Ezra Levante and David Freiheit expose Canada’s pandemic-era civil liberties collapse, where vaccine passports barred kids from soccer fields, Trudeau’s government imposed 10 p.m. curfews, and police assaulted reporter David Menzies in a 10-hour Montreal standoff. Courts rubber-stamped unscientific mandates while prosecuting dissenters like Tamara Leach under conspiracy charges, mirroring U.S. January 6 crackdowns. Citizen journalism—including Rebel News’ 400M impressions—debunked Trudeau’s violent insurrection narrative, yet his tyranny persisted, with $100M paid to regime media and laws like C11/C18 silencing critics. Florida’s freedom and Rumble’s defiance against censorship offer hope, but Levante warns complacency risks irreversible authoritarianism. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the best YouTubers out there when he talks about law and freedom, talking about Viva Fry, also known as David Freiheit, my feature interview with him today.
But first, let me invite you to become a member of Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
It's eight bucks a month, and we need that to pay our bills because we are being demonetized by YouTube and we don't take any government money.
So, if you love our video content and want to support us, go to rebelnewsplus.com and click subscribe.
All right, here's our podcast tonight.
A feature interview with the internet's Viva Fry, also known as David Freiheit.
And this is the Ezra Levance show.
Shame on you, you sensorial bug.
Well, I tell you, there are not a lot of lawyers who care about liberty.
I wish it weren't the case.
I wish most lawyers cared about liberty.
Listen, most lawyers just, it's a job, they got to pay the bills.
And many lawyers, well, they don't want to take cases that are too spicy because that means they might not get a government contract.
And it certainly means they won't get appointed to the bench and be a judge.
I have had a difficult time finding civil liberties lawyers for various cases over the years.
I don't know if I ever told you the story of trying to find a lawyer for Tommy Robinson in the United Kingdom.
I had to go through seven lawyers, each of whom refused to take the case before I found one who would.
And it was not dissimilar in Canada in the early days of the pandemic.
Too many lawyers thought, well, there's no way I'm going to represent an unvaccinated person or someone who is defying the lockdown.
So it was a pleasure to discover or to rediscover that there were lawyers who actually deeply care about civil liberties and who were as troubled by the world as I was, and I'm sure as you were.
And one of them was a lawyer who was also a video blogger based in Montreal, perhaps the most locked down city in all of Canada.
You might recall, they had a curfew and from it had different times, different dates, but from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. was one typical curfew.
Whether you were vaccinated or not, whether you were sick or not, the civil liberties inferno was outrageous and too few lawyers cared.
Well, one lawyer who cared very much, and it obviously pained him dearly, is our friend known as Viva Fry Online, or David Freiheit, as his mama called him.
He joins us now via Skype from Florida, where he departed refusing to abide the lockdown after several months.
Joining us now, Viva Fryheit, great to see you, David.
Thanks very much for taking the time.
My pleasure, Ezra.
I'll correct one thing.
I guess I'm still a lawyer in terms of training, but I am now, I call myself a former lawyer because I left Quebec.
I am no longer, I'm no longer a member of the bar in Quebec.
I voluntarily abandoned my license because I don't think I'm going to need it in Quebec anytime soon or possibly for the rest of my life.
So now I've gone from being a lawyer to just being an internet legal critique loudmouth guy who screams to the clouds at what I think are the most outrageous injustices I've seen, at least in my lifetime, and possibly, I don't know.
There have been worse injustices in the history of humankind, but this is as bad as it's ever been in my life.
I think you're right.
I've called it this Civil Liberties Inferno.
And one of the things that really upset me, and it's one of the reasons why we created the Democracy Fund.
It's an independent charity designed to fight for the civil liberties, is because the so-called Canadian Civil Liberties Association, it's like they hit the snooze button right when the pandemic infringements began.
They didn't do anything.
And all the people, all the law professors who put out week after week, they would put out press releases about poor Omar Cotter in Guantanamo Bay and where's his civil liberties.
If you cared about Omar Cotter and Guantanamo Bay, why wouldn't you care about innocent Canadian citizens being in house arrest simply, and even if they were vaxed, even if they were healthy, I just lost whatever faith I had in this, in the self-righteous, self-described civil libertarians because they all vanished when we needed them.
Ezra, like I was very reluctant to make any comparisons, which many people consider to be hyperbolic between this era and other eras of historical atrocities.
And I'm no longer reluctant to do it.
And I'm no longer shy about it.
And I'm no longer apologetic for doing it.
When March 2020 and the world shut down, and I remember going to my parents' place, talking with my dad, everyone is devastated.
I was sort of more independent and not attached to open society.
I was on the internet and that would exist nonetheless.
Siblings who had jobs that were basically effectively shut down overnight indefinitely.
Nuremberg's Echoes00:08:08
And I'm talking with my dad and he says, you know, you see how fast society can go crazy, for lack of a better word.
They can whip themselves up into a frenzy.
And it only got worse from there.
That was within the first month.
And then it went from two weeks to flatten the curve to celebrate Christmas alone.
Don't visit your elderly loved ones because you might get them sick and die.
Curfew, lockdowns, quarantine, government-designated quarantine facilities, people being whisked away, vaccine passports.
And within a period of two and a half to three years, I saw how quickly a society could devolve, where historical atrocities of the past make a lot more sense to me now.
And unfortunately so.
Yeah.
You know, a lot of people say, oh, how dare you make comparisons to Nazi Germany.
Well, that is the ultimate comparator.
After the Holocaust, after the Second World War, one of the major trials in Nuremberg was the doctor trials, because so many of the worst atrocities were committed by medical doctors.
And part of the verdict of the doctor trials, I mean, you can Google it, Nazi doctor trials.
Part of the verdict was called the Nuremberg Code that they sort of codified the moral rules that doctors should live under.
I mean, that ancient medical slogan, do no harm.
Well, what does that mean?
Well, it means informed consent and the patient needs to know what you're doing and they have the right to withdraw the consent, et cetera.
Like it's a very codified rules that we came up with because of the Nazis.
And we broke that code.
So of course we can make comparisons with the Nazis.
And that's just on the doctor's side of things.
What about the demonization of minorities?
What about the demonization of people who don't conform?
And the rage, in particular, Justin Trudeau obviously did some polling and saw that raging against the unvaccinated seemed to work because it was like he flipped a switch on and the demonization.
Here's a clip of that.
I don't know if you like, he would shout and say, you won't be able to sit next to us.
Well, that, I mean, again, Nazi Nuremberg laws of where Jews were and weren't allowed to go.
The new Jews were the unvaxed.
Here's a clip of Trudeau.
The folks out there tonight shout the anti-vaxxers.
They're wrong.
They're wrong.
And of how we go through this pandemic.
They're more than just being wrong, because no one's entitled to their opinions.
They are putting at risk their own kids and they're putting at risk our kids as well.
That's why we've been unequivocal.
If you want to get on a plane or a train in the coming months, you're going to have to be fully vaccinated so families with their kids don't have to worry that someone is going to put them in danger in the seat next to them or across the aisle.
If you don't want to get vaccinated, that's your choice.
But don't think you can get on a plane or a train beside vaccinated people.
And now is the time for people who are still resistant to getting vaccinated to realize that that choice, which has consequences on putting our kids at risk,
which has consequences at having us risk more lockdowns because they haven't chosen to get vaccinated yet, that there will be consequences for those people in not being able to go to a gym or a restaurant, not being able to go to a movie theater, not being able to get on a train or a plane.
It's going to be those people are putting us all at risk.
I've got that one memorized, the inflection in his voice.
It's, Ezra, it's not just that they went from Nuremberg to violating Nuremberg.
They went from Nuremberg, no human experimentation, informed consent, to immunizing pharma and the doctors, and effectively the government immunizing them from real-time human experimentation.
If you can pull the clip, you know, in post or pull the clip, Obama getting up there and admitting in real time, well, we've basically clinically trialed on billions of people.
That's an admission of real-time human experimentation.
And people want to try to shame.
Oh, sorry.
Take a look at that clip right now.
Absolutely.
Take a look.
And yet, despite the fact that we've now essentially clinically tested the vaccine on billions of people worldwide, around one in five Americans is still willing to put themselves at risk and put their families at risk rather than get vaccinated.
People are dying because of misinformation.
You got Obama admitting it, and people are going to try to shame me.
Viva, people will say, you can't make that comparison.
I say, first of all, I can.
My grandfather escaped Nazi Germany in 1936 to move to Argentina, went back to try to get some family members, and then ended up in, I believe it was Winnipeg, Canada.
I can make that analogy, and I'm not going to be shamed into it because I'm Jewish, and I'm not going to be shamed into it regardless.
Non-Jews can make that analogy.
Jews can make that analogy.
And why?
Some are going to say, well, nobody's being lined up in trains and exterminated.
History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, to quote Mark Twain.
And you want to talk about the adverse events or adverse reactions caused by this experimental, whatever the hell you want to call it.
We're into the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions.
And so we can't even say that we're not even on the same scale in terms of numbers.
What we are on right now in real time was human experimentation.
And not only do we not get to sue people for it, they've been immunized for the consequences of their own actions.
It's a world gone upside down.
Yeah.
You're so right.
And by the way, in society, anyone that they don't like, they call Hitler.
I mean, the agent provocateur who unfurled the Nazi flag, the swastika, at the trucker convoy for about 30 seconds, just so it could be photographed and then put it away immediately.
What a psyop that was.
So you can call anyone you don't like Hitler.
Trudeau immediately called the truckers racist, misogynist, whatever, baseless.
But actually copying what the Third Reich did, you can't point that out.
And the thing is that Hitler won his election in 33.
And the Second World War didn't start till 39.
And the Holocaust itself did not get underway in earnest, really, for another couple of years.
And so let's say it took almost 10 years, whereas we gave up so many of our civil liberties.
Thank God, obviously, we didn't go that last half of the journey to death camps, but we had quarantines.
We had mandatory, you know, banning funerals, banning weddings, house arrest.
Boy, we moved a lot quicker with social media, allowed us to move a lot more quickly than they did 90 years ago.
Well, but we're, yes, we never got to death camps and the world will probably never get to death camps ever again because the next iteration of whatever it was that went down as a societal collapse during World War II, it'll happen in a different way.
But the consequences will be just as grave.
We're going to have effectively, if you believe the numbers, the Veris reports or the Canadian equivalent, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of adverse reactions of serious importance or deaths.
So they're not death camps anymore, but what it is is mass casualties as a result of human experimentation for which the pharma companies, the doctors, and the government are effectively immunized.
It doesn't have to be death camps to be atrocious and an atrocity.
And you might, well, hopefully you never get death camps again.
But what did we get in real time here?
You got your quarantine facilities, government-designated quarantine facilities, imposed curfew, house arrest for millions of people.
Demonization is not, you know, is an understatement.
People losing their jobs, vaccine passports.
Police Harassment Incident00:14:00
Show me your papers.
Oh, I can't compare it to the Holocaust.
I'm sorry.
I can compare it to Nazi Germany when they made my wife show her papers to go out at night after curfew for her job.
So I'm sorry, I'm unapologetic about it.
I was late.
I was reluctant, not late, reluctant to get on the Nuremberg 2.0 hashtag.
I'm fully there now because I understand what they've done.
And it will be an atrocity in 40 years, the same way we look back at other atrocities decades later and say those were atrocities.
Yeah.
And the police aspect of it was there too.
Adam Skelly, the restaurateur in Toronto who dared to open his restaurant to the willing who went there, over 100 police showed up.
We went to cover the curfew in Montreal.
And we had a couple of reporters who were harassed night after night.
We sent a whole team, more than 50 police, swarmed our Airbnb, surrounded us, had a 10-hour standoff.
They demanded the right to search our Airbnb houseboat.
They couldn't find a judge who was willing to give them the court order, search order.
Here, just take a look at that.
See your wicked faces.
Other than David Menzies, I'm the oldest person in the company, and some of our people are quite young, early 20s.
There was even one younger sister of a staffer there who was 16.
And I felt a sense of parental duty almost.
Even for our staff who are in their 20s, I'm 50.
I have some obligation to them.
The biggest part of the day was, obviously, David Menzies getting physically assaulted and dragged to a police car.
Where's your bulletproof ass?
Aren't you more worried about bullets?
There was a car there, plainclothes officers, and I was hoping to talk to them, interview them.
And there was a female police constable, and we got very close and had this, you know, art back and forth little discussion.
Do not get out of here.
Here comes the Nazca.
Here comes the real police.
Did you touch him, guys?
Why did you touch him?
Because he wasn't getting it.
And I felt something touch me.
Are you hiding your name to me?
Instinctively, with an open arm, I spun around and reached out.
And lo and behold, it was a police officer.
And then this starts a whole kerfuffle.
I tried to stop him and the cop picked me up and threw me.
I think I bit it in half as they were dragging me through there.
That was my last act of civil disobedience.
Hey, how many guys is it?
You let the guy out!
We will get you.
We will get to the noise.
Okay, please.
Next thing I know, I'm driven to a jail cell.
I'm put in there.
And I must have been in there for at least three hours.
It's hard to tell.
They took my watch and my cell phone.
I mean, I wasn't particularly really scared of these cops.
I didn't feel like they were going to shoot me or hit me over the head with a baton, but they did throw one of our reporters in jail, David Menzies.
And they actually told our lawyer, we had a lawyer on the scene.
The cops told our lawyer, if we would let them search our houseboat, that's where our Airbnb was, they would let David out of jail.
So they weren't arresting him for any crime.
They were arresting him as some sort of weird bargaining chip.
Here's a little flashback.
By the way, we got a documentary coming out about this whole thing.
It's called RAID, and we'll have that shortly.
But take a look at this.
All of a sudden, all of the Montreal police were on us like we had done something.
Come back with a warrant.
Who are these rogue, dirty cops?
You got to stop lying.
You got to stop lying.
You whipped your liars.
When Montreal police accost our reporters, you know what they call us?
Jew media.
What?
Who are you, sir?
I'm with Rebel News.
I'm not media Jewish.
Smash my head on the police SUV.
They started expanding the police perimeter as if we're like a COVID crime scene.
They will taser you.
They have already arrested one of our reporters.
So, yeah, don't tell me 50 police surrounding a bunch of journalists and demanding warrantless search of our premises.
Don't tell me that didn't have echoes of the Nazis.
But let's talk about you because you were in the belly of the beast.
I think Montreal was the most locked down city in Canada, just like Melbourne, Australia was the most locked down in that country.
And we had the, by coincidence, our Australian reporter was based there and he was able to tell that story.
I remember when you made the decision to get the hell out.
And I respect that decision.
I feel like I have a different obligation.
I sort of feel like I have to be the last one out.
I feel like if I'm calling on Canadians to fight, I feel like I have to be here, especially if we have reporters.
That's just, I see my role is different.
You made the decision to get out while you could, which is probably in the sweep of history, the smart thing.
It would be like a Jew in 1938 saying, you know what?
I think I'm going to leave now because I don't know what 39 and 40 is going to be like.
And believe me, we didn't know how long and how bad things were going to get.
I mean, until the sun started to rise again, maybe it was going to get darker and stay dark.
I think the truckers broke the fever, but we didn't know.
Would we be under house arrest for years?
I had one staffer who was panicked that she wouldn't be able to take the bus.
How could she even get around?
Tell me about your decision to leave for the freest jurisdiction in North America.
It was, well, it was a weird one because I say, like, if I didn't have kids, I might either still be there or I would have left a lot earlier.
I've got the only reason I left, I would say the main reason was for my kids.
And people will say, well, it's a coward's way out anyhow.
And I can understand the critique.
It's not like I haven't had that reflection of myself on my own.
I might have either been out earlier, a lot earlier if I had no kids or stayed and fought because I had no kids.
But it's only going to be a matter of time before what I was doing in Canada is going to be, you know, I'm not going to be able to do it in Canada as a result of the online streaming act.
The other one there, you know, they're going to make it impossible for independent voices to even fight the battle within.
I left because it was the vaccine passport that was one of the red lines in this band.
I said they're putting in vaccine passports.
I'm not going to be compelled to do this to my kids, period.
Well, I took two of those things, whatever the hell you want to call it, touch wood.
You know, I seem to be fine.
But there's no way I'm going to do that type of real-time experimentation on my kids.
They're not going to live in a jurisdiction with vaccine passports.
My kid was 12 when they had that passport that applied to 13 and up.
She was on the soccer field when she sees kids getting kicked off the soccer field because they weren't vaccinated in the soccer, you know, kicked off.
I said, this is not normal.
A child should not have to live through this type of psychological abuse.
And I'm sure as hell not going to have her be the victim of this in a year when she hits that time.
They dropped the vaccine passport and then everyone's like, okay, well, I'll stay now.
And I'm like, you're staying with a dog that bit you on the face.
Oh, well, it bit me once and now I'm just going to leave it because it looks happy.
Now you're living with a dog.
And I said, I'm not living in this province where they can willy-nilly lock you down.
Horatio Ruda during the curfews came out and said, there's no scientific basis for this, but it's a reminder as to how serious the situation is.
Then they came up with a vaccine passport.
No science to that.
And I said, I'm not going to subject my kids to this type of lifestyle.
And I believe I can wage the better war politically, verbally from Florida than from Canada.
And thus far, I think I've been able to get what's going on in Canada on an international scale, maybe more effectively.
Maybe I'm just rationalizing it to myself, but I think I've been more effective getting the network of American podcasters that I have down here to get the word of Canada on even more blasts than I would have been able to do had I stayed.
Yeah, I don't doubt it.
And I mean, obviously, I had a lot of those same thoughts myself.
And how long do you wait before you get out?
Especially if you are a public figure who is a contrarian and a skeptic and a nonconformist and encouraging others.
And it was very lonely for a while there.
And, you know, there was some litigation started and the courts moved so slowly on it that by the time certain of these matters got to court, like you say, the vaccine passports were dropped, the no-fly list was dropped.
And there was an important case by the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms.
That's one of the few civil liberties in the country.
Brian Peckford, Maxime Bernie, there were a number of plaintiffs who were unjabbed who were suing the no-fly list.
They were saying this is unscientific.
We're the second largest landmass in the world.
This is an impermissible infringement.
They had outstanding cross-examination of bureaucrats who admitted there was no science.
And the court said, sorry, it's over now.
So this is moot.
So we're not going to bother ruling on this.
And the very fact that we were slow enables us to get out of it.
By the way, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the pandemic very quickly.
I remember one of the very within months in California, when they banned singing in churches, the Supreme Court issued a ruling saying, if you can have, you know, American Idol and America's Got Talent, then you can have singing in churches.
That was one of the analogies in the ruling.
Basically, yes, you can limit churches, but no more than you can limit anything else in society, or it's discrimination.
Their U.S. Supreme Court got involved right away.
Our Canadian Supreme Court, it's been almost four years, has not yet heard a single case about the lockdown that I'm aware of.
They just have better things to do.
It's you're being, you're being very polite.
It's corruption.
It's judicial institutionalized corruption.
The rulings that did come down, and I was following virtually all of them.
In Quebec, there was a lawyer who challenged the curfew.
And the judge actually said, a curfew doesn't violate your charter rights.
They challenged the government-designated quarantine facilities, you know, being whisked off to a hotel.
They said, no, it doesn't violate your charter rights.
Not being denied your right to access of a lawyer, that did.
That was the bridge too far.
But no, you could be detained and you could be charged for it.
The courts were ratifying, sanctioning, denying a parent visitation rights if they weren't vaccinated, granting one parent the right to, I'm not going to use the word vaccinated, to jab their kid.
The courts were complicit in all of this.
And it's because once upon a time, the authorities deferred to the men in military uniforms.
And this time around, history repeating, but not history rhyming, but not repeating, they deferred to the people in the white cloaks, the white medical jackets.
And they spouted stuff that was objectively wrong as judicial notice.
In some of these cases, they were saying it's judicial notice that the jab is safe and effective.
And we're now learning that it was neither safe nor effective.
But they took this as judicial notice to deny people, deprive people their most basic charter rights, constitutional rights.
And it became clear to anyone paying attention.
Canadians have no rights.
That thing called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that gives us our rights, but you know, God-given rights, not even worth the digital paper on which they're not written.
Yeah.
Judicial notice, by the way, for viewers who are unfamiliar with that, basically is when the judge says, this is so obvious.
We all know it.
I don't need it submitted as evidence.
We all know it's safe and effective.
Well, no, actually, we don't.
You know, just the other day, the Auditor General in New Brunswick reviewed 33 health orders and found there was zero, there was no scientific backing for any of it.
And actually, I learned about this story, funny enough, on the CBC.
The CBC, which was the leading propaganda stalking horse for the lockdowns, actually, you know, I guess a stop clock is right twice a day.
They actually did a story on these 33 orders.
There was no documentary evidentiary basis behind them.
Now that you remind me, Nova Scotia, they succeeded by way of injunction in preventing public protest against the lockdown measure.
Mask Enforcers and Judicial Complicity00:15:42
I mean, it was absolute insanity, top to bottom, left to right.
And the courts were complicit.
And yeah, judicial notice.
Judicial notice is something which is now scientifically and demonstrably wrong.
And how many people suffered consequences as a result of that?
Meaningful ones.
I mean, health ones.
So, you know, it's, I unfortunately, I had to leave, but it's a weird analogy comparison over time.
Grandfather was the only one of our family of 25 that left Poland.
He was the only one.
All the other 24 stayed and perished.
And it's not that dire of a situation because they're not actively hunting people down in Canada.
But the amount of people I know who stayed got two, three, four, I don't know how many jabs.
And now we're seeing the consequences of that.
Again, it rhymes, but it doesn't repeat.
No, I, you know, and in no way am I disparaging your decision.
And, you know, you keep thinking, well, if it gets worse, I'll go.
If it gets worse, I'll go.
Well, then in the end, well, how do you go?
How do you go if you're not allowed to fly?
If you're not allowed to cross the border, like, oh, well, it just won't get that bad.
I'll just use a food delivery.
So I can't go to any restaurant.
You know what?
To this day, I remember the restaurants that wouldn't let me in and the ones that did, you know, and I will never forget that.
I'm still angry at being places I would, I had, there was a, there was a bakery around the corner of our office here, and every morning I would stop in for a little cappuccino.
So our office is in a working class area in Toronto.
I love all the Italian construction guys get a little cappuccino on their way.
It's just a great start to the day.
And I went into that bakery probably a thousand times.
And then I go in and say, where's your mask?
Get out of here without.
It's me.
It's me, Ezra.
I'm here every day.
And I thought, there's no one else in here.
Why are you being a cop?
And I should tell you that that's one of the things that I hated the most about it was not just the government coming at you, but how the government pitted storekeeper against customer, patient against doctor, doctor against college of physicians.
Like it pitted us against each other in ways that I think, and families against each other.
And you talked about that for a moment there about custody.
It's, I mean, Hitler's willing executioners.
The analogies are unfortunately too many to deny at this point.
You had people who turned into willing executioners.
You had others who were just too dependent on the system to fight back.
And it really had revealed the inner tyrant in a lot of people.
And then you got the CBC running the article, you know, the joys of snitching on your neighbor during a pandemic, where the CBC's only problem with snitching on your neighbor is that it adversely affected black Canadians more than white Canadians because it was, you saw how it all works in tandem when you have the courts on the side of the government, the media bought out by the government, running the government's message, brainwashing Canadians in real time through outright propaganda.
And now we're learning, I'm sure you saw the report coming from Black Locks reporters about the government paying $600 and some odd thousand dollars to influencers to push COVID messaging.
I mean, how much worse can it possibly get?
We are victims of a government-funded psyop, government-funded with our tax dollars to brainwash the citizens, to use a media to propagandize, to basically sell propaganda to the citizens.
The courts reinforce, reaffirm what the government's doing.
How much worse can it possibly get?
Yeah.
And by the way, I mean, if it sounds like we're rehashing old news, these things are very much alive.
Tamara Leach, her trial, which has already had more than 30 days of hearings, has gone so long in a mischief trial.
This is the longest mischief trial in Canadian history.
And I've heard it's not funny.
Oh, I know.
It's funny.
It's not funny.
I mean, and by the way, she's lost her job.
Who would hire someone who not just in trouble, but has to be in Ottawa all this time at her own expense?
The process is the punishment.
I've heard from her that this case will be going until March.
They have no case against her.
They're just trying to punish her this way because I think even they know that she's going to be acquitted.
And then in Coots, Alberta, the Democracy Fund and Rebel News are representing, I think, 13 people who were charged there, including a group called the Coots 3.
There's another four men who were charged with more serious crimes, including conspiracy to commit murder, which is very serious stuff.
But I don't know.
We've done reporting.
Those cases will be, I believe that the legal shadow from the prosecutions will stretch into 2025.
Even Arthur Pavlovsky, he was convicted of giving a sermon, a pep talk to the blockaders.
And the Democracy Fund is appealing that.
I guess my point is the government, the courts refuse to hear any freedom-oriented court cases, but they're willing to hear these prosecutions.
Seriously, five years after the pandemic began, we will still be in these courts.
It's beyond the process is the punishments.
They want to bankrupt these people.
And, you know, but for the fact that they can raise public funds to pay for a meaningful defense that they would have and they still will bankrupt them.
But they also, they literally want to kill them with the process.
And I'm not being hyperbolic.
I don't mean like murder.
They want them to die of heart attacks.
They want them to die from stress.
And some of them do.
Others take their own lives.
I mean, it's like Canada has learnt from what America is doing to the January 6ers.
Exactly.
And Trudeau wanted that narrative.
He so badly wanted the truckers to be a violent MAGA insurrection.
He hated it when they were the most peaceful.
He hated the bouncy castles and the hot tubs because that showed how friendly and fun.
And I went down there.
It was like a festival feeling.
I think you were down there too.
It was bloody cold, but it was fun.
It was like a Canada day in the winter.
It was, I mean, I was down there live streaming maybe 12 or 13 days.
I was there on the Saturday when really the police force came in like a bunch of Gestapo stormtroopers to mix comparisons.
The crowd was literally cheering, we love you, we love you to the cops when they detonated two concussive grenades.
And now, in retrospect, I'm convinced they did it to trigger a panic or violent response from the crowd.
I got the video, so if you can find it, play it right now.
It'll be amazing to watch.
But Trudeau wanted a January 6th, but he learned the lessons nonetheless.
You don't have to have a January 6th to pull a January 6th persecution.
And the amount of January 6s, I think they're up to a half dozen who took their own lives, bankrupted them, locked them up in pre-trial detention for years on bogus, trumped up charges.
The process is the punishment, but they want to destroy them physically, financially, and kill them through the stress.
And I don't know how we come back from this.
That's the question.
People ask me if I want to come back to Canada.
I don't think, I don't know what it takes to remedy this.
I don't know how long it takes to heal these wounds, but it's going to be a generation at least to repair this, if it's even able to be repaired.
I think the reason Trudeau didn't get away with it, if I may, has a lot to do with citizen journalism.
Because all the regime media, oh, I'm afraid to go down there.
I'm afraid of violence.
So they were just rewriting government press releases from their offices.
But it was citizen journalists like yourself, like Rebel News.
We had a couple of staff who worked 23 days straight in Ottawa.
We sent, we had two guys embedded in the Coots blockade for more than a week, and we had a lawyer embedded down there too.
We were able to get the story out.
And I think that is what one of the big things that stopped Trudeau from casting this as a violent insurrection by MAGA.
You know, like he had this whole thing that didn't work, and he was so angry by it.
And citizen journalists like you, like Rebel News, there were a handful of others, got the story out enormously.
I think you may have heard our stat that during that month of February, we had 400 million impressions and views, 400 million.
And that is as large as the CBC on any normal month.
We were able to, and plus you and plus True North and plus a handful of others.
I think not only did we stop Trudeau's narrative, but we embarrassed him internationally because he seemed like he wasn't in control and he panicked and he had an unforced error or forced error.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure which it was, an error.
He brought in the martial law and he felt pretty tough about that.
But if you look at the polls, that marks the beginning of the end.
is if you look at the polls when he invoked the martial law, seized bank accounts when his mask dropped and he showed that he was a bit tyrannical.
That's when he started to go down in the polls.
Maybe it's a coincidence, but that was the point.
The truckers did it.
What's amazing is that there's still a great many Canadians who still believe the CBC narrative.
But it was, I think it was the biggest awakening internationally as well, but to many Canadians, the CBC's down there saying that there's a Nazi flag and they're pissing and desecrating the war monuments that the truckers are placing their kids at risk, using them as human shields.
What were some of the other ones that they defaced the Terry Fox Memorial?
Yeah, because they put a flag on him.
Because they put a flag on him.
But when it's Gay Pride Month and they put a Gay Pride flag in Terry Fox, then it's empowerment.
I mean, I think it does mark the beginning of the end of these regimes, of these institutions to a great many people.
The problem is, and it's not one that I'm going to be soon to forget, is the degree to which neighbors effectively turned on neighbors and were willing to just throw away their freedoms for the semblance of safety.
I don't know how long into this it needed, you know, people needed to realize it had nothing to do with safety.
I was, I accepted the two weeks to flatten the curve.
I was really freaked out in the beginning.
I'm a bit neurotic and hypochondriacal to begin with.
But when they started padlocking the outdoor dog run April 2020, I realized nothing to do with safety.
But the degree to which people who have not had to fight for their freedom would willy-nilly throw it away for the semblance of safety.
It was discouraging.
And I hope people have learned the lesson, but I hope it's not too late.
Yeah.
You know, I had a new neighbor in the middle of it and I went up to say hello.
And he pulled his hand away when I put mine out to shake his.
And he refused to shake my hand because of the pandemic.
I should tell you, I have not spoken to him since.
I mean, not that we would have a lot to do with each other, but I just thought, who the hell are you?
And who the hell do you think I am?
And what is wrong with you?
But he, I mean, imagine how terrified some he was terrified.
He was what a conformist.
And maybe I shouldn't be as angry at him as I am, but I have no desire to friend him.
But as a, it, it broke people.
I, you know, when I go across the border to Canada and I'm, you know, coming back for Christmas, I still see people out here in Florida wearing masks outside.
They tend to be, I think they're politically identifiable, to put it politically correctly.
But, you know, but I'm at this point, I feel just tremendously bad for people.
People have been broken.
And I think Canadian, more Canadians proportionately have been broken.
And it has to do with, it has to do with the propaganda that was successfully used on Canadians.
Oh, did we, did we, I didn't, I don't think we mentioned the spying on Canadians.
I just wanted to draw, you know, to draw more analogies.
We now know the government spied on us, tested propaganda on us, experimented on us.
And okay, doesn't matter.
But they're broken.
People are broken.
And I can understand them from being broken, but you understand how breaking people and whipping them into irrational panic frenzies, people no longer make the best choices in that state of mind.
And that's exactly how you end up with tyranny and tyrants.
Yeah.
And for some people, it gave them a whole new identity.
mentioned the Hitler's William executioners.
They were people who they finally found their meaning and their moment.
They could be a mask enforcer.
They could be a neighbor snitcher.
They suddenly found a way to be morally superior to their neighbors by calling out their neighbors' failure to double mask or whatever.
So you identified a whole swath of people who would have done just great under the KGB or the SS.
Hey, let me pivot to one more thing because I want to make sure we talk about it today.
And I don't mind going through these things because although in some ways they feel, you know, I think a lot of people have renormalized the political hangover.
By the way, not a single politician other than maybe Jason Kenney and Aaron O'Toole learned a lesson here.
Every single politician who was up for re-election in Canada was re-elected.
Doug Ford re-elected.
In, you know, all Justin Trudeau re-elected.
It was only Jason Kenny thrown out by his own party.
And same with in Quebec, Francois Lagaud, the supreme leader, dictator, whatever he is, got more seats.
Yeah.
Now, actually, in fairness, in fairness, I think we know a whole heck of a lot more now than we did then.
And I think, I'd like to think the people who have now suffered the adverse events from what has been imposed on them will learn the lesson.
The problem also is human nature being what it is.
I think people have sacrificed more than they can ever admit, recognize, and come to grips with.
And so when you're at the point where you've sacrificed more than you ought to have and you recognize it and you know you're never getting it back, it becomes a question of coping with not trying to remedy.
And you don't want to admit that you were wrong.
It's very hard to admit that you're wrong.
Hey, I want to talk about one more thing, and I know it's important to you.
And we touched on it before about the government propaganda.
There was two sides to that.
One was the government propaganda.
You mentioned the Blacklock story revealing hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Twitter influencers.
Then there was over $100 million, also a Blacklock story, paid by the government to the regime media during the lockdowns.
There's the media, the annual media bailout.
So there's the carrot, but then there's now the stick because, you know, you can't force people to watch the CBC.
The CBC's viewership is falling, even by their own acknowledgement.
People will find interesting things on their own.
YouTube and others did throttle skeptical websites in cahoots with Pfizer, et cetera.
But now in Canada, you got C11, which grants the government domain over the internet.
C18, other bills yet to come.
They have something called the Online Harms Act that they're planning to reintroduce.
So if the government couldn't get people to watch the regime media with a carrot, here they come with a stick.
Now, let's talk a little bit about that because I'm not sure if you're still with rumble.com.
I understand for a period of time, you were actually giving legal advice to Rumble.
Rumble is a freedom-oriented YouTube competitor, so much so that they refuse to abide France's required censorship.
And so Rumble is banned in France.
But thank God, Rumble is still.
And Tucker recently announced he's going to join Rumble.
Tell me about the state of censorship, the good, the bad, the ugly, Elon Musk, Rumble, but what we're also learning about.
Update On Censorship00:07:19
Just give me a give me an update on censorship in the internet.
Get ready for a rant or at least a long, is it a soliloquy?
I want to hear it.
Yeah, soliloquy.
Starting with one thing before I forget, Trudeau bailed out the print media in 2018 with 600 million.
And then he bailed out the digital with all of these COVID ads over the course of whatever, three years.
It is billed C18, right?
The link tax.
I called it, I mean, it wasn't rocket science.
And so this is just another way for the government, the federal government, to find a way to subsidize the flailing legacy government propaganda, the media, by imposing this link tax, which Google and Meta at one point said, we're not going to do.
So we're not going to link to news in Canada.
And Canadians saw the consequences of that.
Well, they struck a deal.
What's Google?
Google's going to pay $100 million a year in link tax.
And that's going to go to select media outlets.
And we know which ones it's going to go to.
So they go from direct bailout to disguise bailout through COVID ads and other government advertising to legislative bailout, which is indirect by creating this link tax law and coercing Google to pay $100 million, which they're certainly going to divvy out and dole out to their preferred media outlets, the ones that can't succeed on their own merits.
So that's how you capture an entire system.
The free speech, and then they want to suppress free speech by treating online content like television and radio, Canadian content requirements for Canadian content creators.
We know where that's going to go.
Rumble is, I mean, I say Rumble, Twitter as well, but Elon was a little slower to the ball than Chris Pavlovsky and Rumble.
You know, Twitter and Elon just let Alex Jones back on.
Right.
But it took a long time.
And, you know, Twitter, which boasts itself on, you know, free speech and it's the free speech platform.
Well, you know, for a while, Elon had an exception for Alex Jones, but I knew at the time it was based on a misunderstanding of why Alex Jones was kicked off of Twitter in the first place, which Elon thought had to do with Sandy Hook, which in reality it didn't.
It had to do with him bothering Oliver Darcy in the halls of Congress.
Elon is doing the right thing better late than never.
Rumble's been doing it from day one and taking the heat for it.
You know, W5 wanted to run a hit piece on Rumble and they found Viva as the unwilling participant where I agreed to an interview and they used me as a tool, as a pathway to defame Rumble and say that Rumble's somehow responsible for toxic and hateful comments in the comment section of the hundreds and millions of comments on Rumble as if YouTube doesn't have the same problem.
Rumble didn't bend the knee.
France said, take down RT and they said, no, we're not going to do that.
And they said, well, we're going to shut you off in France.
And so you need a VPN to get to Rumble out of France.
It's an amazing platform.
And I'm saying this not just because I'm exclusive with Rumble and not just because I actually helped draft the terms of service, which I think are amazing.
They walk the walk and Chris Pavlovsky talks the talk and deals with the brunt of it.
But it's an amazing thing.
You would never have thought the left, which Democrats, which had historically been anti-big government, anti-big pharma, you know, my body, my choice, anti-censorship.
They are now anti-big corporations.
The left now is literally big pro-government, big, big, pro-big pharma, pro-censorship, pro-big banks, if you could believe it.
This whole lawsuit out of New York against Trump predicated on the idea that the banks didn't charge Trump enough interest.
They're flipping out over free speech because they think Alex Jones is going to lead to death and destruction by virtue of being allowed back on Twitter.
You realize it never had to do with principled free speech.
It never had to do with principled preventing hate speech, whatever that means.
It had to do with narrative control.
And the only way certain people can maintain control is by suppressing and censoring those who would otherwise destroy their ideas in the open market of ideas.
Rumble has been pivotal.
It's taking some heat.
It's taken some flack.
It's taken some massive DDOS attacks, which is always a good sign ideologically.
But people are going to soon appreciate how lucky they are to have this alternative to YouTube.
If it doesn't take out YouTube, at the very least, maybe it's going to coerce YouTube to go back to its principles of free speech.
But with the exception of illegal, the most egregious stuff.
But it's been an amazing journey.
It's been amazing to be a part of it.
And so I just hope the righteous win this battle in the long run.
Well, we're on Rumble because, of course, YouTube, we were on track to make a million bucks a year on YouTube until they demonetized us for the most absurd reason imaginable, but they don't need a reason.
They deputized an ambassador to basically be a human version of their website to us just to regurgitate, well, you're not quality content.
And you said that, you know, it's look, they made a political decision to defund Rebel News, and they thought they would kill us.
And we didn't die because we survived based on our viewers.
We're on Rumble.
We make some ads on Rumble.
And we're grateful that Rumble doesn't censor us.
And we're thrilled that Elon Musk did, I think, the most astonishing thing in the history of commerce.
Took $44 billion to buy Twitter.
I don't, maybe he'll make the economic case for that one day.
He wants to turn it into an everything app, a finance app, this app, and that.
Maybe it'll happen.
But for now, it just looks like he actually just wanted to stop it from being used as an FBI, CIA, deep state spy machine filter.
I've got my theories.
I don't think Elon knew how bad it was when he bought it.
Remember when he bought it, I think the biggest problem he thought was that there are too many bots on it.
I don't think, you know, he bought a car not with a dud of an engine because it's still working, but I don't think he had the slightest idea of the depths of the problem and the degrees of power that it reached.
I don't think he knew about the FBI stuff.
I don't think he was totally sensitive to these demonetization campaigns that these awful entities wage.
I guess is it the, I want to say the ADL and these other entities, medium baddest.
And so I don't think he was sensitive to how dirty they play.
You know, write these bullcrap articles and then go after the advertisers.
It was the ADL that wrote the most recent one about far-right extremism on the platform.
And they look at this.
They had an ad running next to a neo-Nazi, whatever.
And they faked it.
And they faked it in the, it wasn't a doctored image, but they faked it in that they had to game the result.
They had to game it so that it produced those results by circumventing or at least finding a way to get around all of the protections that are in place.
So people read that article, they say, oh my goodness, look at this.
It ran, they ran a big, big brand ad against a Nazi Twitter handle, not appreciating in order for them to do that.
They had to like game the system to achieve a one in 500 million results.
And they just highlighted the actual mechanisms in place at Twitter.
But I don't think he had any idea how broken it was, how dirty it was, how infiltrated it was.
And when he recently said, you know, you think you're going to blackmail me with money, I won't say because I don't want to swear, but go F yourself.
And then I said after that Tucker Carlson interview, if he doesn't bring back Alex Jones, and I think he's going to imminently, he doesn't really mean it.
Alex Jones Return Debate00:02:45
And then he brought him back.
It's bringing back Alex Jones was the go F yourself because at the time, people were saying he'll never bring back Alex Jones because it's an exposure of liability, you know, profiting from the weaponization of the judicial process.
Well, he's told everyone to go F themselves.
And I do think long run, he's going to succeed and capitalize.
No, what's the word?
That investment is going to pay dividends.
And Rumble, you know, is going to continue riding its wave because it never even, it never even faltered.
Elon faltered a little bit, but he made the right decision in the long run.
Rumble never even faltered.
Right.
Well, and it's exciting that Rumble actually started in Canada, not too far down the street from Rebel News.
And they're so big and an international success.
And congratulations.
Well, listen, David, it's great to catch up with you.
And I love your fighting spirit.
And I love that you are at the intersection of freedom and the law.
I wish so many more lawyers were.
And it's great to catch up with you.
And listen.
Well, I say, like, people have said since I've moved to Florida, I've been dropping more F-bombs than I ever have on Twitter.
Probably right.
I've reached, you know, when I've reached the limit, politeness goes so far.
And then you, and then it takes a little bit of brazenness and a little bit of understanding.
So I like to think that I have the good balance, but sometimes I, you know, I recognize I drop one too many F bombs, but effort, we're there and the world needs a good hard shake from the shoulders.
Wake the hell up from this slumber, because if you if you sleep in too late, you're going to wake up too late.
So right on.
Ezra, thank you very much for having me.
Well, come on.
Thank you for giving so generously of your time.
Have a great Christmas break and we'll see you fighting like hell in the new year.
So take care, my friend.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
Here you have it.
David Freiheit, also known online as Viva Fry.
What a pleasure to talk with him.
Stay with us.
My final thoughts are next.
What an interesting guy.
And the fact that he moved from Montreal to Florida, I guess a lot of Quebecers go down to Florida, but he didn't go down for the weather.
He went down for the freedom.
And he mentioned Rumble.com.
That's a company that we use as an alternative to YouTube.
They really were just not too far down the street from us here in Toronto.
They've moved their headquarters to the States too.
Now, a lot of companies go to America when they want to get big, especially tech companies, companies looking for financing, et cetera.
But it's also about the freedom.
Don't kid yourself.
I myself have toyed with the idea of do we, when do we leave?
How bad would it have to have gone before we had to get out of Canada?
And would it have been too late if we had waited until that moment?
Lots of heavy thoughts, but I'm glad he's down there fighting for freedom in his own way as we fight for freedom up here.