Ezra Levant slams Chrystia Freeland as a Soros-linked political operator who mocked Atlantic Canada’s carbon tax struggles, dismissed tourism concerns with absurd claims, and flaunted $800 "Mew Mew" sneakers while using taxpayer-funded luxury transport. Meanwhile, Israel’s judicial reforms—seen by critics like Joel Pollock as balancing overreach from a left-dominated Supreme Court—spark global alarm, with protests in Jerusalem’s Dhansakh Garden framed as existential threats despite most Israelis favoring compromise. Levant warns of foreign-backed "color revolution" risks while defending classical works against woke distortions, arguing authenticity matters amid cultural power grabs. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm going to show you a few things about him, including some you might not have heard before.
Then we're going to have a good conversation with Joel Pollock about what is going on in Israel.
Are they really on the brink of some sort of civil war?
And is George Soros involved?
And then I'm going to read some of your letters about Shakespeare and Stratford.
That's all ahead, but I want you to get the video version of this podcast.
Please go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month.
You get the video version, and we get the eight bucks.
And I know that doesn't sound like a lot to you, but it's a lot to us when it all adds up.
It's how we pay our bills.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, is Christia Freeland even worse than Justin Trudeau?
It's August 1st, and this is the Edge of Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious thug!
We focus on Justin Trudeau because he's the boss, because he's the incarnation of the woke globalist male feminist narcissist.
I mean, he's world famous that way in a bad way.
He's routinely mocked overseas.
The first time Trudeau showed up at international events, his gimmicks worked just because they were funny.
He showed his fancy socks, he hugged people in that really personal, space-violating way.
But after that, world leaders, by which I mean the serious men and women of the world, they realized there wasn't really anything behind Trudeau's vacuous exterior.
He's not a thinker, he's not a doer, he's a mascot.
That's the best word for him, I think.
That's why there are so many videos of him walking aimlessly through these international meetings.
No one has anything important to say to Trudeau, and he has nothing important to say to them.
Even at his favorite hangout, the World Economic Forum, when he's given the floor, when the world's movers and shakers, people in his vein, the globalists, the progressives, when he has their attention, he gives some cloying self-promotional speech about how he's teaching his boys to be feminists.
And a big part of these conversations have to be men.
We have to do it.
I was pleased when President Biden was standing up for women's rights in the Canadian Parliament.
Guys, men have to have conversations with their boys.
I have a 15-year-old son who spends too much time on the internet, and I know the kinds of things that are out there, the sneaky misogynism that sort of slips through in workout videos and bro videos.
Having those conversations are way more difficult for me than having just the basic birds and the bees conversations.
Anyone talk about birds and bees anymore in this era of too much information on the internet?
But having those difficult conversations now about women's rights, about equality, about these things that are core to how boys are raised, this is something that men have to be better allies on and part of.
And that is something that we will continue to be pushing in Canada and everywhere around the world.
I mean, you've got billionaire investors, you've got world leaders, you've got the masters of the universe there, but Trudeau has nothing to talk about other than his socks and how he tells his boys to be feminists, you know, like he is, inappropriately grabbing any woman he works with and firing women who disagree with him, like Jody Wilson-Raybold, that kind of feminist.
I've been reflecting very carefully on what I remember from that incident almost 20 years ago.
And again, I feel I am confident that I did not act inappropriately.
But part of this awakening that we're having as a society, a long-awaited realization, is that it's not just one side of the story that matters.
That the same interactions can be experienced very differently.
from one person to the next.
And I am not going to speak for the woman in question.
I would never presume to speak for her.
But I know that there is an awful lot of reflection to be had as we move forward as a society on how people perceive different interactions.
Like I said, I do not feel that I acted inappropriately in any way, but I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently.
So yeah, I think the only person in the world who was surprised when Justin Trudeau didn't win a seat on the Security Council of the United Nations, which is voted on by all the countries, I think the only person who was surprised that he didn't get one of those temporary seats was him.
Oh, and the Canadian media party.
They are still that way.
Just the other day, the Global Mail literally tweeted that Trudeau was going to be a key player in the NATO-Ukraine negotiations.
Did they really believe that?
I think Canada's actual military contribution has been to send one leopard tank, one.
Canada couldn't even participate in the latest NATO training exercise because none of our planes were airworthy.
And remember this, when Trudeau was supposed to chair some panel and he slept in or was drinking the night before or was hitting the bong or something.
He literally didn't show up.
Remember this?
The extraordinary panelists that we have assembled, if I can briefly introduce Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, will be coming here momentarily.
He's going to slot.
Yes, thank you, Prime Minister.
That's the empty chair.
We have, of course, Latvian Prime Minister.
How embarrassing is that?
Did the Globe really, truly think that such a poser was going to be a key player in NATO?
Or were they just saying that as part of some grant application to get more money from him to bail out their newspapers?
So yeah, Trudeau, an empty suit, except he doesn't even wear a suit half the time.
He's more comfortable just being himself.
By the way, I don't think he's any more pro-gay pride than he is pro-feminist.
It's just whatever he needs to say to get through the moment and to demonize his opponents.
I don't think he actually believes in anything.
You can tell he's down in the polls, though, because he's playing that card again against conservatives.
It always works.
So yeah, Trudeau, he's the worst.
He's the symbol, the epitome, the distillation of it all.
He's so vacuous and he's such a sneak.
I think one of the reasons why he's so absolutely low in the polls with young men, it's absolutely his worst demographic by far, is because young men see he's sneaky.
He's fake.
He's a fake feminist.
He's a trickster.
The good professor Gad Saad has a phrase for men like that.
It's a bit rude.
He swears.
It's funny, but he nails it.
Just listen to a minute of this.
Remember, I talked about male social justice warriors as sneaky fuckers.
It's an actual term, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, sneaky fuckers is actually not a term that I came up with to be profane.
It's actually a zoological term that captures in nature the idea of kleptogamy, where you're trying to steal mating opportunities.
So for example, let's say you have a type of fish where there are two phenotypes of a male, you know, of a male.
There's the dominant physically imposing male.
And then there's a whole bunch of other males that actually pretend to be females so that they can sneak by the dominant males and then have a surreptitious coupling opportunity with the females.
And that became known as the sneaky fucker mating strategy.
And so in the parasitic mind, I argue that male social justice warriors are instantiating a form of sneaky fucker strategy, right?
Look, look, I'm very sensitive.
I hug trees.
I cry when I watch Bridget Jones' diary.
See, I'm not, you don't have anything to be afraid of.
And then hopefully that can allow me to have access to some willing and available female.
That professor is making a point.
Trudeau is a sneaky trickster.
His male feminism, his progressivism, it's fake.
It's just to get in good with minorities or women or whomever.
In reality, Trudeau isn't just sexist.
He actually sexually assaulted Rose Knight and afterwards gaslit her, saying she experienced it differently.
Men, other men can detect fake feminists or sneaky effers, as Gad Sad would call them.
Many women are tricked by it, though.
That's why it works.
That's why, though, the latest abacus poll shows that young men, especially from the prairies, are the most distrustful towards Trudeau of any demographic group in the country.
Seriously, Trudeau's at around 10% with young men.
I think Indigenous people actually feel the same way about him, too.
They saw his fake suck uppery 10 years ago, but then the mask slipped and he revealed himself, especially by his treatment of Jody Wilson-Raybel.
Did you see this clip of Trudeau getting booed at a large Aboriginal event a few weeks ago?
Hello, my friends.
We have been waiting for this moment.
Yeah, they discover what a sneaky effer he is.
So yeah, Trudeau.
But would you agree with me that Trudeau doesn't actually do a lot of the decision-making in the government?
By his own admission, he's a relationship builder.
He's a schmoozer.
He's a talker.
He's a narcissist.
He's an emoter, whatever.
But he's not deep into policy.
He's not a doer.
He's not a hard worker.
He's a show up, wave for the cameras, and then go surfing kind of guy, like he did on that National Reconciliation Day.
He just went surfing.
The person in government who is hands-on the most files, who Trudeau trusts and delegates to, is actually Christia Freeland.
She's got a work ethic, by the way.
She calls the premiers.
Jason Kenney and Doug Ford used to say they spoke to her all the time.
She's the decider.
She deals with the things that Trudeau finds boring.
Now, don't get me wrong.
She's not particularly bright or thoughtful.
She actually ran a business before she came to parliament.
She ran a business called Reuters Nick.
She destroyed the entire company.
After she ran it, they literally euthanized it.
They shut the company down.
She destroyed hundreds of jobs.
But, you know, she shows up.
She fills the void that Trudeau leaves.
Remember when Trudeau met with George Soros in Davos back in January 2016?
Most of the time, you only see the picture of Trudeau and Soros.
But Christia Freeland was in the picture too, the three of them.
She is Soros' woman in Canada.
She was Soros' official biographer before she got into Canada's parliament.
She is Soros' key contact up here.
She's weird and quirky.
She clips her toenails in parliament, which I think is odd and sort of gross.
You get a certain vibe off her.
I mean, I guess we all pull our pants out of our bums sometimes, but it just seems like she's doing it all the time.
Most of the time, she just talks blather in the most condescending way imaginable.
And that's enough to bore journalists into moving on.
That's a great skill for a politician, by the way.
It's just to be a fog machine that blunts any questions.
George Orwell, in his book 1984, called that duck speaking.
But I'd like to show you a few of her recent comments because I think that if you put aside your visceral contempt for Trudeau, the sneaky effer, and if you persevere through Freeland's duck speak fog machine, if you actually ever listen to her, I think you might agree that she's worse in some ways than Trudeau.
Why She Bored Journalists00:09:04
Here, listen to this question to her.
And I know this was from a couple days ago, but I've been turning it over in my mind for a bit.
Look at this question about the carbon tax going up in Prince Edward Island and the Atlantic provinces.
I just want to play the full version of this.
Her whole answer, not just the goofy ending part, because I want you to hear the fog machine, the duck speaking in her condescending tone of voice before her clanger of an ending.
Remember this?
I did want to say one more thing, though.
I don't need you to retread the ground you've gone over because you've answered this question from the other side.
But you are facing a lot of pushback in this region, in particular, from local politicians, local provincial governments that say this, they're not opposed to it, but it's coming too soon, too fast.
They need more time to adapt.
What do you say to that?
You know what?
I say I do really understand.
I really understand the challenges.
And I do believe that the challenges are different in small towns, in places with less public transit, than they are in big cities.
You know, I right now am an MP for downtown Toronto.
A fact that still shocks my dad is I don't actually own a car because I live in downtown Toronto.
I'm like, I don't know, 300 meters from the nearest subway.
I walk, I take the subway, I make my kids walk and ride their bikes and take the subway.
It's actually healthier for our family.
I can live that way.
I wanted you to hear the first part of that too, because of the non-answers, the condescending tone, the disrespect of not answering a plain question plainly, like you're a child.
It's how Kamala Harris talks, meaningless word salad while smiling at you and nodding.
Oh, we love PEI.
We support it.
And we talked about your question.
But she did actually say something at the end.
Be like her and don't drive.
That was her message at the end.
Take a bike, take the subway.
Her dad is so surprised with her, and we should be so impressed with her.
She doesn't even have a car.
Hey, did you know that?
What a role model.
She doesn't even have a car.
Except, of course, she does have a car paid for by the taxpayers.
She has a limo and a chauffeur, courtesy of you, the taxpayer.
And as Sheila Gunnread has shown, and as Black Box, excuse me, has recently republished, Christy Freeland's limo driver actually drives hundreds of kilometers in any given day, which actually makes no sense.
Parliament Hill is a very small place, and Freeland's downtown Toronto riding is a very small place.
It's not like a giant rural riding.
So how does Christia Freeland rack up hundreds of miles a day in her chauffeur-driven limbo?
Well, take a guess.
I'll tell you.
She flies private between Ottawa and Toronto, and she sends her car along the way to meet up with her, to be on the other side, because don't you see, she deeply cares about carbon and emissions, and you should be more like her.
She doesn't even have a car, you see.
She's a role model.
By the way, there are no subways in Prince Edward Island.
I think that there are no subways for more than 99% of the Canadian population.
A sliver of a fraction of Canadians are along a subway line in Toronto and Montreal.
And there are some bare-bones light rail transit schemes in places like Calgary and Edmonton and Vancouver.
And apparently, Ottawa has been trying to build one for years, but just can't crack the high technology needed to make it work.
It's sort of weird.
Imagine the hubris of telling Prince Edward Islanders to just take the subway like her.
Or just ride your bike in the winter with young children to get groceries in rural Prince Edward Island.
I mean, you didn't get more tone deaf than her, but the condescension of it all while she lectures him.
But hey, don't you realize that PEI doesn't tax itself more?
Tourists will stop coming to visit.
Don't you know she actually said that?
I have to say, failure to have a climate plan is actually the death knell for the Canadian economy.
People will not want to buy the stuff we make in Canada if we are not making it in a green way.
People will not want to visit our country if they do not see that we are energetically embracing the green transition.
They'll go to places that aren't embracing that.
So I really believe very, very strongly that our green policy is an economic growth policy.
Is it true that tourists won't come to Prince Edward Island if it doesn't impose a carbon tax?
Does anyone believe that?
Has anyone actually ever said that other than her?
That's a kind of blackmail, a kind of gaslighting.
I've heard it before.
Catherine McKenna, another Trudeau-style liar who Trudeau has disposed of, used to say that no one would buy Alberta oil and gas if Alberta doesn't bring in a carbon tax.
Really?
OPEC countries produce about 60% of the world's oil every day, and Russia, which is not in OPEC, is another 10%.
None of those countries have carbon taxes.
People are buying oil from them.
Russia, dictatorships like Iran, Saudi Arabia, not a single customer in the history of the world has ever said, no, sorry, we're not going to buy your oil because you don't have a carbon tax.
They're literally buying oil from genocidal regimes, from terrorist regimes, from warmonger regimes, from regimes that hang gays and stone adulterous women.
And imagine saying people won't buy Alberta oil and gas if we don't impose a carbon tax on ourselves.
The only thing stupider than that is to say that about PEI tourism.
Of course, not a single journalist challenged such a stupid idea.
Of course not.
Now, maybe they were just stunned and stoned and hypnotized by her condescending tone of voice.
But just stop for a second and imagine that being a fact that your Toronto politician had to tell you when visiting PEI just that fact with her limo driver that if you don't have your carbon tax, you're not going to get tourism.
Her message is basically, stop complaining about the carbon tax.
Stop being poor, you poor.
Stop driving.
If you can't afford gas, just stop driving like she does.
Ride a bike like she does.
Or, you know, just, what was that thing she said the other day?
Just stop watching Disney Plus.
Stop watching Disney Plus so you can afford to pay her carbon tax.
I think Canadian families are looking really closely at all of their expenses.
I personally, as a mother and wife, look carefully at my credit card bill once a month.
And last Sunday, I said to the kids, you're older now.
You don't want to watch Disney anymore.
Let's cut that Disney Plus subscription.
So we cut it.
It's only $13.99 a month that we're saving, but every little bit helps.
And I think every mother in Canada is doing that right now.
Yeah, that's going over really well.
I saw in that same abacus poll for the first time ever, Trudeau is in a dead heat with the Conservatives in the Atlantic.
And that was before her comments.
Hey, let me end on another note.
I saw this on Twitter.
People were asking about Christy Freeland's sneakers.
She's a bit quirky that way, wearing sneakers, not just to community events, casual events, but she wears sneakers to diplomatic events, fancy events.
Oh, well, that's maybe that's really cool.
But they're quite unusual, the sneakers.
They're quite distinctive.
She wears that one black and white pair a lot.
And as you can see in some of the pictures, you can see the brand name poking out.
It's called Mew Mew.
I had actually never heard of it before, but it's a brand owned by Prada, named after Mutciaprada.
That's the billionaire who owns that company.
And she named the shoes after herself, which is nice.
And the shoes that Christia Freeland is wearing, they retail for about $800 for a pair of sneakers.
So yeah, don't you get it?
You poors have to pay a carbon tax.
And don't complain to Christia Freeland, she's better than you.
She doesn't even have a car.
She bikes.
She makes her kids bike.
Even her father remarks on how wonderful it is, except she's a wicked liar.
She has a car and a driver that you pay for.
She flies on private jets and she'll wear $800 sneakers when telling you how righteous she is and how stupid you are for complaining about being poor.
I mean, why don't you just stop watching Disney Plus already, you poors?
That'll cover the cost of housing and your carbon tax for maybe a day.
Mark my words, the media will do whatever they can to make this woman prime minister.
Courts And Controversies00:15:31
Stay with us for more.
Hey, welcome back.
You know what?
A few years ago, before the pandemic stopped all of our traveling, we used to have Rebel News cruises, which were really fun.
And we actually had a Rebel News trip to Israel.
About 45 of our most enthusiastic fans came with us on a bona fide journalistic mission.
We went across the whole country.
We met Palestinian leaders, Jewish leaders, political leaders, historians.
It was great.
Well, the pandemic stopped all that, but we're doing it again.
In fact, we're going to Israel this September 5th.
There are still, I think, a couple of tickets left if you want to come.
Check out all the details at rebelvacations.com.
But this time we're adding something different.
We are adding on a second leg of the journey to go to Dubai, the Arabic city in the United Arab Emirates.
It's actually a kind of Abraham Accords fact-finding trip.
We'll spend a week in Israel and then three or four days in Dubai to see if it indeed is a warm peace.
I'll be there, Sheila Gunried, David Menzies, Avi Yamini, Drea Humphreys.
It's going to be a great team of rebels.
And hopefully you, for more details, go to rebelvacations.com.
We are interested in Israel, whether or not the tour was happening, because such incredible things are going on in that country, and we'll see them firsthand.
It looks to me like a political division in the country that is more shocking than anything I've seen, even in the United States.
The United States where Democrats and Republicans despise each other, where there's talk about a national divorce or even a civil war.
I think it's just talk in America.
But it feels like it actually is on the precipice of a genuine civil war in Israel.
I know that sounds crazy, but to help us figure out what's really going on, we go to our friend Joel Pollock, the senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com, who's been covering the story for them.
Joel, great to see you again.
What I see in Israel right now suggests a kind of division that makes the Trump-Hillary division look like a friendship.
Well, I don't know how real that is.
And it's exciting to hear that you're going to Israel in a few weeks because you will have a sense on the ground of how things feel.
I've had the experience before, especially during the height or the depths of the second Palestinian intifada, of feeling as though Israel was under siege and perhaps even about to give up.
And when I arrived there, I found a healthy, thriving, robust society that was dealing with a problem of terrorism at the periphery, but was overall intact and simply too big and too strong for anybody to bring down.
And I think you'll find that as well.
I have a friend named Asher Fredman, who is a veteran of the Israeli army.
He's an Israeli.
He studied in the States and went back there.
And he tweeted late last week that despite all of the media talk about Israelis being at each other's throats, that life actually felt as if it had continued normally.
There were large-scale demonstrations.
There was some disruption to traffic and things like that.
There certainly is a lot of passion on either side of the issue of judicial reform.
But for the most part, Israeli society remains intact.
And the term civil war is mostly being used by people on the left who seem desperate that the majority of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, is determined to fulfill its promises to its voters and to pass these judicial reforms, which are actually rather modest.
There is a panic on the left that is partly about the loss of political power, partly about intolerance toward any election or any governing majority that isn't them or that they didn't win.
And I think it's also fueled by social media.
I think there's a level of unreality to it.
I'm not trying to dismiss the idea that there really are divisions that are important.
But when I talk to people on the left in Israel, including some of my own relatives, or I listen to what people on the left are saying, serious people, intellectual people, they almost never address the issue of judicial reform.
They are not really upset about the particular reforms being pushed.
They are really expressing a kind of anxiety about their own place in Israel's future at a time when demographically the balance is shifting in favor of more religious Jews and in favor of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, what are called in Israel Mizrahi Jews, who tend to be browner, who tend to be a little bit less educated sometimes.
They come from more impoverished backgrounds, but they're still very much part of the fabric of Israeli life.
The old secular Ashkenazi Eastern European elite, which was predominantly socialist and which was responsible in large part for the founding of the state of Israel, is feeling its power slip away because it is largely confined to the urban coastal environment.
It is very heavily represented in the media and in the tech sector and at the universities, but it doesn't represent the population as a whole.
And ever since the end of the peace process in the early 2000s, it has lost its, if you will, grip on Israeli political discourse.
It had already lost the majority in the late 70s to the Likud Party led by Menachem Begin, who was the first to bring the opposition to power in Israel.
But the left stopped being able to set the agenda, except through the courts, where the powerful Israeli judiciary took more and more powers for itself over time, declaring a constitutional revolution and the right to review legislation, which is part of many other democracies, but was never explicitly guaranteed by any constitution in Israel and not by any legislation.
So the left hung out through the judiciary and eventually conservative voters got tired of it and they're trying to pair back the judiciary, not to make it dependent or to take away its judicial independence, but to keep the branches in balance so that when people vote for a government and it carries out a policy, it actually can do that without being overturned almost automatically by the courts.
You know, I'm so glad you said everything you said there because I have not been in Israel in a while and I do listen to social media from Anglo-oriented Ashkenazi Jews as opposed to the Sephardi Jews or Russian Jews or working class Jews.
And I'm sure what you said is right.
It feels a little bit like a color revolution, almost like what would America be like if Trump won in 2024?
You would have people looking for any excuse to jam a clog in the works.
In this case, they actually are focused on their remaining source of power, which is the Supreme Court.
Joel, can you tell our viewers?
I think I know of some of them, but I know you follow this closely.
What are some of the quirks about the Israeli Supreme Court that the left and that the court itself is fighting over and that Netanyahu ran to campaign on?
Because some of them are so astonishing that I think Canadians or Americans who are used to sort of check and balance the courts, the legislator, the executive, all in sort of tension with each other, I think they would be blown away by how powerful and self-delegated that power is by the Israeli Supreme Court.
It would shock people in Canada, United States.
Can you list a couple of ways that the Israeli Supreme Court is different, ways that Netanyahu wants to change?
Sure.
I mean, one of the ones that comes to mind immediately, and this makes a lot of Americans take a second look at what's going on in Israel, because the Israeli Supreme Court is composed of 15 members.
We have nine justices here in the United States.
And every time there's a case at the Supreme Court, it has to be heard by all nine of the justices.
But in Israel, not all 15 justices hear every case.
And in fact, the Chief Justice in Israel can delegate certain cases to certain justices.
So the Chief Justice can decide that a particular case is going to be heard by a conservative justice or a liberal justice and thereby determine the outcome of the case.
It's not as if the balance on the court is allowed to work its own way through the facts and the laws, but rather the chief justice can essentially decide whether liberals or conservatives prevail on a particular issue simply by deciding which judges or justices are going to hear the case.
It's as if the only judge allowed to hear the affirmative action case would be Clarence Thomas, who's opposed to affirmative action.
The left would never accept that.
Or the Chief Justice, John Roberts, deciding that the only justice who can hear the Roe versus Wade line of abortion cases is Samuel Alito or Amy Coney Barrett, both of whom voted to overturn Roe versus Wade.
So that's one aspect of it.
Another is the power that was recently removed in last week's legislation by the Netanyahu government, which was the power to overrule government actions that the courts found unreasonable, not unlawful, not unconstitutional, but simply unreasonable.
Now, there's a doctrine of reasonableness in common law that we have in the United States and that you have in Canada as well.
This is something different.
This is not establishing reasonableness as a standard of behavior.
So when you have a tort case, for example, you often measure someone's culpability by what a reasonable person would have done.
Or we talk about whether there's a reasonable doubt in a criminal case.
This is simply saying we don't think this policy is reasonable.
Not that it didn't go through the right administrative hoops or that the government didn't apply its mind to it or whatever, but just that the court decides that such and such is unreasonable and therefore we're going to reject it.
No left-wing activist or Democratic Party voter or liberal voter would ever accept that a conservative court could tell a Democratic Party or Liberal Party government that its policies are simply unreasonable to those conservative justices.
But that's how the Israeli system works.
And the reason it worked that way, as I alluded to earlier, was that in the 1990s, the Chief Justice at the time, Aharon Barak, began taking more and more power for the courts and declaring that the courts had power to review certain legislation and that the courts had the power to intervene in government decisions.
And this power went largely unchallenged, but it began to interfere not just in things conservative governments wanted to do.
It began to interfere even in agreements that the left and the right had come to.
For example, about six years ago, there was an agreement between the left and the right on how to resolve the thorny question of religious students participating in the military.
And they actually came to an agreement.
But the court, which is dominated by the left, said, no, this agreement is invalid.
It's unreasonable and we're going to reject it.
So it's actually been a force for the left, but not a force for compromise in the Israeli political system.
It has tended to be a backstop, sort of last-ditch maneuver or weapon, really, for the left to defeat not just conservative policies, but compromises so that conservatives know when they negotiate with the left, they're not really negotiating with elected leaders.
They're also negotiating with the courts.
I think there's also, there was one ruling.
You tell me if this is right, that the current members of the Supreme Court wanted the right to veto any new appointments to the court.
Is that right?
Did I hear that right?
Well, they have a veto because Israel selects its judges through a judicial commission.
And although there are a few elected members of the Knesset on this commission, the majority of the seats are composed of judges and lawyers or members of the bar.
So the judges can say, no, no, we don't like who you pick.
Pick again.
It's got to be one of our friends.
Right.
And the lawyers don't contradict the judges.
So effectively, the judiciary has a veto over judicial selection.
There are occasionally conservative judges who are simply so brilliant that it's hard to turn them down with a straight face.
But most of the people who are selected are on the left and learn through their careers and on their way to that point to appease the worldview of the largely secular, largely Eastern European judges who are running the system.
So yes, Nashinaho wants to broaden that.
And when Americans say, like the Biden administration has said, I mean, most Americans actually aren't too familiar with the ins and outs of this, but when the Biden administration says that these reforms are radical and they're a threat to Israeli democracy, you look at how we select judges in the United States.
It's entirely political.
The president who is elected nominates a judge or a justice.
The Senate, which is, of course, elected, then can approve or disapprove of the selection.
At no point are there any experts at all who weigh in on the judicial selection process.
So we have an entirely political process.
In most of the states, in terms of ordinary criminal law and civil law, we elect our judges directly.
So I want to talk about the power of the legislature relative to the judiciary or the power of the electorate.
We have an independent judiciary in the United States, but it's not as independent as the Israeli judiciary.
And it will still be more independent than the Israeli judiciary if most of these reforms are passed.
There is one reform that I've objected to, which would allow the Knesset to overrule court decisions, Supreme Court decisions, by a majority vote.
Now, I don't think that is consistent necessarily with judicial independence.
That's too low a bar.
It's too low a threshold.
We in the United States also allow Congress to overrule the Supreme Court, but they have to pass a constitutional amendment, which is much more difficult, much higher bar.
And of course, three-fourths of the states have to approve of the amendment for it to go through.
So it's much more difficult.
It still exists, that kind of mechanism, but it's just much more difficult.
So I think that having a simple majority of the Knesset is too low a bar.
I've brought this up with proponents of the reforms in Israel, and one of them told me, Well, you can't get a majority of the Knesset to do anything, but I think they've started to realize that that one reform they've proposed is problematic, and they've signaled a willingness to drop it or to compromise on it.
The point is, there can be a dialogue about this, and most Israelis, including some on the left, agree that the powers of the court are simply too great.
What they object to is that Netanyahu is in power, that he is directing this process of reform, and that he has, in a sense, the ultimate say on which reforms come to the floor for a vote.
The opposition has walked out of negotiations.
They have rejected talks with Netanyahu.
They've put up impossible conditions.
They have, in a sense, created their own internal opposition because the hundreds of thousands of protesters on the streets and now living in tent cities in places like Dhansakh or the Sachhir Garden in Jerusalem.
Interestingly, these tents are top of the line.
They're all the same.
There's a lot of funding coming into this opposition movement.
But when you've got those kinds of numbers on the ground, it's very hard for the elected opposition leaders to come back to their supporters in the streets and say, you know what, we decided to compromise after all.
So they've talked themselves into a corner by using phrases like civil war or regime or coup and using it not rhetorically, but in a real sense.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
You mentioned the funding.
All the tents are the same at first rate.
Foreign Meddling and Civil War Fears00:06:37
We know that the United States meddles in other countries.
I was in Hungary recently and I learned of $25 million being poured into that country to set up opposition media, which would be like three-quarters of a billion dollars that Hungary puts into America for anti-regime media.
And George Soros himself and other Democrat activists have been against Netanyahu viscerally.
I think that I use the phrase color revolution.
I think that this is exactly what America would look like if Trump were, quote, restored.
Because remember, Netanyahu was voted out.
They were coming for him legally.
He was disgraced in scandals, but he got back in a vindication of himself, he would say, and his policies.
And now he's going to do what he always wanted to do and take out his deep state critics.
That's the analogy I see.
And so all the forces, many of them in America, many of them in Europe, who want to topple Netanyahu because they have a personal hatred for him and because they don't want him to make these democratic reforms to alter the balance of power in that country.
I actually think this is there's a lot of foreign meddling and it's the Supreme Court is something they care about, but they just really are going to try and stop Netanyahu at all costs and they wouldn't mind a civil war.
I mean, I've heard that, for example, some people are not showing up for conscription to the military.
I've heard stories of doctors saying, what's your political strike before I give you medical care?
I don't know if those are true stories, but I think that there are some people who are so insane that they actually would go to civil war.
I think the conscripts are still showing up.
It's some of the volunteer reservists who aren't showing up.
Now, it's still problematic.
It's still a major problem because it is anti-democratic.
It's an attempt to use military pressure to change a policy, right?
If you're going to say we are going to prevent the military from functioning to get our way because we didn't win at the ballot box last November, that is the opposite of standing up for democracy.
The military, it's a coup of its own in a way.
But I think that there won't be a civil war in Israel because Israelis don't want to kill each other.
There's a lot of animosity between some groups of Jewish Israelis.
There are also fault lines between Jews and Arabs in Israel.
We saw that explode two years ago, shortly after Joe Biden was elected when Hamas went to war against Israel and there were riots in which Arab Israelis attacked Jews and there were some revenge attacks, reprisal attacks as well.
So there are some tensions, but nothing to approach the scale of a civil war.
There have been military divisions among the Jewish residents of Israel before.
Prior to the state of Israel being formed in the last few years, there was a military confrontation really between the forces that lined up behind David Ben-Burian, who became the first prime minister, and the forces in the paramilitary organization that was led by Minachim Begin, who later became the prime minister in 1977, as I mentioned.
These were forces that were opposed to one another, and Begin's forces decided to attack British police installations and to attack infrastructure in what was a campaign of sabotage, and you could even call it a campaign of terror against the British occupying forces.
They bombed the King David Hotel and so forth.
Ben-Durion's forces in the Haganah, which later became the Israel Defense Forces, they worked with the British to suppress Begin's forces.
And that left a lot of bad blood that Begin, to his credit, set aside when the state of Israel was founded.
But there has been that sort of low-level conflict in history, not recent history, but we're talking 80 years ago when there were real divisions among the different Jewish military organizations about what tactics to use to win independence from the British.
But I don't think anything like that is possible now.
And I think, you know, you'll tell us when you return how it feels.
I think when I talk to my relatives, I have Israeli relatives on the left, some of whom have been at these demonstrations.
They're very passionate and they fear that their lives are going to be taken over by religious authorities who are represented in the Netanyahu government.
I don't think that's a rational fear, but I think they fear it.
I think the role, by the way, of social media in spreading some of these fears has to be looked at.
When I talk to my few conservative relatives in Israel, they may or may not agree with the judicial reforms, but they take the attitude of live and let live, that we can get past this and people have to let go a little bit and nobody should be seeking the blood of anybody else.
It's just not necessary and it's not what we're about.
And I tend to think that that's a widespread sentiment in the general Israeli population.
What you see in Tel Aviv is just like what you see in major cities in the United States.
You have liberal organizations, liberal activists who are living in close quarters.
It's easy for them to get into the street.
It's easy for them to get media attention.
They're very active on social media.
So they drive a lot of the narrative.
And the Biden administration is playing into this.
It has supported the opposition protests.
It has given the opposition leaders a false sense, I think, that Netanyahu is going to be on his way out soon, that he can be defeated.
I think one of the reasons the opposition doesn't negotiate with Netanyahu is that they believe they have the backing of the Biden administration, and that's all that matters.
I think it's a miscalculation.
But I don't think there's going to be civil war, and I don't think that people are going to allow this to get out of hand.
We'll see what happens, of course, but I look forward to your reporting when you're there on the ground.
I'm looking forward to, and thanks very much for your wisdom today.
And for those who haven't signed up yet, I mean, we do leave in five weeks, but I think there are a couple tickets left.
There is more room on the bus.
We will be doing journalism as we go around the country, and that's the fun stuff.
We'll be doing journalism.
We'll be meeting with experts on all sides of these various divides.
And you will be there right with us as we learn what's going on in the country.
Joel, great to catch up with you.
Thanks for this briefing.
Before we head on over, the website is rebelvacations.com, but it's definitely a working vacation for the rebels.
Our guests will have a lot of fun, though.
Joel, take care.
Thanks again.
Thanks for going to Israel and thanks for taking an interest in this issue.
Right on.
We sure do.
Joel's the senior editor at large at breitbart.com.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Shakespeare Festival Shenanigans00:02:12
Diana Bachner, if I'm saying that right, says, I love history and classical plays, literature, movies, statues, art, and more.
I totally agree with you, Ezra.
If anyone wants to write or create something authentic according to their own views and capabilities, then fine.
But they have no right to change the authentic creations of artists from history.
You're so right.
I mean, there's tribute bands, right?
There's cover versions of famous songs.
But we acknowledge that.
We say, hey, how do you like my interpretation?
Or I'm going to do a jazzy version or I'm going to do a parody.
You know, if you heard of weird Al Yankovic, he takes famous songs and makes jokey rhymes to them.
That's all a form of art, too.
But this is a counterfeit Shakespeare.
And I don't know.
It feels like the Taliban destroying statues because it offends them.
It really feels that way.
Elkie says, I was going to buy tickets for Stratford, but everything looks like a woke adaptation.
I'm not wasting my money.
Even worse, my kids didn't even read Shakespeare in school.
Well, that's why I was so excited to go.
I truly, truly love that play, Much Ado About Nothing.
I've read it.
I've watched the wonderful movie with Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branner.
And I thought, this is going to be great.
And I show up in the theater and I felt great because the set was normal.
It wasn't alternative.
And the actors were good.
And I was in a great spirit.
And then I thought, what?
That's not in the play.
That's not, what's that?
That's not how it ends.
And it was only when I did the digging that I thought this is rewritten.
I felt tricked.
You shouldn't be tricked.
It would be like.
And who on earth has the gall, the hubris, to say, I can do a better sculpture than Michelangelo.
I can do a better painting than Da Vinci or Raphael.
Who on earth would have that hubris?
Well, naturally, a woke Marxist professor, that's who.
I was so crestfallen because I love the idea of a Shakespeare festival.
Call me old-fashioned and quirky that way, but this is not a Shakespeare festival.