire to it all the time.
I mean, you can look at a sculpture all the time too, I suppose.
Maybe you could listen to the same song all the time.
But, you know, any one of his plays, 15,000 words, I think there can be so much more in it than a song.
I mean, speaking of words, he invented hundreds of them from wild goose chase to the word zany.
His plays weren't original in their subject matter, but I think they were perfect.
He mastered the language and he mastered the human condition.
I don't know of anyone who has ever better understood what it means to be human and could express it better.
Love Romeo and Juliet.
Jealousy, Othello, Ambition, Macbeth, and it goes on.
One of my favorite Shakespeare's is a comedy called Much Ado About Nothing.
You know, a million sitcom episodes have treated the same subject.
A man and a woman who argue with each other all the time, and their friends say, hey, wouldn't it be something if we could trick them into getting together?
Well, that's basically the story of Much Ado About Nothing.
They trick Benedict, that's the man, and Beatrice into falling in love with each other.
I want to show you a beautiful treatment of this, a movie, I don't know, about 20 or 30 years ago by Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson when they were both at their prime.
And they really make the language come along.
One of the things about Shakespeare is sometimes the language is archaic.
It's difficult to understand.
But of all the Shakespeare's plays I've read, I think Much Ado About Nothing is the easiest to understand.
The jokes carry to today the best.
And with Branna and Thompson acting it, it was great.
I want to show you a few minutes from my favorite scene in the play.
And I hope it makes you want to see the play, either the movie, Much Ado About Nothing, or the play in person, or even just to read it.
Take a look at this.
They did a beautiful job.
Come hither, Leonardo.
What was it you told me of today?
That your niece, Beatrice, was in love with Senor Benedict?
I did never think that lady would have loved any man.
No, nor I neither.
But most wonderful that she should so dote on Senor Benedict, whom she had in all outward behaviors seemed ever to abhor.
Is it possible?
Maybe she doth, but counterfeit.
Faith, like enough.
Oh, God!
Counterfeit!
There was never a counterfeit of passion came so near the life of passion as she discovers it.
Why?
What effects of passion shows she?
Bait the hook well, this fish will bite.
What effects, my lord?
You heard my doctor tell you how.
She did indeed.
How?
I pray you, you amaze me!
I should think this a trick, but that the gray-bearded fellow speaks it.
Has she made her affection known to Benedict?
No, and swears she never will.
That's her torment.
She'll be up 20 times a night, and there will she sit in her smock till she has written a sheet of paper.
Then down upon her knees, she falls, weeps, sobs, beats her heart, tears her hair, curses.
Oh, sweet Benedict!
God give me patience!
She does indeed.
My daughter says so.
My daughter is sometimes afraid that she will do a desperate outrage to herself.
It is very true.
It were good that Benedict knew of it.
What end?
He would make but a sport of it and torment the poor lady worst.
I'm sorry for her.
I pray you, tell Benedict of it and hear what he will say.
What a good thinking.
Hero thinks surely she will die.
For she says she will die if he love her not, and she will die ere she make her love known, and she will die if he woo her.
If she should make tender of her love, tis very possible he'll scorn it.
For the man, as you know all, hath a contemptible spirit.
Oh!
Ah!
This can be no trick.
The conference was sadly born.
They have the truth of this from Hero.
Love me!
Why?
It must be requited.
I hear how I am censured.
They say I will bear myself proudly if I perceive the love come from her.
They say, too, that she will rather die than give any sign of affection.
I did never think to marry.
I must not seem proud.
Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending.
They say the lady is fair, tis a truth, I can bear the witness, and virtuous, tis so.
I cannot reprove it, and wise.
But for loving me, by my truth, it is no addition to her wit, nor no great argument of her folly, for I will be horridly in love with her.
I may chance have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me because I have railed so long against marriage.
But does not the appetite alter?
A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.
Shall these quips and sentences and paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humor?
No!
The world must be peopled.
When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.
Shakespeare's Quirks00:10:26
I've seen that movie five times, and this weekend, I'm back in Canada after so many far-flung travels.
I thought, you know, let's do something in Ontario.
And the missus took me to see Shakespeare at Stratford, Ontario, which is about a 90-minute drive outside of Toronto.
And the whole town is based on plays and Shakespeare.
And to my delight, the set for this play looked normal, not some weird political statement.
The actors were normal.
And I say this because if you go to a lot of plays these days, there's politics forced down your throat.
I saw the show Oklahoma a couple months ago, and the central prop were Bud Light Cans.
And they were handing Bud Light out and drinking Bud Light and throwing.
And I just thought, I'm so distracted.
It was awful.
I left at halftime, or I saw The Winner's Tale, and there was some trans subtext.
Can I just see a play?
And I did, and I loved it.
There were a lot of black actors playing it, which I thought was excellent.
It was a little bit confusing to have a white dad with a black daughter, but I have to say that all of the actors of every background were outstanding.
I'm not against actors of other races playing other races.
Ben Kingsley was excellent in Gandhi.
In the Emma Thompson Kenneth Brown movie I just mentioned, Denzel Washington played a key character.
So it was excellent.
I thought, good, finally, I can see Shakespeare done right, and everyone was on their game.
But the play is about staying pure until marriage.
That's one of the themes.
There's a young woman named Hero who's going to be married to Claudio right away.
They get engaged very quickly, and they're about to be married in like a day or two.
And they're both young and they're both perfect for each other.
But here's the plot: the night before their wedding, a villain wants to destroy things.
So the villain gets his own servant to have noisy sex with his own mistress while calling out Hero's name.
And the villain makes sure that Claudio and his friends hear it.
So this is the night before his wedding, and he creates a trick to make it seem that his intended bride is disloyal the night before.
So obviously it's a calamity.
I mean, this play was written 400 years ago, but that would be a calamity today to encounter what you thought was your bride having sex with someone else the night before your wedding.
So it was a shocking moment of the play.
Hearts were broken.
The villain is caught and confesses it, and Shakespeare solves this plot by having this young woman, Hero, die.
She doesn't really die.
And then coming back as her cousin or relative who just happens to look the same and marries Claudio and happily ever after.
But there I am in Stratford watching this, and that happened in the play.
But then the play didn't end on that happy ending.
They added on additional scenes.
It was in old-timey language.
It pretended to be Shakespeare, but the play ends there.
I've read the play, I've seen the play, I've seen the movie.
It ends.
But in this Stratford version of the play, Hero lectures Claudio, basically saying, well, if I did have an affair, what's it to you if I did?
And I'm not saying I did, but if I did have an affair.
And it was so bizarre.
And then Claudio literally prostrates himself, bows down, face to the ground, while an angry hero lectures him that she can sleep with whomever she wants.
What?
That is the opposite of the entire play, the entire plot, the entire context.
That is not Shakespeare.
They called it Much Ado About Nothing.
They advertised it that way.
They claimed that it was Shakespeare, but it was not.
You could say it was Shakespeare in transvestism.
It was Shakespeare in drag.
Aaron Shields is the writer who thought that she is a world-class historical cultural figure by rewriting Shakespeare.
And you have to dig deep on their website or in their program to find out additional text by Aaron Shields.
That's quite something.
Imagine if you had a Bible and you had additional text by Aaron Shields, just adding a few things in.
And let me read from Aaron Shields' official website.
She needs a website.
Shakespeare doesn't have a website.
He doesn't need one.
He was perhaps the most influential writer in the English language in all of history.
So he doesn't need a website.
But if you've never heard of Aaron Shields, she has a website and she'll tell you, quote, most of her work highlights the negation of or misrepresentation of women in classical texts by adapting these stories through a feminist lens for a contemporary audience.
But it wasn't a misrepresentation.
It's a play.
It's a work of fiction.
But it absolutely was the state of affairs back 400 years ago in England.
And even now, not only in much of the world, but I put it to you in 2023 in Stratford, Ontario.
It is the social norm that if a bride was having noisy sex with someone not her betrothed on the eve of marriage, that would break the marriage off.
But not to Aaron Shields and Stratford, who want to rewrite this misogynist play.
They kept it largely hidden.
It was called Much Ado About Nothing.
It was a Shakespeare play.
Aaron Shields' name was not on it.
It was a counterfeit.
It would be like seeing Romeo and Juliet without suicide.
It would be like Merchant of Venice without mentioning the Jewish merchant, no pound of flesh.
Those things may disturb you.
I mean, I find The Merchant of Venice a challenging play.
There is anti-Semitism in it.
It's a plot line there.
But if you don't like it, don't change it and pretend it's Shakespeare.
Stratford is a huge cultural engine.
There are many theaters, hundreds of millions of dollars, both public and private money, dedicated to the theater, but especially dedicated to Shakespeare, even the town name, the place names.
It was dedicated to this cultural pillar of the West, and it has been stolen and invaded and colonized by woke radicals.
Look, if you don't like Much Ado About Nothing, which is a funny play, fine, everyone has a different taste.
Why not write your own play under your own name?
You know, Wizard of Oz is a fun movie that is almost 100 years old, actually.
And there's a revision to it.
It's a Broadway play called Wicked from the point of view of one of the witches.
And it's a great play.
And by the way, it's very successful.
It's a huge commercial success.
People really like it.
It's not called The Wizard of Oz.
It's called Wicked.
It has its own writers.
And by the way, they made it a success.
If you're going to revise Shakespeare, say so.
Call it a feminist revision.
Why trick people and hide what you've done?
I started poking around the website of Stratford.
I came upon their DIE, their diversity, inclusion, and equity statement.
It's 14,000 words.
It's as long as a Shakespeare play.
Shakespeare play takes about two and a half hours to read.
That's how long their diversity and woke policies are.
Look, what else do you propose to change and sort of sneak in as a stowaway?
Maybe the King James Bible?
Well, fine, I guess.
I mean, it was revised too, right?
But King James put his name on it, letting you know it was his version.
That's what we often hear, King James version.
If you want to change the Bible, put your name on it and see if people will read it.
But what else would we change in the arts because we don't like it in the lens of 2023 woke studies?
Change the Mona Lisa because it's sexist in some ways.
Change Mozart musics.
Destroy a sculpture like the Taliban do because we don't like it according to our progressive instincts.
Are Aaron Shields and the actors at Stratford as good as Shakespeare, as interesting as Shakespeare?
Would you buy a ticket?
Could you sell out a theater if they put their names on it and said that this is their interpretation, their revision?
Will their work be read 400 years from now?
Will Aaron Shields bizarre feminist take where brides can have sex with whoever they want noisily on the eve of a wedding?
Will that be a cherished work of art 400 years from now?
No, it wouldn't even be a cherished work of art today.
No one would pay to see it today were it not for their deceptive advertising.
Don't ever trust Stratford again.
I say that with a broken heart.
They can't convince you to like their feminist revisionist propaganda on its own, so they'll pretend that it's actually Shakespeare's work, oh, with additional script from Aaron Shields.
Don't go see Much Ado About Nothing.
There's still some wonderful parts to it, if you know, which is Shakespeare.
But if you watch the whole thing and actually listen to what you're watching, you might end up hating Shakespeare, too.
Hot Arson and Climate Antifa00:15:38
Hey, our friend Mark Marano was on Fox News.
Take a look at this interview.
He was on Jesse Water's show.
Take a look.
Says some European landowners don't have the money for forest maintenance.
It's costly.
So instead of paying a fine for not maintaining the underbrush, they'll torch it instead.
The producer says it's common knowledge.
And last year in Portugal, CNN reports two firefighters were arrested for setting forest fires in order to give their fire company more work, Cha-Ching.
So what about here in America?
Remember those awful wildfires in Yosemite last year?
Multiple states are under red flag warnings.
That is the highest level of alert for wildfires.
It's all due to a combination of high, blistering heat of low humidity and strong winds.
So it wasn't the heat, humidity, and winds after all.
It was Wackerman.
Edward Wackerman has just been busted for the Yosemite arson.
He could be responsible for destroying 130 homes and 20,000 acres.
And remember the smoke bomb from Canada?
The sky was orange.
The East Coast strapped their COVID masks back on?
Well, the Toronto Sun reports that cops suspect arson was behind that major wildfire in Quebec.
So yeah, it's hot.
Maybe it's getting hotter.
But before we blame Republicans like Hillary Clinton did this week, let's take a look at the guy with the book of matches, author of the green fraud, Mark Morano, joins me now.
So Mark, can you distinguish between an arsonist fire or winds blowing an already hot forest?
No, not really.
Not once they start.
And it looks like they started these fires, the arsonist or the unnatural way, at the worst possible times with high winds, with dry conditions, with heat.
So it sounds like they may even have known what they're doing.
And there's two different aisles.
There's the Rhodes Isle and the Corfu Isle.
And both of them now, the officials are saying these are intentionally started.
And they actually said they're basically sick individuals who get pleasure out of causing other people pain.
And this, of course, happened in the United States.
You mentioned Yosemite, that was a Democratic donor who was actually given a Democratic candidate.
So we have Democratic politicians blaming wildfires on climate change when in reality it was one of their donors who actually started the wildfire.
And this goes to Australia.
42% of the Australian fires were said to be caused by mankind.
They've had 700 unnatural fires started over 250 arrests a few years ago in Australia.
This is a global problem of people starting this.
Now, is it climate change?
Well, this would be the equivalent of blowing up a dam or sabotaging a dam and allowing a valley to flood and then saying, oh, look, climate change is causing more floods.
There's other forces at work here, Jesse.
Joining us now from his lovely globally warmed patio is our friend Mark Morano.
Mark, great to see you.
Whenever people say global warming causes forest fire, they're trying to scare people into thinking it's so hot.
It's so warm.
There was some kind of natural combustion.
You saw that head of the UN the other day talking about global boiling.
You know, they're trying to imply that there's some spontaneous combustion.
I think that's their message track.
They're trying to imply it's so hot, things are just conflagrating.
But it's arson or other human, you know, not putting out a campfire or throwing out a cigarette.
That's what's causing most of these fires, isn't it?
Yeah, it is human caused.
It's just not climate change.
Well, a couple of two background things on wildfires and forest fires.
Dramatic declines in the last hundred years in Canada and the United States and Europe, globally.
Even the United Nations acknowledges this.
Even our national climate assessment, that's really not in dispute.
We've now forest fires and wildfires are down dramatically, even hot spots like California, San Jose Mercury News, big newspapers have reported, first of all, centuries ago, California had much worse droughts and wildfires.
So there is no increase in wildfires.
Now you can always find an increase as or if you pick one region of California or one region of Western Australia, and then you pick like since 1998, there's been an increase that this continues.
So that's how they do it.
And the other thing they do is they show you, and I call it like sort of the casino effect.
You walk in a casino and you see a wall of slot machine winners, right?
You'll see someone, there's $10,000 winner, there's a $100,000 winner.
Look, that person won $300,000.
I got to play the slots.
Everyone's winning.
It gives you the impression that everywhere they're paying out huge sums and you got to play because you're going to be a winner too.
Your chance of winning the lottery very low.
Your chance of someone somewhere winning the lottery is very high.
So what they do with wildfires in all extreme weather is they highlight every single event to show you as though this is some kind of unprecedented record-breaking event and they combine them all over.
They can always find a, you know, you can always find a lottery winner.
You can always find a slot machine winner.
And they put them all together on the nightly news and the corporate media and they run with it as though it's unprecedented.
It's not.
We know that on climate time scales, they're not.
So those, that's an important, and then actually a third point, this is important before we talked about wildfires, is there not even a good metric of climate change?
This isn't a good way to measure whether climate change is real or accelerating or happening or man-caused because wildfires depend on land usage, politics, forest management, water diversion, tree maintenance, all sorts of other issues that have nothing to do with carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, or anything like that.
But if you want to play that game, of course they're down.
So we're now finding out whether we're talking Australia or Greece or Italy or Canada or the United States.
It's either a majority of fires can be started with arson or as you mentioned, campfires, unintentional.
But the point is they're still human caused.
In the case of these arson, a lot of these seem to happen during a time when it's a max impact, meaning dry, hot, in a time where you just wouldn't want to see that happen.
And we're finding here in the United States, we just had a major arson event revealed.
A Democratic donor, not making this up, Ezra, started a fire in Yellowstone, was being prosecuted for it.
This Democratic donor actually gave to Democratic politicians who later then tried to make hay out of these forest fires and wildfires and claiming they're caused by climate change when in reality, the fire was caused by a Democratic donor.
So you have Democratic politicians blaming wildfires on climate change that were actually caused by their own Democratic donors.
That's the absurdity we're facing right now in the climate arena, if you will.
That's a comment you made on Jesse Water's show on Fox.
And I wanted to ask you for more information about that because there are some people, pyromaniacs is a phrase that we used to use, arsonists, people who get a psychological thrill from lighting fires.
There are some people who just do it for terrible kicks, who want who almost like there are some mass shooters who do it for the celebrity.
I think that there is a strange psychological thrill that some of these deranged people get.
Here's what I want to ask you.
And maybe you don't have the information, and if so, that's fine.
But I believe you when you say a Democratic donor was the arsonist.
Do you think that this was just a deranged person who happened to be a Democrat donor?
And it's a coincidence.
You know, there are criminals who donate.
There are deranged people who donate.
And it just is, I mean, I would call it a coincidence.
Or do you think that rather than a psychological derangement in the criminal act in that way, do you have any information that the arson was done to promote the narrative of global warming?
Because that's a whole different thing.
It's one thing for a crazy pyromaniac to be a Democrat.
I won't be surprised, but frankly, he could be any political stripe.
But if the fires were set knowing, uh-huh, this will make the news, this will promote the narrative, this will help wake people up to the threat of global boiling.
Do we know if it was a political arson or just a pyromaniac arson?
Well, we don't know if it was political, but this was summer of 2002, last summer.
His name is, this is not making his name, Edward Wackerman, and he was from California, and he's now been charged.
This is according to the Washington Free Beacon, and he's a donor of thousands of dollars to many Democratic candidates.
He's being charged with starting the fire with arson.
In most cases, and particularly the Greece fires, which are occurring right now, the authorities there are basically saying these are people.
It's an arsonist mentality.
It's twisted.
They sort of bring, they get a pleasure.
It's pyromania.
They get a pleasure out of bringing sort of pain and seeing this massive destruction.
It gives them a feeling of power.
You can get into the whole psychology of an arsonist.
But no, to answer just directly, no, we don't have evidence that he did this to sort of hype it.
However, it does make you wonder.
I mean, if you think of someone, you know, say someone sabotages a dam and creates a great flood, I wouldn't be surprised the media then says, hey, look at this, the valley is flooding.
This is climate change.
I mean, this is the kind of thing you got to start wondering.
And it's the same.
It's not very far because you have the Harvard Environmental Law Review this year, Ezra, saying that energy companies should be prosecuted for climate deaths because use of fossil fuels is creating wildfires and droughts and tornadoes and hurricanes.
It's really, and this is in our premier environmental journals.
This isn't like I'm quoting you a Greenpeace blog.
So it's not very far-fetched.
And it's not a far-fetched idea to think that someone's mindset could be like, gosh, this forest is dry.
And gosh, we really need Joe Biden to declare a national climate emergency.
Let's help them along here.
Because whether they do it intentionally or whether they're, as Joe Bastardi, the meteorologist, says, climate ambulance chasers, in the end, is there really much difference whether you start it intentionally or whether you just, excuse me, or whether you just exploit that bad incident or the wildfire or the hurricane to use it to get political climate emergency declaration and or use it as an excuse to prosecute energy companies or pass the Green New Deal or whatever you're trying to push in the climate agenda.
There's really not much difference.
You're right.
And of course, the worst people here are the media spin doctors who say this is proof.
So whether or not the arsonist was politically minded or just deranged is irrelevant because it's weaponized the same way by the media.
But I can't help but think back a few years with the Black Lives Matter riots around America.
And maybe you recall seeing a few people dressed head to toe in black, complete black block anonymity, face covered, black umbrella, who had a specific baton in hand.
And to get the riot started, he would go and smash windows, smash, smash, smash, because riots require some sort of starter pistol, the first person to do the first violent thing, and then everybody pours in.
And we saw social media footage of people who were clearly agents provocateurs who were clearly going to get this party started, like Ray Epps on January 6th.
But in this case, they were completely anonymous.
The riot was ready.
And so I would be disappointed.
I would be scared.
I would be shocked, but I would not be surprised if the same bad actors who wanted those riots in the summer of 2020 wanted the arson in the summer of 2023 because it's all just political math for them.
It's all just, can we get the images?
Can we get the social political feeling?
If you have people starting riots and they cause burning and they cause death and destruction, why wouldn't they start a fire?
In fact, in many ways, it's a lot easier and less risk of being detected.
Yeah, in the case of the Greece fires, they actually have a video of the man actually starting it.
And I mean, you can watch this from, I guess it was aerial footage or satellite photo of something.
It might have been.
It may have been a drone.
But to your point, we had many instances here in the United States during the Black Lives Rally burning of cities.
You could call it, where they'd show up, you could actually see piles of loose bricks would show up on the sidewalk.
And the idea would be to start breaking storefronts, all to sort of ignite that incident.
You can go back to the Vietnam War, our government, the Gulf of Tonkin.
Anything is always, you always need the spark.
The question is, is that you could also refer to this as climate Antifa if they are out there trying to start these wildfires to create this kind of emergency.
But the key is they're also on the flip side of that.
They really are just kind of the way a school shooting generates the gun control excitement.
You know, they'll seize on any opportunity, weaponize it, and they're almost excited when a school shooting happens because then they can start pushing legislation.
It's that same thing again.
So the question is, and now you're going down a rabbit hole of dark conspiracy, some people would say, of what came first, the chicken or the egg.
Ultimately, it may not matter because especially with extreme weather, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, there are always going to be, just like there's going to be a lottery winner, just like there's going to be a slot machine winner somewhere, you're always going to have your example and your case to show up and try to, I guess the word would be a psyop.
And my phrase this past couple of weeks with the heat wave and the wildfires and the UN saying it's global boiling is we're moving now, I think officially from the COVID psyop to the climate psyop.
And of course, a psyop, just a psychological operation, is a government.
You can even see government corporate collusion narrative where all the information is sort of controlled to lead the public into one direction, that this is unprecedented, this is happening, and we need to basically give up more rights in order to fight the climate emergency.
The same way we had to give up rights to fight the COVID emergency.
And right now, this week, now, remember, a week ago, it was two weeks ago, it was the heat wave.
And I could go through every one of those claims in the heat wave and have some fun with you to explain in a sentence or less why they're all bogus, unprecedented.
They were not unprecedented.
But it's shifted now to the wildfires.
And what they don't want you to talk about is the lightning strikes and the arson and the intentional firing.
And this goes all the way.
I mean, in Australia, at one point, they estimated 42% were arsonists or unnatural causes.
They arrested hundreds of people in one year alone in Australia a few years ago for intentionally setting fires.
And Australia, of course, is having their political battle on climate.
I can't answer because I haven't seen prosecutors say that any of the actual arsonists were motivated to start these fires, but it's a certainly legitimate and valid question to be asking.
Well, and we've seen this used in other jurisdictions.
Political Arson Suspected00:04:05
I'm familiar with Israel, where in a Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, they would send fire-starting balloons over to Israel.
And within Israel proper, the forests were attacked for arson by terrorists.
It was a political weapon.
In that case, it was designed to genuinely harm the environment, harm the forests, harm the fire department.
So they weren't trying to build a political narrative.
It was other than you are vulnerable.
We are everywhere.
You can't protect all of your forests.
So terrorists in Israel, terrorists against Israel, have used arson as a weapon.
It is not inconceivable that the same kind of eco-terrorists who do horrific things to build awareness would do horrific things here.
And by the way, all it takes is one in a million people.
Is there one in a million people crazy enough, immoral enough, cold-blooded enough, sociopathic enough that they would start a fire if they thought it was for the right reasons?
I think the answer is absolutely.
And they'd be normalized.
Last word to you, Mark.
Do you think, I just don't think this is ever going to stop.
Fires are natural.
200 years ago, forest fires would rage completely uncontrolled over North America.
They would wipe out, well, I mean, no one knows how much territory they would wipe out because there are no contemporaneous records.
But before European settlement in North America, I could imagine forest fires burned until they burnt out.
And by the way, that was a natural thing and they regenerated.
And obviously it was a healthy cycle of nature.
There always will be fires from natural causes.
And I think that political arson is absolutely something we have to consider.
Last word to you.
Yeah, in fact, when I did my Amazon rainforest documentary, I interviewed experts and talked to scientists.
Going back to like 15th century, the indigenous people, people always say, oh, the indigenous people of the world, they're earth-friendly.
They live in harmony with the plants and the animals.
No, they said you could fly over the Amazon if you could fly over the Amazon in the year 1500.
You'd see fires all over the place, slash and burn agriculture.
The American Indian, to use the politically incorrect term, would hunt species to near extinction, buffalo off of cliffs and herding them.
So the idea these fires have been caused by man for years.
And the other thing you could argue, interestingly enough, and I've seen evidence of this, the whole smoke, if you're worried about forest fires, you ought to be worried about Smokey the Bear.
Smokey the Bear may be responsible.
Remember, he was the one who started the early 1970s the fire suppression ideology among the green movement, which infected and we're still dealing with in places like California, where they believe all fire is bad.
So we must suppress it constantly year after year, decade after decade.
And what do you do?
They're building up a giant tinderbox, and that tinderbox is going to blow.
Whereas, you know, the actual good forest management is you have controlled burns, you keep it thin, you keep it cleared, you don't let the fuel load, i.e. the dead branches and leaves and pine needles, grow.
So Smokey the Bear might be responsible as well.
But I think you're absolutely right when you're dealing with this.
It's a valid question, but I'm not aware of any prosecutors anywhere, whether it's Australia, Greece, United States, or Canada, who have said this person started it because they are a climate activist and wanted essentially to put political pressure to make a climate emergency worse or appear worse.
But it might just be, Ezra, that our prosecutors aren't asking the right questions and aren't thinking outside the box like that.
And I think you're on to something here.
Very valid.
Well, we'll have to keep our eyes peeled.
I certainly hope that's not a new kind of political crime.
But I just say again, there's such mania out there.
Drummed up.
I mean, this global warming here is so insane.
I think it pushes even one in a million people pushed to the brink is enough to create terrible things.
Gerald Butts Rumors00:02:48
Mark Morano, boss of climate.com.
Great to catch up with you again.
Thank you, Ezra.
I appreciate it.
Our pleasure.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Veranda says, in the last hundred years, we've had summers with 35 to 40 degrees Celsius.
Now with climate change, we have the very same 35 to 40 degrees Celsius.
However, presented by your local forecast with the map painted in red.
Yeah, I mean, it's called summertime, and they really connect it to global boiling.
We have cold winters too, but don't you dare say that that's global cooling?
Don't you know the difference between weather and climate?
JNM Cross says, this may be your most succinct, most correct, most rational commentary yet, Ezra.
What about China's unchecked pollution?
Is it really about saving lives, saving the earth, saving non-renewable energy sources?
Of course not.
about control and fear is the shortest and strongest path to control you know they really did try out so many new things during the covid lockdowns that they are going to repeat from fear to the concept of lockdowns to emergencies to you know just two weeks to flatten the curve just two years till we flatten the curve of you're going to hear flatten the curve for climate too I promise you that.
Boy, they learned all the wrong lessons, didn't they?
Banzo Bean says Trudeau and friends turned their entire society into an elementary school classroom with a dumb authoritarian teacher in above his hat, teaching obedience disguised as reason, expertise, and authority.
Yeah, but what is so disappointing to me is that it seems to have worked.
You know, they did a cabinet shuffle, so many positions like, you know, musical chairs, but really, does it make a difference?
First of all, his appointments to cabinet are based on demographic tokenism.
It's so clear to me that the people he appoints don't actually do the work.
And second of all, I think that we've never had a government more controlled by the center before.
It's all controlled out of Trudeau's office.
I see gossipy rumors, I don't know if they're confirmed yet, that Gerald Butts is back in Ottawa helping to run the show and getting ready for the next election.
I have not had that confirmed, and that might just be some gossip, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
Gerald Butz, the disgraced former aide to Trudeau, who was ejected from the PMO for his outrageous role in sacking Jody Wilson-Raybold, the former justice minister who opposed Trudeau meddling in court cases.
He left in disgrace, but he's been warmly welcomed back by the media party and the political establishment.
Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know?
Oh, well, we'll keep up the fight.
That's our show for today from all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home.