Ezra Levant and Sheila Gunn-Reid dissect Rebel News’ 2023 mainstreaming, from pandemic censorship battles—like Trudeau’s C-11/C-18 laws—to legal fights for free speech, including Tamara Leach’s trial (March 2024) and Pastor Arthur Pavlovsky’s appeal. They expose Stephen Gilbeau’s defiance of court rulings on carbon taxes and fossil fuel bans, comparing it to CNN’s alleged Gulf War reporting bias, while noting $15B in Ontario EV subsidies. Levant praises Danielle Smith’s data-driven pushback against Trudeau but questions Pierre Poilievre’s silence on immigration. Rebel News’ shift—from lockdowns to transgender school policies and CBC scrutiny—signals a broader conservative media war against state overreach, with Elon Musk’s Twitter as a key battleground. [Automatically generated summary]
Our friend Sheila Gunnread is in town for our Christmas party.
I took the opportunity to sit down to go over the year in review and a look ahead at 2024, a great conversation with a great journalist.
That's ahead.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
It's eight bucks a month.
I know that's not a lot of dough for you, but it really adds up for us because enough people do that.
We can pay our bills.
You know, we don't take any money from Trudeau or demonetized by YouTube.
So it really makes a difference.
If you can go to RebelNewsPlus.com and click subscribe.
All right, here's today's podcast.
I don't know if you ever heard that
wonderful saying, the sun never sets on the British Empire.
And there was a point in time when that was true.
Think about it.
Australia, Canada, India, much of Africa, and the United Kingdom itself.
So no matter what time zone you were in, it was always sunny.
Well, we're not quite as big as that, but it is true that the sun never sets on Rebel News Empire.
We have people in Australia.
We have people all across the time zones in Canada.
And although we don't have a full-timer in the United Kingdom anymore, we do like to cover the news there.
So to get together in person is a rare event.
We have daily meetings by Zoom, but that's not the same.
Well, today is our Christmas party.
So we brought at least the Canadians together to have a little Christmas celebration in our Toronto World headquarters.
And we'll be joined by Zoom with an Australian delegation because we're going to announce the results of the Viewers' Choice Awards for the Rebbe's.
That's what we call our prize for the best rebel reporter.
But while our team is here in town, what better opportunity than to stop and have a catch-up with our chief reporter and Alberta Bureau Chief, Sheila Gunnread, who joins me now?
Great to see you.
It's great to be in the office.
I'm not here as much as I would like to be, but things are changing in here.
I don't think we had this set up this part of the last season.
You know, we haven't fully deployed the whole news studio, but it is more a real-life studio than a green screen studio.
There's these fancy chairs.
I interviewed Conrad Black in there the other day.
And I think we have some other plans.
We're not rushing to get it done, but I think it is a fun thing to have a real life studio.
So thank you for being here.
Now, Rebel News, I think, has shifted.
During the lockdown and the pandemic, that was our overarching mission.
It was, I think, 80% of what we did.
Of course, we covered other things too.
But every aspect of the lockdown, from the quarantine for the country, for the curfew in Quebec, for the shut down the business laws, for the forced vaccine, like there was 20 different aspects that we covered, and we covered it like crazy.
We're still working on some of those files.
Tamara Leach is still on trial.
Arthur Pavlovsky still has an appeal emanating from the, so we're doing that, but Rebel News has moved on to the frontline battles of today.
What are some of the frontline battles that you see as our chief reporter?
Government Attacks Truth Tellers00:05:48
You know, I think a lot of what we're working on now are the things that still flow from the lockdowns in that the government is attacking the truth tellers that told the truth about the lockdowns and the effects of the lockdowns and the effects of COVID vaccines.
We're seeing that through Justin Trudeau's censorship legislation, you know, C-11, C-18, His attacks on the naturopath industry, the regulation of natural health products.
So I think that's where we're moving to: is the people who told the truth during the pandemic and then were censored by social media, Justin Trudeau is now trying to legislate social media companies to enforce silence of his political enemies.
I think that's where our next battleground is.
It's still in civil liberties.
It's still the fight for free speech.
It's still the little guy against the hammer of the government.
You know, you made me think of something about how Trudeau isn't stopping.
Like, he really is, if it's the COVID today or disinformation or whatever.
Yeah, he'll, I mean, as Dr. James Lindsey said, the issue is never the issue.
The revolution is the issue.
And he'll just, Trudeau will use whatever issue is in front of him to get the revolution.
By revolution, I mean authoritarian control over our lives and future power to the government.
You know, he is so authoritarian by nature, and he never stops.
And he's got a team around him that are the same way.
I think of Stephen Gilbeau.
That is a pure ideologue who cares only about the revolution.
And we know that because he was willing to commit a crime for the revolution.
Well, and we're also seeing a reoccurring theme in Justin Trudeau's government.
We experienced this firsthand when we won a court order to be in the leadership debates and he still wouldn't acknowledge us as journalists, even though a court had just slapped him on the wrist and said they are journalists.
His government is still doing the same thing.
We saw, you know, Bill C-69, the No More Pipelines law, get struck down.
And what did Stephen Gilbo, the environment minister, say the next day?
We're still going to proceed with this.
We saw the plastics ban get struck down.
And he said, we're still going to proceed with this.
This government keeps getting slapped down, and then they continue to ignore the courts.
And that's a sign of an ideological, you know, you know, I think it was Churchill who said a fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
And think about Stephen Gilbo that way.
He was in Dubai.
He jetted there.
I'm sure he went first class, if not, on a private airline.
And he was talking about, oh, we have such huge regulatory plans.
They're novel.
He has so many plans to regulate and shut down and cap the fossil fuels industry, which means to cap jobs.
And I'm thinking he is undeterred.
The number one, two, and three issue in Canadians, according to liberal pollsters like Abacus, the number one, two, and three issues are all cost of living, prices of groceries, cost of housing.
Pierre Pollier had a viral hit with his 15-minute video called Housing Hell.
And you might say, well, that's a bit of a shocking title.
Watch the video.
It is hell.
And so you would think they would address what Canadians care about.
No.
Stephen Gilbo thinks that what Canadians want right now is more carbon taxes, more bans on plastics, and shutting down the oil and gas industry.
The guy is maniac's the wrong word, although he is manic about his issue.
He is, I guess, like a terminator, as they say in that movie.
You can't negotiate with him, you can't bargain with him.
He will go until he is stopped.
He's an extremist on these issues.
I don't know if you saw it last week out of Alberta.
Our environment minister, Rebecca Schultz, said the environment minister tried to get me to sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement, before he divulged the plans to continue to phase out Alberta's oil and gas with these emissions caps that he then went on the international stage and announced to the world.
He didn't even give her a heads up on it unless she agreed to shut up about it.
And that's not what she's elected to do.
I have never heard of that before.
Yeah.
I mean, I've heard of a media lock-up.
Yeah.
So journalists are invited typically an hour or two before a budget, let's say, so that they have time to read the budget documents and ask questions of experts.
And they're given it one or two hours before the whole world so that when it's announced, they're ready to say something.
They're not spending two hours reading it.
That's a very time-limited lock-up for people who are not part of government.
And so that's the only thing I can think of that is close to a non-disclosure agreement.
It's just, hey, we'll give you a sneak peek, but you can't blurt it out.
There's other reasons why they don't want to blurt it out because if someone knows what the budget is before the budget's released, they might buy or sell something on the stock market, whatever.
That's the only thing I can think of.
I guess there are some top secret state secrets.
Sure.
But to tell a cabinet minister of another government, I'm not going to tell you what my plans are unless you keep it secret from your government and your people.
I have never heard of that in my life in Canada or, frankly, in any other democracy.
That is an insane thing to do.
That is a crazy, that is an out-of-control guy.
Yeah, well, it also makes me wonder who else are they saying this to?
Top Secret Electric Vehicle Plans00:06:27
Right.
And who else is complying?
He's so right.
You know, I remember way back in the first Gulf War.
So this is more than 20 years ago now.
CNN, their boss, I think if I'm remembering his name, Eason Jordan, I'll have to check that.
Wrote, I think it was the New York Times, The Washington Post, admitted that they had made a deal with Saddam Hussein, that they had a secret deal.
CNN had a secret deal with Saddam Hussein that if they agreed to shape what they said, including to be his mouthpiece, they would be allowed to stay in Iraq when other media weren't.
So CNN cut a secret deal with a dictator, didn't tell their viewers, and he later confessed this in the newspaper.
How could you ever trust CNN before?
It's not just that they said, okay, we're keeping a secret.
It's they agreed to shape what they said.
They were actually a foreign propaganda mouthpiece.
Do you doubt that Stephen Gilbo has done the same thing with the CBC?
And heck, why not with the CTV or the very many media companies that they subsidize?
Or with Doug Ford?
We see these massive electric vehicle battery deals that are coming to Ontario.
What kind of silence is being bought on the back end for that?
You know, I'm enchanted by Elon Musk these days.
I find him so interesting.
And that's another thing that we cover.
We're sympathetic to Elon Musk editorially because we like his, he's an innovator, he's a builder, he's an industrialist, he's an engineer, he's anti-woke, he's for free speech.
There's so many things we like about him.
And he's a litmus test because you don't have to love the guy.
But if you hate, if you think he is a problem, if you think he's the enemy, that tells me something about you.
And look at how the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities Exchange Commission is gearing up to do a Trump on him.
But one of the things he said the other day, which I have forgotten about, is early in Joe Biden's regime, he had a meeting of all the electric vehicle manufacturers, except Tesla.
Isn't that weird?
The big guy.
More than all the others combined.
And there's certain things.
I mentioned this because Elon Musk is, I think he's, I know I'm shifting gears here.
You made me think about it because you talked about the electric battery plans.
Elon Musk says, and I believe him, that he has never asked for a subsidy, that all these electric vehicle subsidies were asked for by GM or the others, and they just sort of sloshed over him by accident or as a collateral purpose.
I think I believe him when he says that.
And it's so, I mean, you could get Tesla to build a factory in Ontario.
You could.
There's an enormous automobile industry in Ontario already.
It's a lot smaller than it used to be, but it's still enormous.
You could get that if you had low-tax environment, reasonable labor laws, and a non-woke pro-business environment.
Elon Musk would build a factory for free.
I know it.
That's what he does.
I don't think that, I mean, I have to check, but I don't think he's being paid to set up his factory in California or in Texas.
And to give $15 billion or whatever it is just to build some batteries, holy cow, there's a lot of things going on there.
But there's also, we're going to support Elon Musk's competitor.
There's a lot of things cooking there.
Yeah, I think you're right to touch on the buying votes thing, too, because I see what's happening in the Canadian auto industry, sort of what happened in the Rust Belt for Trump, that the regular workers are starting to disconnect from their union leadership.
COVID helped with that, I think, where people were being forced to take a vaccine to keep their job and looking to their union shop stewards saying, what are you doing with my dudes?
You're supposed to stick up for me.
And I think those blue-collar workers that were traditional NDP and liberal voters here in Ontario, they're going the way of the blue-collar voter in Alberta.
Isn't that interesting?
You made me think of Washington County, Pennsylvania.
I spent a fair bit of time there 2015, 16, 17.
That was steel and coal country.
And those places were shutting down.
I remember driving down one road and there was this big steel plant and it was just on a skeleton crew and just like one shift a day.
All the other steel and coal had moved to China.
But what had come in to save the state?
Fracking.
And as fracking gave these folks new jobs, great jobs, and actually royalty checks, because in Pennsylvania, you own your subsurface rights.
So there was a lot of farmers who were getting what they called mailbox money.
Every month they get $1,000 or $2,000.
It lifted the whole state.
And that county, Washington County, went from being two to one for Democrats to being a big pro-Trump.
And it put Trump over the edge in Pennsylvania, which helped give him the election.
That's what it sounds like Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau don't want to have happen.
They want to keep- Exactly.
And the funny thing is, Jagmeet Singer is about the least labor-ish leader of the NDP you could even design in a lab.
The guy's out there with his Louis Vuitton bag or whatever.
I don't think he's worked a day in his life with his hands and look who am I to talk, but I'm not the leader of the NDP.
You're not pretending, are you?
He's such a fancy pants.
And where do these working class folks go?
I mean, if you're in the government sector union, obviously you're going to vote for Trudeau and NDP, obviously.
But if you're actually a working union, automobile, or any other private sector union, you're not voting for Jagmeet Singer, Justin Trudeau.
No.
And that's a shift that happened in Alberta a very, very long time ago.
Any of the oil patch unions, the pipeline unions, they don't vote for Jagmeet Singh.
They don't vote for Rachel Notley.
Because she votes against their jobs.
Well, what's going on in Alberta?
Danielle Smith's Shift00:12:00
Danielle Smith, I knew her from the university.
We were actually, at the same time she was the leader of the young progressive conservatives, I was the president of the Campus Reform Party.
It was very funny.
I mean, I've known her for 30 years.
And I sort of fell out of touch with her when she defected to the conservatives.
It was eight or nine years ago.
But I've had a reconnection with her.
I've interviewed her a couple times.
I like generally the direction she's in.
And I judge her a lot by her enemies.
I judge her by who's squawking about her.
I judge her by what the Globe of Mail and McLean says against her.
The more they hate her, the more I say, okay, she's doing well.
Yeah, and she's learning, I think, from Pierre Polyev and how she handles the media.
I don't know if you saw, she did exactly what Pierre Polyev did when he did the Apple thing.
A journalist asked her, you know, we've seen emissions go up in Alberta.
And she said, tell me your numbers.
Where'd you get your numbers?
The journalist was caught completely flat-footed.
It is so refreshing to see politicians now, particularly conservative ones, be emboldened enough to push back against the media, to treat the enemy like, or to treat the media like the enemy that they are.
It's good to finally see them recognize that.
That's so right.
And in Alberta, in particular, the CBC, in an unethical manner, really campaigned against her in the last election.
They knew their mission was to kill her, and they didn't succeed.
You know, it's funny because I was not at the Apple Orchard moment, which was just classic, but I was at an event with Pierre Polyev when that CP reporter sort of said, oh, you made a false announcement about a purported terror attack at the Rainbow Bridge.
And he said, no, I'm referenced a media report.
They went back and forth, and I was there.
I hadn't been to a press conference like that in a while.
Yep.
And what was interesting to me, Sheila, is I think there were five or six reporters there.
I got the first question, and I asked about Hamas on the streets, which was the theme of the press conference.
Here's what I saw about the rest of the questions.
There was one Jewish reporter there for a Jewish newspaper who asked a Jewish question, but put that aside.
The rest of the reporters, CBC, CTV, Global, et cetera, none of them asked about what Pierre Polyev said.
Right.
All of them asked about really obscure hobby horse vendetta issues.
And what's interesting is almost all of them just read verbatim from their phone.
Now, I'm not criticizing.
Sometimes I write my questions out if I want it to be just perfect.
But what I sensed there is they were reading questions sent to them by Central Command from the CBC.
And so when Pierre Polyev pushed back, in this case on the Canadian, they had no idea.
Because they were just saying, oh, the big boss at the CBC headquarters wrote this perfectly worded attack on Polyev.
I'm going to read it.
Okay, but what happens if you're asked to back it up?
So it was amazing to watch the back and forth.
This Canadian press reporter had no idea.
She had never been on the back foot before.
She had never debated before.
She had never been on the defensive before.
She didn't know how to handle it.
And predictably, all the other meetings, oh, you're a bully.
Like, you see, the CBC had issued panels.
Oh, this is unbecoming of a leader.
Really, you didn't say that when you and I and Rebel News was banned, banned from a tele.
I never had that solidarity from other media when we were literally banned, or I hate to say it, when our people were physically assaulted.
Never that solidarity.
But Pierre Polyev asks a question, and the entire media party takes it as a moral affront.
It's a pleasure to see.
We can't even go to a liberal press conference.
We can't even find out where they are.
And these people are complaining that being told to back up their contentions to politicians, that's offensive to them.
Really, you must see Danielle Smith push back on that person because he said, you know, emissions are going up in Alberta.
You know, you're headed off to Dubai and you're going to go there and sell Alberta oil and gas as a clean alternative.
She just stopped.
Is there a video clip of it?
There is a video clip.
Let's take a look.
As the owner of this resource, we have a responsibility to make sure that we're taking care of emissions.
That's why we set our target in the first place.
What we don't accept is the federal government thinking they can do it better than us when they can't.
And that's why we're going to be asserting our constitutional right to be able to manage this resource.
Emissions have gone up radically in Alberta.
But follow-up question.
We had a couple of polls earlier this fall that suggest as many as two-thirds of Albertans actually support an emissions cap on oil and gas.
How confident are you that Albertans back you on this?
What are your numbers?
I think it was 62% in one poll and 57 in the other.
No, what are your numbers that you're talking about of emissions going up?
I just need to know what your baseline is.
Well, it was from the Canadian Energy Regulator, Premier.
I mean, I can send them to Sam if you like, but Albert's emissions are going up.
I don't really want to argue about that.
I'd like an answer to my second question, please.
Well, you did assert.
That's why I'm curious what your numbers are because I gave you the two examples of how our emissions have gone down.
That's why I need to know why you say that they've gone up.
Carbon dioxide emissions have gone up.
You're forcing me to guess here, but I think it was something like 256 megatons.
I don't have the number offhand.
I can find it from the Canadian Energy Regulator and send it along to Sam.
Tootsuite.
But I would like an answer to my second question, please.
Okay, well, I think emissions are going down.
This is why we're probably not going to get an answer to this because, yes, emissions have gone down 53% in electricity.
They've also gone down 45% on methane.
And we're continuing to see that the Pathways Group, Dow Chemical, Air Products, and others have made emissions reduction targets of net zero by 2050.
So there is a whole of industry approach to getting emissions down to net neutrality by 2050.
It's a matter of rolling out the technology to make sure that we have the means to do it with a technology approach as opposed to with a shut-in approach.
So if you asked Albertans, do you want your production shut in so that you lose 1.2 million barrels a day of production and you reduce revenues by 6.5 billion a year and you're cutting a third out of our health budget, I suspect you'd probably get a very different answer because that is what the implications of a production cut of this magnitude would be.
And that is not something that Albertans support and it's certainly not something that the federal government should support either.
When this industry gave $9 billion worth of corporate income tax to them last year, that is the consequences of what would happen if we ended up with a production cut, which we won't allow to happen.
You're right.
She is picking up a little bit of the apple.
I think Pierre Polyev should, I mean, you don't want to walk around with an apple in your pocket because that's going to be a big bulge.
But if you have an apple holder, like if like Pierre Polyev always travels with an assistant, I think that assistant should have a little apple in like a suitcase or a purse or whatever.
And if there's an apple, I think they should rush and hand the apple to the boss.
And then I think the boss should take it.
This is just my theory, because I think it would be such a winning move.
Let's get back to Danielle Smith for a second.
There was a moment there when on the provincial scene, it looked pretty bleak.
And I think Doug Ford is actually a liberal.
I think he's a disgrace.
But Scott Moe, Danielle Smith, I see this Blaine Higgs.
He was terrible during the lockdowns, but boy, he's standing up for things in terms of parental consent or at least informing parents about their kids changing genders.
I see a national revolt against carbon taxes.
I see now the head of the Northwest Territories is saying, we can't have a carbon tax.
Everything we do is based on diesel.
Everything has to be shipped in or flown in.
I sense that Danielle Smith is not alone.
And there's this new coalition of premiers who are in their calm manner.
They're not bomb throwers.
They're just in a calm manner saying, you know what?
We're sort of not going to go along with Trudeau anymore.
He is unpopular.
His ideas are unpopular.
He's still pretending it's 2015 and carbon tax is the thing people want to care about instead of the cost of living in the housing.
I like the way things are going in the provincial scene.
Yeah, I think we're seeing a little bit of the DeSantis effect with Danielle Smith, and I say DeSantis as the governor and not the candidate for the president of the United States, in that she'll go out on these tough issues first, quite frequently, or at least the loudest.
Sometimes Saskatchewan is leading on these issues.
They had their sovereignty act before we ever did in Alberta, but they just quietly did it.
We're a little bit more bombastic in Alberta.
She'll go out loud.
She'll put the feds on warning.
And wouldn't you know what all the other premiers sidle up behind her and say, you know what, us too.
And we saw Ron DeSantis do that when he said, I'm not going to do lockdowns anymore.
Then all of a sudden, Christy Noam in the Dakota said same thing.
So I think she's doing a little bit of that.
And you'd be surprised who's joining her on these issues.
For example, in Manitoba, Wab Canoe, he's saying, you know what, we need a carbon tax break here too.
He's breaking with his own party and being more of one of those prairie pragmatist NDPers that we saw so many years ago.
I had a hard heart towards Wab Canoe.
Oh, I still do on a lot of issues.
Because he did some really rough things.
But I have to say, when he won, his acceptance speech showed more humility than I thought, showed a recognition of his past failures.
And it was, I mean, I'm not sure how he's governed since candidly.
I haven't followed that closely.
But he talked about how Indigenous people can't always just blame the system.
I want to show you a short clip of that because this moment of grace bought a lot of time for me with Wab Canoe, someone who I had hardened my heart to here.
Take a look at Wab Canoe, the Premier of Manitoba.
I want to speak to the young Nietzsche's out there.
I want to speak to young people from all backgrounds.
Really, I want to speak to people of all ages, but I want to speak to young Nietzsche's in particular.
I was given a second chance in life.
And I would like to think that I've made good on that opportunity.
And you can do the same.
Here's how.
My life became immeasurably better when I stopped making excuses and I started looking for a reason.
And I found that reason in our family.
I found that reason in our community.
And I found that reason in our province and country.
And so to young people out there who want to change your life for the better, you can do it.
I tell you, if he's saying he wants a holiday from the carbon tax, that tells me he's listening more to the people of Manitoba than he's listening to Jagmeat Singh.
And that's a good sign.
Well, he's also more reasonable on this issue than the previous PC government.
Isn't that a great point?
That's such a good point.
You know what?
It is true.
Everyone does deserve a right to earn a second chance.
They don't deserve a second chance just because.
But I think there has to be some sort of recognition and maybe contrition or something.
He did a lot of bad things, but I like for an NDP here.
He's off to a good start.
And as you point out, and by the way, I remember Brian Pallister, who was the premier of Manitoba during the lockdowns, was one of the most brutal, one of the most brutal.
Crazy Talking About Carbon00:05:18
Very interesting.
Well, I don't know.
I think that everywhere I look, there's disaster.
But I do have hope that things will correct, that the pendulum will swing back.
I think in the United States it will.
In fact, I think everyone knows that, including the Democrats.
I think they're going to try and replace Joe Biden before the election because I think he's a disaster, and most Democrats know it.
I think they're trying to maneuver Gavin Newsom in there, frankly.
I think in Canada, the polls show almost a 20-point lead by Pierre Polyev.
And he is still silent on certain key issues.
He has not said a word against mass immigration, for example.
He's afraid of certain cultural issues because he doesn't want to be tagged as racist.
And I get it.
He wants to win.
But I think in every way, Pierre Polyev would be an improvement.
I think that, according to polls right now, Trump would win, frankly, even if he was in jail.
I see elections overseas, for example, in Holland, the Netherlands, with Hirt Builders winning in part by opposing nitrogen taxes that they're imposing on their farmers.
It was weird for me to hear it because we hear carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon, and we're sort of numbed to the fact how crazy it is talking about chemical.
It's on the periodic table of the elements.
It would be like if someone started talking about, you know, hydrogen.
Yeah.
Oh, we got to get rid of this hydrogen.
Well, it's like the building block.
Well, hydrogen.
Are you crazy?
We've heard this word carbon.
It's in everything.
And they've labeled it as pollution.
We are made up largely of carbon.
CH.
See, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen is the building block for almost everything.
And so here, let me play a clip from you when I was talking to Kirt Builders, and he just talks about nitrogen under the blue.
And what?
And in the Netherlands, they normalized the war on nitrogen.
And hearing him say it, it just, I mean, I know what he's talking about because we covered the farmers' rebellion, but it made me realize how absurd we must sound to normal people.
Second priority is that people feel that they are totally nejected, the Dutchman, the indigenous people.
They believe that while we spend 60, 17 billion euros a year when it comes to nitrogen or climate change or all those other things, that they have trouble paying for their utilities, the rent, the gasoline for their car, the social security or the healthcare system.
So we believe that we should stop feeding those leftish liberal ideological nonsense issues, and we should make sure that our people have enough money in their pocket and really can help our economy and help themselves.
So those issues are the two most important.
Stop the immigration and the asylum seeking.
Be proud of our own identity, culture, and everything that goes with that.
And make sure that we make better choices with the Euros that we have.
Don't spend it to Africa.
Don't spend it to other countries in the European Union as a transfer union that we almost have in the Eurozone.
Don't spend it on nitrogen and other issues.
Give our own people their money back with lower taxes and lower burdens for the Dutch people.
It's all madness.
It's all madness.
It's that old saying, how many angels dance on the head of a pin?
You know, you can get into such an abstruse, abstract debate about something that is no longer related to anything in real life.
And I think of the massive global warming conference that the UN has, and everyone's talking about, well, I'm an expert in carbon emissions reduction technology, and you're all focused on the nitty-gritty instead of the emperor has no clothes.
You guys are all crazy.
You're talking about carbon, which is a naturally occurring element.
You're pretending that what you do will make a difference to the world's temperature.
You are literally saying that if we don't pay your taxes, there will be tornadoes or a volcano or something, and you want to sacrifice the virgin to the volcano, but you're updating that narrative and talking about, we'll pay taxes to me, and I promise there won't be a hurricane.
They are all crazy because they've been saying it for decades now.
Everyone just repeats the weird talking points.
I do think, though, the emperor does have no clothes now.
We saw the United Arab Emirates say we're not phasing out fossil fuels.
That's crazy.
Show us how that works, that we could ever advance as a society and ever be actually energy efficient without our good friend fossil fuels.
Saskatchewan and Alberta did what Trump did in Bonn, Germany.
They went there, they had their delegations, and they promoted clean, Canadian oil and gas as opposed to the dictatorial, dirty oil and gas of the world.
So I think we're seeing a bit of the tide shifting, specifically when the host country is saying we have absolutely no intention of phasing out fossil fuels.
Yeah, I mean, Dubai is such an energy-intensive place, whether it's for air conditioning or building steel towers.
Fossil Fuels Fight Back00:04:47
Building things just because you can.
Yeah, and there's more aircraft per person there between Etihad and Emirates to the world's largest airlines in a tiny country.
I mean, that is a fossil fuel.
That's a country that's getting a lot of things right.
Well, listen, it's great to catch up with you.
And I feel like 2023 was the year that Rebel News normalized.
I mean, we were so focused on the pandemic, and rightly so.
I think we rose to the occasion.
It was a historic moment.
One of the great things we did was create with our friends at the Democracy Fund a civil liberties charity to help fill the void.
Other than the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, there really were very, very few people fighting for civil liberties in the courts.
And that was our total focus for a year.
I think this last year we focused on other things, whether it's David Menzies and the transgender insanity, or whether it's, you know, I mean, now we're focused on the Hamas war a bit.
What do you think 2024 is going to hold?
I think we've already seen a little bit of it, and that is fighting for the free speech of people who are being canceled, particularly local politicians on the school board and whatnot, who are standing up against the trans agenda, who are saying this is madness.
These boys cannot compete against girls.
We cannot sexualize kids in the classroom.
I've done some reporting on that.
David Menzies has done some incredible work on that.
And I think that's where the real next fight for the Democracy Fund will be, is on these smaller issues where people, politicians, are brave enough to stand up and speak on behalf of the people who sent them there to do what's best for kids at the school board.
Yeah.
The last two big cases the Democracy Fund has are Pastor Arthur Pavlovsky's appeal of his conviction for giving that sermon at the blockade, and Tamara Leach's trial insanely is reaching all the way into March of 2024.
Those are last big cases.
Of course, Democracy Fund has hundreds of little cases that are being dispatched.
I think that one thing to watch is the CBC when they're cornered.
They know, they have, they absolutely realize that Pierre Polyev is serious when he says he doesn't like them.
Every conservative leader always says, oh, I don't like the CBC.
Stephen Harper didn't defund them or privatize them.
Andrew Scheer and the other guy whose name I've forgotten and don't want to remember, they would never criticize the CBC.
Pierre Polyev is campaigning against them, is naming and shaming them every day.
They've got to be taking him seriously, and I do, that he will privatize and do something to them.
I think you're going to see the CBC and then the newly colonized print media who just got another big bailout from Trudeau.
You are going to see the activation of the state regime media more than you've ever seen before.
And you're probably thinking, how is that possible?
They're already fully activated.
Imagine someone who feels in their bones they are going to be fired if Pierre Polyev wins.
They personally will be fired.
What wouldn't they do?
They would do anything.
And I think you're going to see 2024 will be the year of the extreme weaponization of all the institutions that TRU can control through money.
You're going to see media, you're going to see professors getting government grants, you're going to see the RCMP, you're going to see this total weaponization of the instruments of the state that TRUIO controls when you're 20 points behind and are facing electoral oblivion.
If you're an extremist like that, you will do anything.
You will burn down the whole house to stop your opponents from winning.
I think that 2024 will be in some ways the worst year yet.
I'll offer just a little pushback because these constant media bailouts are evidence that whatever the media is doing is completely failing.
It shows that people have lost trust in them, particularly over the last three years.
The media didn't just attack the conservatives, they attacked the people during COVID.
And so the people who normally would have maybe tuned into the CBC, they have turned against the CBC and it has necessitated ongoing bailouts.
So I think the media's effectiveness at attacking politicians on the right, I think it's drastically dwindled because of the media's own actions over the last three years.
You know what?
You make some good points there.
And of course, we talked earlier about Elon Musk liberating Twitter, reinvigorating Twitter.