Lord Conrad Black’s Forgotten History: Civil Rights in Canada challenges narratives by tracing Canada’s freedom roots—from the 1774 Quebec Act securing French Catholic rights to Sir Joseph Howe’s defamation acquittal—while defending MacDonald against modern racism claims, citing Indigenous voting rights and voluntary residential school attendance. Black warns that demonizing historical figures risks empowering extremist ideologies, linking it to cultural Marxism and Trudeau’s divisive rhetoric. Meanwhile, Trump’s legal battles and 2024 poll lead reflect public frustration with weaponized justice, with Black speculating his deal-making could end conflicts like Ukraine swiftly, contrasting Biden’s perceived failures. Yet, inflammatory calls to "eliminate" Trump raise unsettling parallels to past political violence, underscoring how unchecked rhetoric can destabilize even democratic systems. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a feature interview with historian and author Conrad Black.
It's November 24th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you.
You censorious bug.
You know, my whole life when I use the word civil liberties or freedom, boy, that word triggers people.
They always say, that's not a Canadian value.
We are about peace, order, and good government.
That freedom stuff is an American concept.
Well, I know that's not true.
I know that Canada's history is one of freedom.
We were born in freedom, and it's not a partisan thing either.
Ask Wilfrid Laurier.
And so I think it's incredible that we finally have a book documenting the history of civil liberties in Canada.
And I have it in my hand.
It's called Forgotten History, Civil Rights in Canada.
And what a pleasure to spend the course of the next half hour with its author, Lord Conrad Black.
Thanks for coming in.
Congratulations on the book, published by our cousins at the Democracy Fund.
Tell us what the thesis of this book is.
Well, in fact, rights are at the very core of the organization of Canadian government, going back to immediately following the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.
I mean, we had rather severe French criminal law and gentler French civil law when it was New France, French colony.
But as soon as the Quebecois, they became, got a good look at British governance, they wanted to get rid of French criminal law and get the benefit of a more generous and fairly administered British criminal law, but they wanted to retain civil law.
And of course, they were principally concerned about their religious and language rights.
And I mean, at that time, it was unlawful in the British Empire for a Roman Catholic to hold a public office.
But the British varied that, obviously, for Quebec.
And an arrangement was made by one of the great statesmen in Canadian history, Sir Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester, who was the governor and saw what was happening in the American colonies and saw how restive they were becoming.
And he left his post in Quebec and returned to London, didn't retire as governor.
He spent four years in London lobbying for the passage of the Quebec Act, which was passed just before the American Revolution.
And basically it said the French Canadians will swear allegiance to the British crown, and the British crown promises there will be no interference with the Catholic religion or the French language or the civil law of Quebec, French civil law.
And both sides upheld the bargain.
And that was the only way that we kept Canada from joining the American Revolution.
And so to answer your question, but the thesis, we have a fusion in this country of French and English concepts of law, which is unique in the world.
And generally it works quite well.
But you get these differences where the English tradition is of the rights of the individual and the French tradition is the rights of the collectivity.
See, to the French mind, or French-Canadian mind traditionally, it was nonsense to tolerate anti-democratic forces.
That's why Du Plessis used to attack the communists, for example.
And maybe they said, you English are idiots.
You're allowing these people to exploit democracy to attack democracy.
And this makes no sense.
And you can see the logic of it.
We can see it today in our streets.
We see people marching against Canada, calling for jihad, using our freedoms perhaps to attack our freedoms.
Exactly.
I mean, it is this phenomenon of democracy being exploited by anti-democratic forces.
Interesting.
You know, until I read your book, I didn't think of it that way.
I mean, you grow up, especially growing up in Western Canada.
There's always that tension between English and French Canada, and Quebec has certain rights.
But if you look at it historically, 250 years ago, to grant minority rights to a minority language and a minority religion, that's got to be a novelty.
Like to have, to protect the minority.
And you say it was partly to shore up Canada against an American Revolution.
Well, and to prevent Canada from falling into the American Revolution.
Whatever the reason why, it did grant civil liberties in a time when civil liberties were not as well as common as they are today.
Exactly.
We can take note of the inconsistencies in the American revolutionary position.
I mean, Jefferson writing, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
And he was, of course, a slaveholder.
But it had a tremendous power.
And the Americans, even in their earliest moments, had this genius of showmanship and salesmanship.
They struck a heavy blow for liberty.
And it would have had a huge attraction in Canada if the French had not been concerned about other things, including, if you look carefully in the Declaration of Independence, there's the allegation that the British were trying to, I mean, the British government was trying to spread Catholicism in America.
That's in the Declaration of Independence.
Of course, rubbish.
They weren't trying to do anything of the kind.
They were just protecting it in Canada.
But these things seem very obscure now, but they were terribly important then.
Because if it hadn't happened, the United States would be the whole continent.
There wouldn't be a Canada.
There would be a bunch of American states.
Now, that's not the end of the world.
Some people would like that very much.
I'm not saying it would be a horrible fate, but it would be a very different political situation.
The book is called Forgotten History, Civil Rights in Canada.
You can get it at forgottenhistorybook.com.
Hey, let me tell you my favorite story of Canadian civil liberties.
In the 19th century, when Sir Joseph Howe was an up-and-comer in Nova Scotia, he would go on to become an important part of Canada.
In Sir John MacDonald's government, yes.
He was a publisher before he was a politician.
And he wrote about corruption in Halifax.
And he was prosecuted for criminal defamation.
Wasn't a civil law suit.
That's a serious matter.
And he was his own lawyer, which is normally bad advice.
But he talked about freedom of the press and the importance.
And then the judge in this case directed the jury to convict.
But the jury would not.
They acquitted him.
And to this day, Sir Joseph Howe, who was really one of the founding fathers of Canada in many ways, I believe he struck the greatest blow for freedom of speech and freedom of the press in Canadian history.
I doubt one in 100 people in Canada know that.
I doubt one in 10 in Nova Scotia know that.
That their founding father fought for the right to skewer politicians with the tool of free speech and free press.
There are stories like that, and we don't champion them.
We don't have them on the $10 bill.
We don't teach his story.
Maybe they do in Nova Scotia.
I think he's prominent in Nova Scotia, but I agree.
He should be more prominent.
Especially for fighting for civil liberty.
Some of those fathers of Confederation from the outlying places were extraordinarily able men.
And the man from New Brunswick, Tilley, Samuel L. Tilley, he invented the word dominion as a name for a country, as a type of government.
They were very intelligent people.
And Howe, he somewhat blotted his ledger because he petitioned the British government against the evils of Confederation.
But in an orderly way, he just sent a petition, you see.
And then this was entertained in Parliament, and it was contradicted by a similar petition from MacDonald and some of his colleagues.
And the British quite rightly found in favor of MacDonald, but at least it was a process.
They heard the thing out.
And then MacDonald, great statesman as he was, the denigration of him in recent years has been an outrage.
He recruited Howe, who was a political opponent, to come into his government.
You know, there's such a great story there.
And by the way, and I'll stop talking about Sir Joseph Howe now, but I don't have as much history in me as you do, so I got to make use of the stories I do know.
His closing arguments to this day are recorded by the government of Nova Scotia on the government homepage to show people what that back and forth battle is like.
But let me ask you this.
You mentioned Sir John A. MacDonald, obviously the builder of the country, and an able man despite his flaws.
I should tell you, if you drive 20 minutes south of here, you'll come to Queen's Park, which is the name of the Ontario legislature, and you will see something that is strange.
You will see a giant wooden box that looks like an upright coffin.
And if you weren't here in this country more than 10 years, you would never know what's in that coffin.
The answer is it is a statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, the founding father, the first prime minister, and it has been boarded up out of shame, out of denunciation, out of cowardice, out of indecision.
Tear it down, keep it up.
Well, let's board it up in a sarcophagus.
What do you make of that?
What do you think that says about our treatment of history and a man who, whatever his flaws, built this country?
It's, of course, tangled up in the complicated and very vexed issue of historic treatment of the Native people.
And the charge against MacDonald is that he was hostile to them, a racist, and was responsible for an unreasonable and unjust treatment of them.
And in my opinion, that's an unjust charge.
And what it tells me, my principal reaction is it shows the lack of courage of our public leaders.
Because in every jurisdiction, they should have said, rubbish.
MacDonald, like everyone else, had his faults, but he was a great leader, a great prime minister, and without him, this country would not exist.
And on balance, he was undoubtedly a very constructive force.
And because he said you want to take the Indian out of the Indian and make him a Canadian, what he really meant was that he wanted to give the Native people the right to participate fully in Canadian life if they wanted to.
He gave them the right to vote.
How do these native radicals go around hanging him in effigy and calling him a genocidist, trying to exterminate them when he gave them the right to vote?
And he had native allies like Crowfoot, for example, who he was loyal to, and they were loyal to him.
I mean, he wasn't hostile to the natives.
He was trying to help them.
Now, maybe the policies weren't overly successful, but the motivation was good.
And yet we have these lunatics accusing the founder of our country of being virtually a replicator of Hitler.
It's a scandal.
I personally know two Native Indians who attended residential schools, one of whom is a senior lawyer, and his son is now a lawyer.
And he told me that he would, the idea that he would go to law school without having that building block of his Canadian Western education was unthinkable.
So he said he owes his entire life's path, his prosperity, his effect on the world, his assistance to other Indigenous people.
He owes it all to the residential school.
And I know another man who attended residential school who told me that their family reunions, they would all get together.
Not a single one of them had a complaint.
They loved it.
Now, I'm not saying that's a universal story.
At all schools, there are some abuses.
By the way, any boarding school can have some molestation or other illegal mischief.
That's not necessarily something to do with Indian residential schools.
I guess what I'm saying is there are some Indigenous people who make that argument, but I put it to you that most of them are actually woke white cultural Marxists who are looking to divide us, just like Black Lives Matter was an attempt to racially divide.
That couldn't really be grafted onto the Canadian experience because we didn't have slavery in any major way.
So they said, uh-huh, we'll use the oppressed-oppressor dichotomy in an Indigenous context.
I think it's just cultural Marxism trying to corrode our history, which was actually quite different.
I just couldn't agree more.
And we should remember the following facts about the residential schools.
I don't dispute that some bad things happened, probably a lot of bad things.
I don't doubt that.
But all of them were there because there were applications to accept them.
They weren't.
This idea they were torn out of the hands of their parents is rubbish.
They weren't.
Two, it was their only exit from poverty and illiteracy, as your friend said.
If it wasn't for that, whatever the failings of those schools, they taught them to write and read and do basic education, the three R's, which they would not have had.
And then we have built upon this, this blood libel against ourselves, culminating in this absolute fraud of the murder and furtive burial in unmarked graves of Native children.
You realize that $27 million were voted to determine just what these graves, if they are in fact graves, what's in there, and not one native child has been discovered.
And not one Native child died unrecorded.
Now, unfortunately, at that time, even with wealthy people, tuberculosis was a terrible problem.
And the death rates were much higher than they are now.
But this idea that our government and our churches, our Christian churches, were engaged in murdering either deliberately or out of negligence Native children and secretly burying them without any record is simply outrageous.
Timeline For Excavation00:02:39
Not one part of it is true.
You know, Rebel News, our journalist Drea Hunt.
But that confirms what you said.
Well, and there are lots of politics afoot.
Let me show you a quick clip from a documentary film that our reporter Drea Humphrey did.
She's part Indigenous herself.
She went to Kamloops.
She bumped into the mayor by chance on the street.
We tried to get answers.
I want to show you a short clip of what that looks like.
Take a look.
Try to look at some of the archives and get some of the history and everything.
So are you recording?
Yeah.
Where's the best place to get the history, like to look through archives and things like that right now?
Right now, that's not my department political.
Okay.
Well, I guess I would have to come back and just find out exactly where all that stuff is because I know that if you're talking about records, like whether there's nothing here.
Right, that, and also just in general, the mystical culture.
Some of those are going to be probably in places like the Office of Reconciliation.
Right.
And rescue A officers.
Okay.
Yeah, but there's that place.
There's also contacting the local first stations.
So that would be the meeting.
That would be an individual to ask about the records and the documents, but I know that a lot of that is also confidential.
It has to go as a proper process because it's very sensitive information to hold the integrity of the individuals and the families that are directly impacted.
And of course, it also has to be done in trauma as long way.
So there's a lot of different protocols and stuff that need to take place.
So I've done a few reports on it, and I think the main question most people ask is: what is the timeline for excavation to find out what happened in this great site?
Well, for myself, again, we didn't have a schedule of an interview.
And two, we are still working.
And we have just been assigned an internal chair that has been, I was a part of the press release with Minister Medi and with Minister Martin Miller.
Okay, I said that a couple of days ago, so that's also on the website.
So it is going to happen.
There's going to be excavation.
I'm not saying there's going to be excavation, but we are steps to ensure that it's going to take place.
And that's why the internal term, the special internal term, has been identified and working through those things.
The worst thing about that is it went from there are anomalies that we detect underground to, I mean, Jagmeet Singh himself saying mass graves.
Excavating The Past00:03:33
Like it just, everyone was trying to outdo the other.
And again, why?
Why?
Why?
It's because if you destroy your past, undermine your past, denounce your past, if you call yourself a genocidal country, Justin Trudeau has called Canada.
I know.
He won't say that about China, which some would say meets.
Well, they've gotten more of a claim to it than we did.
Well, I was going to say that probably the Uyghur Muslims.
When you call your own country a genocidal country, when you hide your own prime minister, when you destroy your own story, your own narrative, that is the largest kind of self-destruction in this cultural Marxism.
It is suicide.
And the decolonizers who say, well, Israel is the oppressor, so anything you do about, anything the oppressed do in return is justified.
I fear that could actually one day come here.
People saying anyone associated with the past, anyone associated with being white, with being powerful, any violence is acceptable.
If it's white and it's successful, it's bad, evil, and oppressive.
Except it isn't.
If it's white and successful, it's successful and it happens to be white.
But it's not exclusively white.
I think Canada really has been one of the most successful countries in the world.
But that is part of our vulnerability because it is receptive to foreigners, because we need immigration.
And all people who've immigrated here came voluntarily.
We don't have the legacy of slavery where people were involuntarily transported from another continent.
Because of that, and because we do welcome foreigners, and because it's a country that has, look, we're not perfect, nobody is, but we have a relatively clean past.
We never engaged in an aggressive war overseas.
We never sought to conquer anybody.
We populated our half of this continent, but the idea wasn't an invasion of someone else's territory.
was to build a nation, including the people that we found here.
And because Canadians are sensitive to these issues and respect questions like rights in general, and always have, French and English, we're vulnerable to that charge.
And because we're vulnerable to it, these charlatans hurl these outrageous charges at us and hang the founder of our country in effigy and compare him to Hitler, who I need not tell your viewers, plunged all Europe into war and murdered 12 million innocent people in death camps.
I'm worried about that.
I mean, a nation is many things.
If you look at the root of it, it's literally where you were born.
The word natal or nativity is rooted in the same word, your nature.
But if we denature our country, if we destroy the past, destroy our stories, denounce our heroes, well, then nature abhors a vacuum and something else will fill that out.
You're a sitting duck.
And you can believe anything, especially if you're taught to hate yourself and your past.
I fear that the utopia that's being promised to displace our flawed past will be carnage.
Look around the world at others who have tried it, whether it was Stalin or Mao, to raise the past down to zero and to start again to build the perfect society.
Maybe I'm sounding too dramatic, but frankly, the way the world has gone since the terrorist attack on October 7th, the vocal uprising in the West of so many anti-Western elements on our streets, that scares me.
Reasons To Believe00:07:25
What do you think of what's been going on the last six weeks?
in the west i mean israel's body in response to the well i look i think it was orchestrated in advance by the uh what we might call the palestinian movement i i i They must have known that Israel would respond very forcefully militarily, and their plan was to mobilize the Muslim minorities in the Western countries to demonstrate in great numbers,
focusing on what they judged to be, on the basis of what they'd seen.
They didn't just imagine it.
They had some reason to believe it.
The weakness and cowardice of our Western governments, that if there were big demonstrations, they'd put pressure on Israel.
And so that's part of their strategy.
Now, I think it hasn't really worked.
I mean, you can only demonstrate so far, particularly when it's an attempt ultimately to justify barbarous behavior, the outrages, the atrocities of October 7th.
And secondly, I'm glad to see the response.
The largest demonstration of all was the pro-Israel one in Washington a couple of weeks ago, 250,000 people.
And I understand another one of comparable size is finally coming in London.
And the Jewish community is nothing like as powerful in Britain as it is in America or as numerous.
But I don't think it's working, but I think it's a tactic.
Now, I have been shocked, as I'm sure you and most of your viewers have, by some of the anti-Semitic manifestations on our campuses and in our media.
But on the other hand, for many years, I've found both our campuses and our media constant sources of disappointment and concern.
And they're full of people who are capable of believing anything.
You know, Chesterton said, when people stop believing in our Judeo-Christian values, it doesn't mean they won't believe in anything.
It means they will believe in anything.
And that's where we're getting to.
But with all of that said, I think it is going to work out because I think Israel essentially has been given a blank check by American opinion to do the necessary to assure that an October 7 never happens to them again.
And when they destroy the military arm of Hamas and then sign the agreement with Saudi Arabia, I think it will so shift the correlation of forces that we will finally have a chance of a genuine peace agreement.
You are perhaps more optimistic about America's role than me.
I see in Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States.
I'm not optimistic about him, just the country.
Okay, well, I'll take your answer in that light then, because I know that Biden was part of the Obama administration that strengthened Iran.
It gave them a lot of money.
And then he went on appeasing Iran.
And look, I think he is now trying to reconcile the traditional Democratic Party of Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy and Johnson, who are reasonable people.
I mean, we might disagree with them in some ways, but they were patriotic Americans and friends of Israel.
But, well, Roosevelt died before Israel was founded, but he was certainly a friend of the Jews.
And on the other hand, Biden has, as you say, been not just a front-row witness, but a key protagonist in the intrusion into the Democratic Party and the gnawing away within it of this woke minority, but this powerful, assertive minority.
He's now trying to reconcile traditional Democratic Party reasonableness with these anti-American, anti-Semitic, you know, the extremists.
And, you know, at a certain point, you can't reconcile that.
You know, you can't reconcile oil and water very well.
But I think that's what's happening.
But fortunately, there'll be an election in a year.
You know, I look at America, how different it is in four years.
I guess it's been three years since Donald Trump, since the last election.
America, the economy is staggering.
Inflation, war, or the rumors of war in Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel in the Middle East.
And I think a lot of people, even who are not Trump fans, would say that wouldn't have happened under Trump because he projected strength and risk to enemies.
People didn't know if he would have a tantrum and fire missiles at you.
The bad guys were tamed during Trump's tenure.
There were no new wars.
China was muted.
North Korea was coming around.
Russia didn't make a move on.
The Americans hadn't had 8 million illegal so-called migrants.
Of course, they're not immigrants in a traditional sense, like people going under the Statue of Liberty and registering their names and coming to join a new country and become citizens.
It's more like the late Roman Empire, just masses of people moving into other countries.
It feels like the decline of an empire, the final days.
That's misleading.
The United States is not in that kind of a decline.
Well, it's certainly overstretched militarily.
I see now that the U.S. military is talking to Zelensky about getting him to negotiate, whereas two months ago, the word negotiator ceasefire.
Whatever it takes, they said.
Look, if they can't dislodge Russia from where they are, they've got to make a deal, giving Russia pretty much what it has.
But in exchange, Russia does admit that Ukraine in its new borders is an absolutely sovereign country.
There's no more question about them not being a legitimate country.
I mean, the Ukrainians may have to accept three-quarters of a loaf, but that's still progress for them.
Well, it's been an absolutely demographic disaster.
Hundreds of thousands of young men dead.
I saw a news report the other day that the average age of the Ukrainian soldier is now in the mid-40s because so many younger men have been put through the meat grinder or have fled the country's rights.
Well, they've taken, what, the Ukrainians have taken about 100,000 casualties.
Oh, I think maybe more than that, but in any event, it's just a horrific loss.
And they've had more than 12 million people displaced, so it's a terrible upset.
But it's a heroic tradition to build a country on.
But we've got to turn the corner and say all this money that NATO is putting into the war there, we've got to put into development aid, which, without any corruption, has got to be properly used to build Ukraine back up.
Two elections in the last week have been fascinating.
Both have been Trumpy in a way.
I referred to, and both of them have magnificent hair, I should tell you.
I'm talking about Javier Mille, if I'm saying that, right, in Argentina, who is even more audacious than Trump, if that's possible.
He wields a chainsaw at campaign rallies days before the election.
He made a pinata out of the central bank.
I want to show that pinata clip because we haven't shown it before.
Take a look at Javier Mille.
Let's just show a few of his greatest hits: the chainsaw, the piñata, the stickers, and let's end with the Israeli flag.
Javier Mille: Argentina's Trumpy Leader00:02:44
Because for a leader in these days to wave the Israeli flag days before the election, that's a bold risk you're taking.
He is apparently a practicing Roman Catholic who says he has been contemplating converting to Judaism for 20 years.
Oh my God, here in a 90% Catholic country.
I mean, practicing Catholic country.
Let's take a quick look.
who's Javier Millet.
¡Para!
¡Basta de inflación!
¡Basta!
¡Basta, Millet!
Fijo y deporte.
¡Afuera!
Ministered cultural.
Afuera.
Ministerio de la Miette de Saloso Zoteni.
A fuera.
Ministerio de la Juquer de Si General University.
A fuela.
Ministerio de la Rapública.
A fuera.
Aho que ta resistas.
Ministio de 6 tecnología de innovación.
Afuera.
Ministiero de ta comprezo sociado.
Afuera.
Ministiero de locación.
Adoclamento.
Afueda.
Ministerio taporte.
Afuera.
Ministier de salud.
Afueya.
Ministerio de salóso social.
A fuera.
Si acabo el curo de la política.
Oh, that hair, I'll never get tired of looking that hair.
And speaking of hair, yesterday, or two days ago in the Netherlands, Geurt Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom, who has been very hardlined against immigration and in particular against Muslim immigration, dominating, getting 38 seats, more than doubling his seat count.
Here's a quick clip of him on Election Day.
Both of these characters, pro-Israel, pro-Western, pro-capitalist, anti-woke, anti-globalist, small government, and anti-immigration.
Geurt Wilders Victory00:12:36
And in the case of Kate Wilders, perhaps the most anti-Islamic candidate in the Western world.
What do you make of these two dramatic wins in a week?
Look, I think it's a trend.
And I think in a way, none of these countries are interchangeable.
I mean, the Netherlands and Argentina are extremely different countries.
And the United States, of course, is immensely complicated.
It's a third of a billion people.
But the fact that Trump was the only person in American history to be elected president who never sought or held any public office, elected or unelected, or a high military command, and just projected himself on the basis of his celebrity and his identification of the levels of discontent in parts of the country, which the polls hadn't picked up, was news to everybody except him.
I think that was the forerunner of it.
And I mean, again, there's special cases.
I mean, Wilders has been focused on immigration as an issue, I think, throughout his public career.
And he wants kind of Brexit, a Netherlands, Brexit, a Nexit.
And you know what?
I tell you, one Brexit said EU can maybe withstand that, but if Netherlands goes, Italy will probably want out.
That's the only thing that's happening.
So then it gets very bad.
The dominoes start falling.
And in the case of Argentina, at the end of World War II, Argentina and Canada had equal standards of living.
It's incredible to think.
And, you know, it's not that Canada's been so brilliantly governed, but it's still a very rich country.
And Argentina, more than half the population lives in poverty.
And there's no excuse for it.
It's a rich country.
There's no illiteracy.
There's just no excuse for it.
It's just bad government.
45 million people.
It's a substantial country.
And they've chosen that.
And a splendid country.
Yeah, well, I've never been, but maybe we'll have to check it out.
Hey, let's end on Donald Trump, because I know you've written it.
You've known him for years.
You were sort of neighbors in Florida.
In New York and in Balm Beach.
And what was the name of your book, The President Like No Other?
President Like No Other.
President Like No Other.
We talked about that.
Here's a quick clip of our conversation about that book.
I love talking to you about books.
Here's A President Like No Other, a little bit of a conversation that Conrad Black and I had about that.
This was a 256-page, breezy, readable, fun book.
Some pages you laugh out loud, some pages you say Donald Trump's a rascal.
And you know what?
I think you managed to be fair, but not to suck up to Trump and not to be a gotcha critic either.
No, no, no.
I tried to play it right down the middle.
And the true Trump is, in fact, a very entertaining person.
So a book about him should be rather entertaining.
Yeah, you know, a president like no other, that's sort of an ambiguous statement.
You could say that if you were a Trump hater or a Trump lover, but he's such a good person.
But no one can dispute that that is true.
There's never been one like that, of that country anyway.
A lot of people despise him.
What's interesting to me is a lot of his critics today, 10 years ago, would have been his super fans, or at least people who wanted to bask in his celebrity and his wealth.
Well, they'd see him as fine in his place as a sort of blowhard billionaire.
But the idea that he wanted to take over the system and kick out the people that he said had misgoverned the country for the last 15 years, obviously that offends all those who identify with the people who've been established in office in both parties all that time.
Well, look, the guy is, he's like Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels and all the Liliputians, hundreds of them tying him down.
And they're distracting him.
They're burning up his cash on lawyers.
They're giving him bad press.
They may actually get the guy in jail.
But I put it to you, right now he's ahead 10 points in the polls.
And even if he were in jail, I think he would still be ahead in the polls because, first of all, people understand the justice system has been weaponized.
And second of all, corrupted.
I don't think that's true.
I mean, it's been terribly perverted.
And they don't care if he's in jail because they look at the world and say the world is on fire.
Get the fireman out, even if he's in jail.
We need the fireman now.
So were Mandela and Gandhi in jail.
Hey, what does that tell us?
That's a good point.
So was Robert Walpole.
So was Cervantes, all kinds of people.
I never looked at it that way.
Donald Trump said he can end the Ukraine war in 24 hours.
I actually believe that.
The guy's a natural deal maker.
Biden and Obama were the worst negotiators.
One to the Kremlin and one to Kiev.
I really think so.
And I'm not saying he's magical.
I'm just saying he was not part of the deep state.
But as president, he had a consciousness of the power of America and what it could do.
He's getting on in age too.
Watching Joe Biden at the age.
He feels lively.
He feels lively and like he's got his wits about him.
Look, Goethe wrote Faust when he was 80.
Verdi wrote his Requiem when he was 85.
Sophocles in the fifth century B.C. wrote Oedipus when he was 90.
And the famous doge Daldona conquered Istanbul at the age of 96.
I mean, Mr. Gladstone formed a government at the age of 81.
Adenauer was a distinguished chancellor up to the age of 88.
I mean, you can do it.
Yeah.
I think Trump can.
He's got a lot of energy.
He's a tornado.
He only sleeps about five hours a day.
And whereas Biden, they often call him.
He's an old 80 and Trump's a young 77.
And I think everyone can see that.
And it's true what bin Laden said decades ago.
People look at the strong horse and the weak horse and they want to go with the strong horse.
And America has had a weak horse for three years.
And what makes me think of it?
But it was a sandbag job of an election, too.
Well, I mean, let me ask you, let me conclude with a terrible and terrifying question.
I look at all the resources, all the laws being bent or broken to get him, the collusion of the media.
I look at the lengths they've gone to beat him in 2020, to undermine him in the interregnum, and to try to get him to.
To try and destroy him in 2016.
And the other day, a Democratic congressman, actually who led the charge of impeachment in the House, used the word eliminate.
He said, we have to eliminate Trump here.
Let me show you that.
Here's a Democrat saying eliminate.
Every time he talks, he's putting himself into a bigger criminal hole.
But that's not his objective.
His objective is purely political at this point.
Politics don't work in a courtroom, as I think he's finding out in the New York Attorney General's case in New York, a civil case, and that's going to continue in his criminal trials.
But his rhetoric is really getting dangerous, more and more dangerous.
And we saw what happened on January 6th when he uses inflammatory rhetoric now.
And his recent true social post is incredibly, incredibly scary for anyone that might be trying to work in government.
And it is just unquestionable at this point that that man cannot see public office again.
He is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be eliminated.
I'm not saying it's probable.
I'm saying it's possible.
We saw which responsible controversial and dramatic, and I want you to understand that I'm not saying this will happen, but Javier Yair Bolsonaro was stabbed and also killed days before his election.
Assassination does happen.
The people, there is so much at stake here.
Not just trillions of dollars, but the fate of wars and democracy.
There could be no greater stakes than whether or not Donald Trump wins in 2024.
And the people who have weaponized the entire government system against him are surely not above, I hate to say it, assassination.
What do you think of that?
That's what I'm worried about.
It's a country with 400 million firearms.
And of course, there have been four assassinated presidents.
So you can't dismiss it in any case, you know.
And there were tents, like on Gerald Ford and Harry Truman and others.
President Roosevelt is president-elect, Franklin Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt, both of them.
And so you can't say it can't happen, but I have intense political and philosophical animosity towards Trump's unreasonable critics like Nadler, like Schiff, the people who tried to impeach him, and all the dirty tricks specialists in the Democratic Party.
I don't, you know, I'm from Quebec.
I don't really believe in pristine politics.
I understand it's a rough game, and you do what you can to get elected, but you draw the line at a reasonable place.
And I don't think that even Schiff or Nadler, for example, would be interested.
I think they'd be highly consolable if he was assassinated, but I don't think they'd have anything to do with the commission.
I don't think they would either.
But all those ex-CIA this, ex-FDS.
You can't say it couldn't happen, but I think if it happens, it's because a kook does it, not because those who have corrupted the justice system would say, right, there's only one bridge we haven't crossed.
This is what we've got.
We've got to kill this guy.
I just don't think they would do that.
Maybe I'm being that.
I sure hope you're right.
I look at some of those old CIA bosses who are still milling around.
Oh, God.
Clapper and what's his name?
John.
I think they're not above anything.
And even some of those senior FBI officials.
Assassinating a presidential candidate.
Some of them boast about their assassination system.
Well, they both lied to Congress.
About lying to Congress in the Lodge of Congress.
Let me put it this way.
If they are not above coups in another country, and if they actually believe, some of them say that Donald Trump is as bad as Hitler.
That can't possibly be true, but if they actually believed it, wouldn't they do anything to stop Hitler from becoming president again?
If you actually in your bones felt he was like Hitler, why wouldn't you take him up by any means?
It's like that thought experiment.
If you could go back in time, would you assassinate Hitler if you had a time?
Well, I think they would.
I mean, I don't like to be a psychoanalyst of people I don't know personally, or indeed even who I do know, though I'm not a psychoanalyst.
But I think they would make a distinction between Hitler and someone elevated by the American political system.
I think even James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, for example, who has publicly stated that he thought Trump was a Russian intelligence asset.
I mean, how great an intelligence chief of this guy?
But even he, I think, would feel that assassinating an American political leader was a bad thing.
He would say that, but Xi Jinping might not say that, and the Ayatollah's who were random.
Look, for a foreign power to get into it, then you're really asking for trouble.
Well, I'm just engaging in speculation.
No, I think there are in America kooks who might try it, but I would be hopeful that the security apparatus around these political leaders would prevent it.
I hope so.
By the way, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has had a difficult time getting secure.
Well, that's just the Democratic establishment trying to discourage him.
I find him interesting.
I don't agree with everything he says, but I'd like to think he's contrary.
He's a kook.
I have nothing against him.
I'm not anti-Kennedy, but a guy who says my father and my uncle were murdered by the CIA.
I mean, I just don't believe that.
Well, someone murdered him.
Listen, Conrad Black, great to catch up with you.
You know, we started talking about the book, and I just want to mention one more time.
We've been showing we have the civil right to speak our minds.
That's right.
The book is called Forgotten History, Civil Rights in Canada.
It's published by our cousins over the Democracy Fund.