Ezra Levant exposes Canada’s escalating anti-Semitism, from Thornhill’s pro-Hamas rally—where "genocide" chants and torches terrorized Jewish neighborhoods—to Trudeau’s silence amid genocidal slogans at Spadina and Cafe Landware. Police arrested six Jewish counter-protesters but ignored Hamas-linked violence, raising DEI policy concerns. Levant contrasts this with Biden’s State of the Union, where partisan attacks overshadowed anti-Semitism despite its surge, while his Gaza port proposal ignored Hamas aid theft. Both leaders face trust crises, with Levant predicting Canada’s decline under Trudeau and a potential Kennedy Jr.-Trump shift in the U.S., signaling hope for change. [Automatically generated summary]
I want to take you through David Menzies' journey to an anti-Semitic pro-Hamas rally in a Jewish neighborhood in Toronto.
And then we're going to talk to Joel Pollock about the State of the Union address in the States.
I really want you to see David's report and to see it.
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That's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month.
You get the video version every night and the satisfaction of helping keep Rebel News strong because we're independent.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, Hamas protesters occupy a block in a Jewish residential neighborhood with plenty of violence.
Why is that being normalized?
It's March 8th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
I live in Toronto.
There were a lot of Hamas protests here.
Same in Montreal.
The two cities are unrecognizable in that way.
Both were very friendly to Jews and all minorities.
That changed.
What's crazy is they're not protesting Israel so much as protesting Jews.
That's called anti-Semitism.
It's been going on for months.
I remember one of the first protests was outside a Jewish community center and a daycare, the Spadina Jewish Community Center in Toronto.
Who protests outside a Jewish daycare to shout at children?
They had a protest in Toronto outside a large Jewish hospital, the Mount Sinai Hospital.
Obviously, it's a hospital that takes people of all backgrounds, but they chose a Jewish-founded hospital with lots of Jewish doctors.
It's not got to do with Israel.
That's got to do with hating Jews.
There were protests at Jewish restaurants, or at least restaurants owned by Jews, or those that serve Jewish food, like Cafe Landware.
I know a little bit about Cafe Landware.
I've been there.
It was started in Germany.
It had to be shut down, of course, because of Hitler.
Its descendants restarted it in Toronto.
And same with the descendants of Hitler.
They restarted in Toronto, too.
Jewish-owned businesses that have nothing to do with Jewish anything are targeted.
You might know that Chapters Indigo is owned by a Jewish woman, Heather Eastman, and her husband, who's also Jewish.
It's not a Jewish business in any way, but a Jew owns it.
So they vandalized and attacked that business.
Now, those are all minor attacks, but of course, there were some major attacks that could have been deadly.
In Montreal, a Molotov cocktail, a firebomb was thrown, gunshots at synagogues and schools.
Of course, in Toronto, there's vandalism everywhere.
There's graffiti that more or less says kill the Jews.
There's posters being held at protests with machine guns.
There's posters on posts that say, by any means necessary, showing a gun.
Those are calls for death, for murder.
They're not pretending to be political.
They're not really going through the effort anymore.
They just realize they can get away with pure Jew hatred.
They don't really have to pretend.
They blocked a road into a Jewish neighborhood.
There's a road called Avenue Road.
It's a bridge that goes over the 401 highway.
It's one of only two ways into a large Jewish community with schools and residences.
Hamas protesters would block it.
It is miles away from anything political, anything economic.
It was just blocking a Jewish neighborhood.
And that went on for days and days and days.
And police brought them coffee.
And now they've moved a little bit north to a Jewish community in Thornhill in a city called Vaughan.
They protested not at an Israeli embassy.
There's no Israeli embassy in Vaughan, Ontario.
They protested in Jewish neighborhoods near Jewish houses and a Jewish synagogue.
There's been no one condemning this in high office, not the Premier of Ontario or the Premier of Quebec, and certainly not the Prime Minister.
He talks about these protests.
He's actually talked about it a few times.
And what he has to say is, that's their free speech.
Really?
Here's a clip of that.
Can you comment about some of the protests that we've been seeing across the country in relation to the Israel-Hamas war, but particularly in Toronto?
I mean, you had experience with this last weekend where your event was canceled.
And a lot of people were upset about that, upset how they've been.
Toronto Police has talked about the hostility and confrontation between police and protesters now.
What specifically is your government, if anything, going to do about this?
Or are these protests just allowed to happen in our country because it's a free country?
First of all, nobody can remain indifferent to the suffering and the anguish going on in Gaza right now.
This loss of civilian lives and the impact on Canadian families and people who are worried about their loved ones is entirely understandable.
Canadians have a right to protest, absolutely, to make their anguish, their anger heard by other Canadians.
That's important, and we will always protect that right.
But when the protests turn to hatred or to acts of harassment, particularly against fellow Canadians, there's a line that's crossed.
I've heard from too many members of the Jewish community, particularly, who are seeing their synagogues, their community centers, their neighborhoods protested, who feel unsafe in their own country.
So chanting for Intifada revolution, Intifada being an Arabic word for a riot, a race riot, a pogrom, as it would be called in Russia, signs with guns on them, and violence, more violence in a single day than in the entire trucker convoy.
Compare Trudeau's reaction to the Hamash protest to his reaction to the truckers.
Trudeau appointed an anti-Islamophobia commissioner named Amira El-Ghawabi, but there's actually not a lot of Islamophobia to be against.
There's no hateful protests outside mosques.
There's no vandalism of mosques.
There's no assault on Muslims.
What this anti-Islamophobia commissioner is spending her time doing is defending these protests, saying that they are legitimate.
She's not being an anti-Islamophobia commissioner.
She's being a pro-anti-Semitism commissioner.
Trudeau also appointed an anti-Semitism commissioner.
Bizarrely, he chose a non-Jew for the position, Deborah Lyons.
I guess there was no Jew available or no Jew who cared enough, or maybe the Jews all cared too much.
I'm not quite sure.
I really don't know what Deborah Lyons does.
I know she took a first-class trip to Israel for some photo ops.
But other than that, all I can detect is every once in a while she writes some pathetic tweets on Twitter to her small following that basically say, come on, guys, let's stop hating the Jews.
It really is pitiful.
Now, back to what's been happening in this city north of Toronto called Vaughan.
There's a big Jewish synagogue.
It's actually the one I went to about a week ago when the British commentator Douglas Murray was in town.
I really like Douglas Murray.
I asked him a few questions about the United Kingdom.
I asked him if it's safe for Jews in Britain.
Here's what he said.
Is Britain still safe for Jews?
Yes, but it's tense.
It's very tense.
I mean, if there's a march every Saturday where there are people calling for your death and destruction, you can't say that that's a happy society.
And it wouldn't be put up with for any other group.
If there were marches in the center of London every week where there were some people, even just some people, saying that we should eradicate everyone who's black, that march would be stopped.
There would not be a second march or a third.
And the people who would be on the first march, once they knew what they were involved with, would not go back on the second week if they were decent people.
So there's not even a double standard, a triple standard going on.
But, you know, you know that as well as anyone.
Imagine the irony of me in Toronto asking him if it's safe for Jews.
That Jewish synagogue is very Zionist and very conservative.
Not just conservative in their Judaism, but conservative in their politics.
When I was there, I could feel the love for rebel news.
It's a base of support for Melissa Lanceman, the conservative MP from there, the former conservative MP Peter Kent.
It is true that there are some Jews who are conservative.
They're not all liberal.
That synagogue has been targeted again and again and again.
It's in a residential neighborhood.
I showed you the video clip the other day of some pro-Hamas protester who hit a cop, was arrested, but the pro-Hamas mob pulled her away and freed her.
And the cops went, oh, oh, well, remember this video?
She miner!
Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me.
You guys are fucking disgusting!
Shame on you, you fucking asshole!
Fucking asshole!
Let her go!
Let her go!
You fucking asshole!
Let's just all stop if they fucking let her go!
She's a fucking minor!
Fuck you, she's a minor!
Let me go!
Move away!
Well, having this kind of hate mob blocking a road and in a residential neighborhood with such hateful and insane comments towards Jews, it freaked out a lot of Jews who called their local MP, their local MPP, that's what they call the provincial politician, their local mayor, and they all signed this letter together, the mayor, the member of parliament, the member of provincial parliament, of how they were going to stand by the Jews, and Nothing.
Nothing.
There were a lot of police there and they just stood and watched.
In fact, you could say they escorted the Hamas protesters.
They didn't clear them out because the police across Ontario, and I would say across Canada, are DEI police, diversity, equity, and inclusion police now.
Of course, if it were white KKK protesters outside a black church in a black neighborhood, the batons would be swinging and they'd arrest people like they were truckers.
But these are Islamic extremist protesters, most of them foreign-born from what I can tell.
And they're demonizing Jews who in the main are white, although there's a lot of minority Jews there called Sephardic Jews.
But so what?
Jews are the oppressor class, so the oppressed class, Palestinians can do anything.
Police did not arrest any of the protesters, but they arrested some of the counter-protesters.
They arrested a woman who used pepper spray on a Palestinian protester.
And I can understand that.
That's a weapon.
It's like the other day when they arrested a man with a nail gun, who I understand was a Russian Jew.
And I'm against people using violence on their own accord.
I think that's morally wrong.
And I think it sets back the cause politically, which is one of the purposes of these Hamas protests is to drive the peaceful residential Jewish communities to some hasty act that they'll later regret.
But I can understand why a woman is terrified by a Hamas mob and uses her pepper spray.
And I could understand why a man is terrified by a Hamas mob and reaches for a nail gun.
I can understand it because they're thinking, oh my God, the police are actually not going to stop this.
They're going to stop us.
We have to rely on ourselves or we'll be like lambs to the slaughter.
Yesterday was total madness.
Our reporter David Menzies was for hours, was there for hours.
The protest started in the middle of the day and it went well into the night, harassing people on their private property.
Torches too.
Imagine.
I mean, that's like the white supremacists at Charlottesville.
The torches have come to Toronto.
How would it be, I say again, if the Klan were outside a black church?
You don't need to imagine.
Remember what a single fake swastika flag at the trucker protest in Ottawa did.
The entire media was riveted by it.
They demonized every trucker because someone took a photo of a Nazi flag that no one else could find.
It was obviously a staged Asian provocateur.
That was enough for the entire media to demonize every peaceful trucker across the country.
You have Hamas flags, Hamas chants, genocidal calls from the river to the sea, calls for a violent intifada, calls for by any means necessary, and the media is silent about it.
They call it peaceful Hamas, peaceful Palestinian protests.
They never say Hamas.
And they say the Jews are the violent ones.
It doesn't feel like Canada anymore, does it?
Here, let me play for you a video that David Menzies put together.
Now, this is a fairly lengthy video, so it's going to take some time to watch, but I want to show you what his experience was.
Hamas Chants at Place of Worship00:06:19
Take a look at this, and I'll come back on the other end.
David Menzies for Rebel News here in Thornhill, Ontario.
And folks, I'm standing outside the Beth Abraham Yosef of Toronto synagogue.
And well, there's some kind of a real estate exposition going on.
And well, guess who has come?
Like so many skunks to the garden party.
That would be the pro-Hamas types.
It's a repeat of what happened just four days ago.
You might remember, I was just further down Clark Avenue on Sunday, and the same shenanigans took place, pro-Hamas people outside of a different synagogue.
And not only that, they were chanting chants of genocide from the river to the sea in Tifada and go back to Poland.
Can you believe it?
Here, check out the evidence.
Go back to what?
Go back to Poland?
Well, my cameraman, Lincoln, Jay, and I just got here.
And a growing number of demonstrators are coming along.
I haven't heard any chants of genocide yet, but I spoke to a lady on the pro-Israel side.
She got here early, and she said they were chanting death to Jews in Arabic.
I don't have any way of confirming that, but hopefully somebody has that on video.
In any event, we're going to wait in to both sides, see what this recent kerfuffle is about.
But you know, I can't help but think, folks, that if the rules were reversed, if these Jewish demonstrators and their allies went to a mosque in the GTA and they chanted death to Muslims, would that be tolerated?
Or would that maybe be shut down in a nanosecond?
I think we know the answer to that.
So why the double standard?
Why the two-tier policing?
Hopefully we can get somebody from law enforcement to come on camera too.
In the meantime, let's see what both sides have to say.
Long live Jerusalem.
If you are speaking the truth, if you are speaking the truth, you will not be to shut up.
All of this, everything that they're saying, is built on a lie.
All I do is I remind people the facts.
And the facts are that for thousands of years, the Jews have had a home, and that's Israel.
This is a clear sign the Jewish community is under severe threat.
With a complete double standard, this is a place of worship.
A church is a place of worship.
A synagogue is a place of worship.
They are not respecting human values of which our country is founded on.
It doesn't even cross our mind to stage a protest if it's important to us and to go into a Muslim area.
Why?
Why would I want to do that?
Personally, I believe that everyone should have the right to protest.
Everybody should have the right to worship whichever God or religion they believe in.
But to come to a Jewish neighborhood, to come to a Jewish place of worship to protest, I find absolutely disgusting.
But I do believe that the police are taking a peace officer approach.
In other words, they're less interested in upholding the law than they are in keeping the peace.
Anywhere in the world, any time anyone has called out Islam or even come close to anything, drawing an image, whatever you might call it, it's led to violent, destructive behavior.
I am seeing now.
I thought I would never see that in Canada.
He said he just arrived from New York.
He doesn't have a Niloka accent.
He doesn't have a Hebrew accent.
We think it's just an absolute costume.
There's nowhere.
Well, they love guys like this.
He's the poster boy for Palestinian terrorism and support of Palestinian terrorism.
It's a very, very small group within the Hasidic community.
I don't even think they have 25 people.
You see the same two guys showing up over and over again.
Look at this beautiful.
Well, not beautiful.
It's a pretty healthy face.
I'm sorry.
Rebel Muse.
Who is this man in this moment?
He's a big journalist.
They pretend to be a journalist.
Revolues, how are you doing?
Why are people...
Why are you all in disguise?
People In Disguise00:07:30
John Bush.
What's happening?
No, no, no.
You're not supposed to be on the road.
Why are people here chanting genocide to Jews?
They were chanting genocide chants.
There was one chanting televisica.
What, willing to chant it?
Team**** старies me?
I know, I know.
What the hell am I talking?
What you doing here again?
Who are you?
Bro, hey!
Bro!
You're going to make him leave right now.
Hey, why just leave?
I just don't know.
I know, but it's both ways.
Just take me in the malls.
It's both ways.
Tell him to leave.
He's laying in the malls.
That's how you, that's how you saw things.
It's a violence, right?
Is that why?
You can't do this.
Well, you know what, folks?
Talk about a tale of two cities.
We're on the pro-Israel side and we have civil discussions.
We're able to debate the issues.
I come over here and right away they acted violently.
Somebody out of camera range, of course, because that's how they operate, kicked me in the groin.
They are claiming that we are committing genocide when in fact we are not.
We're simply defending ourselves.
It's important to remember there was a ceasefire on October 6th.
On October 7th, they broke that ceasefire.
They came over onto our side.
They raped our women.
They beheaded babies, burned people alive.
There are Muslims coming from countries that promote this and that teach Jew hatred.
And they come here, they're not vetted.
They have every right to protest.
They could do it in a peaceful place like City Hall, but not in front of a synagogue where they're trying to entice hatred.
We've had to bear the insult of having our house of prayer be literally spit upon by these protesters.
When it comes to our current government, I mean, they're doing an awful job.
I think a lot of Canadian Jews at this time are going to definitely think about what their next options are.
Prime Minister has no backbone.
He's fine.
I love you.
And Mr. Fort, look at the electoral map.
And he's playing a double game.
Is this your house?
Is this your house?
What's your house?
Back up!
Stand up to my house.
Okay, what's your house?
You want to come in for coffee?
Should I want coffee?
Why are you wearing a mask outside?
Why not?
Why are you in cover?
Why not?
These guys are wearing disguises.
Why don't you focus on that?
It's the crime that occurred.
Is COVID a thing?
You're wearing a mask when you're breaking the law.
It's not why we're here.
Someone broke the law.
We want to do something happening.
What was the law that was broken?
Someone scraped some home water for salt and water.
Do you feel completely safe in Canada anymore?
I mean, you know what?
Up until two years ago, I met an Israeli and he was commenting on how safe it is here.
We're not there anymore.
It's very easy to settle this down.
There should have never been taken.
Not only should there never have been murders, but why would you, in addition, take hostages unless you want a barter?
and coming to a synagogue to entice hatred is just not okay in today's society in Toronto, Canada.
We're here for protest.
Why are you wearing a disguise, by the way?
I can barely hear you.
I'm going to be disguised.
That's my choice.
You're on the wrong side, buddy.
You're on the wrong side.
We're not going to talk to anyone that's complicit in the genocide of Palestinians.
Is this your property?
It doesn't matter.
You're hosting a Zionist event at a place of light.
I am.
How am I hosting it?
Well, you're reporting on it, so go on the other side.
So if I report on an event I'm hosting.
Go to the other side.
No, we're not in Gaza.
We're not under Sharia law, sir.
Okay, so I don't think so.
They talk about killing our children, raping our women.
They have pictures with our women's undergarments.
Come on, man.
What happened on October 7th?
Boy, there's so many people on this side that are wearing disguises.
So I thought COVID was over.
Why are you wearing a mask?
I'm sorry.
Can't really hear you that clearly with your face diaper on, I gotta be honest.
But if you believe in something, fine.
Why are you covering your face?
Are you planning a criminal activity?
Well, you know what, folks?
It is coming up for, it's just past four o'clock, actually, and there's all kinds of skirmishes breaking out.
There's reports of somebody getting hosed by a garden hose, presumably.
There's a report of somebody getting pepper sprayed.
So by the way, my cameraman, Lincoln, was inexplicably assaulted by this individual.
Grab my phone, man.
Put your phone away.
Go, go away, go away.
We're going to hit you.
Go away.
I swear to God, just get the fuck out of here.
Hey, watch your hands, buddy.
Hey, just watch your hands.
Watch your hands.
I think we're gonna need more law enforcement.
The cops are really outnumbered here.
Safety Concerns Escalating00:03:43
And I really fear for the safety of the people here.
I can see this quickly getting out of control.
There are tempers flaring on both sides.
Let's see if some reinforcements come along.
I think Toronto needs to do better.
I think Canadians need to do better.
And I think they really need to read the truth.
Our mission is the truth.
Our mission is the freedom to be Canadians, to be Jews in the place that we live.
We're just asking, release the people that you talk what you shouldn't have, and I know that we're all going to come to the table.
You know, a recent opinion poll asked Canadians if they think the country is broken.
70% of Canadians say the country is broken.
I take that to mean that most Canadians don't like what they see on the streets in Toronto and Montreal.
Most Canadians don't like the anti-Semitism.
They don't like this violence.
They don't like the threats in residential neighborhoods.
I think woke people, college grads, may hate Israel and Trudeau's Hamas base is migrants hate Israel.
But I don't know.
I've been around for 52 years and I think that most Canadians don't like this.
Most Canadians are not like this.
I think most of the hate marchers are actually foreign provocateurs, often paid.
Remember the global news report that there are 700 Iranian agents in Canada.
It doesn't take a lot of work to drum up 30 or 40 protesters in a city the size of Toronto.
The same people again and again on that bridge over the 401 at the Jewish synagogue outside a Jewish restaurant.
40 or 50 people every day paid to protest with a professional organizer can make an entire community feel defensive.
Granted, sometimes there are marches with thousands, but I think it's a hardcore of probably about 100 or less in Toronto and the same in Montreal.
They're not out there to persuade you to support Gaza.
They know what they're doing is odious.
It's not about persuasion.
It's about dominance.
It's about moving the Overton window.
It's about normalizing what was not normal before.
It's about demoralizing Jews and their allies, dispiriting them.
It's about emboldening the Hamas supporters and radicalizing Muslim moderates.
And it's about showing old stock Canadians who the new untouchable class is, who you can't question, about showing you what the new rules are.
Do we accept it?
Trudeau does.
He loves it.
How about you?
Stay with us for more with Joel Pollack.
Well, we've been riveted by the near riots about 20 minutes north of us here in Toronto in Thornhill outside the Jewish synagogue.
I would never in my life imagine that you would have a 12-hour threat hate march, including some violence.
Our reporter David Menzies getting kicked.
Our videographer Lincoln Jay having his phone stolen.
Not a single Hamas supporter arrested, rather, six Jews who counter-protested were arrested.
I just can't believe it.
That's where our eyes have been.
Biden's State of the Union00:14:53
But out of the corner of our eyes, the United States has its annual State of the Union address.
And Joe Biden was on a cocktail of drugs to make him lucid and energetic.
Could he keep it together for 45 minutes?
Here to tell us about how he did and what he did is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Joel, great to see you again.
Good to be with you.
I don't know if he was on any drugs, but he was certainly on a very high volume.
So he was shouting for quite some time.
I believe that he is on a cocktail of meds just to give him boost moments of lucidity and energy.
I truly believe that.
I have no evidence of it other than the fact that when he's not on, when he's not on for a big show speech, he mumbles and meanders and falls asleep.
So I juxtapose those key moments with the rest of his mumbles.
I suppose it's a speculative theory on my part.
But let's put that aside.
Let's talk about his tone for a bit.
It was a little bit unusual, a little bit odd, a little bit partisan, a little bit angry.
What do you make of that?
Well, it was very odd, very partisan, and very angry.
We haven't seen a State of the Union address like this in my lifetime, and probably ever.
We've never seen the State of the Union used in a way to attack the opposition.
And that's not where you do this.
The State of the Union is not a campaign speech.
Of course, it can be political.
Of course, it will reflect the president's ideology.
Of course, you see the party that supports the president standing and applauding, and the party that opposes the president typically sitting down for many of the portions of the speech where the president's talking about his policy agenda.
So there's always a partisan element to it, but it's never used to attack the opposition as a focus of the speech.
And that's what stood out.
Biden used this address to tarnish Republicans, to claim that they are a threat to democracy.
He went after Donald Trump.
No, he didn't mention Trump's name, but he talked about my predecessor, this, my predecessor, that.
Everybody knew who he was talking about.
And Trump never did that.
You know, Trump was quite pugnacious.
Trump would fight with people, insult people on social media and so forth.
But when Trump delivered a State of the Union address, it was really about the presidency and Congress and the grand spectacle of American government.
Trump would even say things that would make his opponents stand up and applaud.
In 2019, when he lost the House to Democrats, or just after the new Democrats had taken their seats in the Capitol, he earned a standing ovation even from the likes of left-wing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when he devoted part of his speech to praising the role of women in leadership positions in American politics.
That's how you do a State of the Union address.
You don't abuse the platform to take pot shots at your opponents.
He also took shots at the Supreme Court.
That hasn't been seen since Barack Obama did the same thing.
It was probably the ugliest moment of the Obama presidency, or one of them.
I suppose it'd be a long list because Obama had a penchant for doing things like that.
But Obama, the great constitutional scholar that we were told he was, took a shot at the Supreme Court.
And of course, the justices seated in front of him, I think six of the nine were there.
They're not allowed to respond in any way.
They can't react.
They're not supposed to say anything.
They're supposed to be completely apolitical.
They come as a courtesy to the president and to show the three branches of government in one place.
But for Obama to insult the Supreme Court was horrible.
Biden just did it again.
This was not an appropriate State of the Union address.
However, it did achieve one great thing for President Biden, which is that it showed he can speak for an hour or more without falling asleep, without falling down.
He still has energy.
He still has stamina.
And he may not be in full command of the country at times or the details of policy, and he forgets names and dates and so forth.
But this display was very important as a message to his party that they should not try to replace him before the 2024 election.
And actually, before the speech, I said, if you want Joe Biden to lose in November, you should want him to do very well tonight because the chances of Democrats winning are lower with Joe Biden in office.
They're higher with another candidate.
If you have another more vigorous candidate who can replace him, then that candidate would theoretically do better against Donald Trump.
Joe Biden is possibly the only Democrat who could lose to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is, in fact, beating him everywhere.
So if you want Trump to win or you simply just want Biden to lose, then you needed him to do a good enough job last night to convince his own party it would be a waste of time to replace him.
And he did that.
He actually delivered the speech, and some Democrats liked all the partisanship.
Of course, that's a very short-sighted view because once the shoe's on the other foot, you can get it back in your face.
But that's how people reacted to it.
I think that Democrats liked it and they felt more confident in the president.
Everybody else thought, what is this man doing leading our country?
He has a temper that he can't control.
He did stumble during the speech, despite whatever stimulants or otherwise he might have been on.
He stumbled many times.
He made mistakes.
And there was more heckling than I've ever seen or heard at a State of the Union address.
And much of it was well deserved because after they had heard the president go after them so viciously, many Republicans decided they've had enough.
People were shouting things about how the president was lying.
There was a gold star father, the father of one of the 13 U.S. servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan in the terror attack during the evacuation.
He was there in the gallery and he started heckling Joe Biden.
He was eventually arrested and taken out.
But that has not happened.
It never happened during Trump speeches.
It happened once during an Obama speech, and the congressman who made the interjection at the time apologized profusely and so forth.
So it's really a violation of decorum.
But Biden basically invited it because he was attacking the opposition.
You don't do that in a State of the Union address.
One final point I'll make about the address, or maybe a couple.
So penultimate point here.
Biden started out talking about Vladimir Putin and Russia.
Now, I know that for some people, that's a very important issue.
I care a lot about foreign policy.
You would never start the State of the Union by talking about another country.
You don't start by talking about Ukraine.
He mentioned Sweden and Finland before he mentioned the people of the United States.
I don't know who the speech writers are, and I don't know why Washington thinks that these issues, like NATO expansion, are the number one thing they have to tackle in a State of the Union address.
But they put it right up front.
It was a terrible, terrible way to start.
He didn't even wait for the speaker to introduce him.
He just launched right into his speech about Putin and Ukraine and so forth.
And this is a moment like World War II and all nonsense, but also just deeply offensive.
The purpose of the State of the Union, the constitutional purpose, is the president has to report to Congress about the state of the United States.
Don't start with Putin and Ukraine.
And the other thing is, you know, we heard over and over again during Trump's presidency about what an anti-Semite he was.
Well, Trump spent a lot of time in his State of the Union addresses dealing with anti-Semitism, criticizing anti-Semitism, praising Holocaust survivors, talking about the Jewish community, speaking out against prejudice.
He spent several minutes in 2019 in his speech talking about exactly that.
Biden didn't mention anti-Semitism at all, not once during the entire speech.
We've got a wave of anti-Semitism here.
I know that there are incidents in Canada as well that you just mentioned.
Biden didn't say a thing about it, not one thing.
So this was a campaign speech.
It was not the speech of a man leading a country and really confronting the challenges that Americans face.
Yeah, he didn't talk about anti-Semitism, but he certainly scolded Israel, implying that they're invading Gaza the wrong way, because General Joe Biden knows better.
I'm going to talk about Israel in a second.
Let me just talk about that.
So he did two things.
He expressed empathy for Israel, and that was actually good.
That was the best part of the speech, actually, because he talked about how Hamas had used sexual violence against Israeli victims and so forth.
That was important.
But then, as you point out, he flipped and began saying things about Israel that were deeply offensive.
He began to imply that Israel is not allowing humanitarian aid in, that Israel isn't trying to avoid Palestinian casualties, all nonsense.
And then he came up with this idea of building a port in Gaza to allow for more aid to be shipped into Gaza.
Well, that's very nice, and the Israeli government is playing along because why wouldn't they?
But it's also ridiculous.
The problem in Gaza isn't getting aid to Gaza.
It's distributing it within Gaza because Hamas steals the aid and the United Nations is incompetent and cannot distribute the aid.
So you can bring as much aid as you want.
And in fact, more aid, as the U.S. government has admitted, comes in by truck than could ever come in by airdrop or by sea.
But the problem is, how do you distribute it once you get it there?
And the best way, in my view, to distribute the aid would be to allow Israel to win the war, end the threat of Hamas, and then you can go wherever you like, all over Gaza.
There's no security risk anymore if there's no terrorism.
Very strange.
Yeah, I, like I said, we were so focused on Canadian things yesterday.
I feel like our whole country, you know, Joel, 70% of Canadians say the country is broken.
That's the word that was tested in a poll.
Imagine that.
I think things are bleaker here, even than in the U.S.
And I think our leader is more, he's like on a kamikaze run.
And the worse he does, the more it's like he just wants to burn the place down.
At least Joe Biden knows there's an election coming this year and he's trying to set himself up to win.
Trudeau is in the low 20s in the polls, and I think he's just going to burn the whole place down.
It really is shocking to see.
But to watch Joe Biden give priority to the fact that Sweden and Finland are no longer neutral.
They're now part of NATO.
That's so obscure.
And the fact that he was told and he agreed to make that the lead item.
When Americans are hurting too, I think Canadians are hurting more.
I think we've actually fallen back and per capita income.
We're where we were 10 years ago.
There's a lot of things, new records that are being set in Canada for poverty and stress and cost of living.
But it's bad in America too, I think.
And I got to think that if anyone was watching it yesterday, they would have just clicked away.
Who cares about Finland and Sweden?
I mean, nice people and all, but I really think that most Americans don't give a damn.
Do we know what the viewership was?
We don't yet know the full viewership because some people watch it online and so forth.
But Americans are feeling very uncertain about the future.
The unemployment rate is low.
The economy is growing.
That's good.
But inflation has really hurt American households.
Yes, the inflation rate has come down, but people are still struggling to pay for things.
Groceries are very expensive.
And really for an entire generation of Americans, Americans under 50, home ownership has become an impossible dream.
There's just no way that middle-class families can afford a middle-class lifestyle anymore.
And Biden and his cohort are completely insensitive to that.
And every time Biden talks about the middle class, he falls back on these old ideas of unions and organizing.
And that's all well and good, except that is not how most people earn money.
They don't have union jobs, most people.
And that's not how our economy works anymore.
We don't have guaranteed jobs with nine to five benefits and retirement.
People live in an economy that's rapidly changing.
That's one of the reasons it's so successful, that people are adaptable and industries change, but things are getting more expensive.
And Biden keeps imposing new regulations, new restrictions.
He boasted in his State of the Union address about passing legislation to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.
Well, some of us thought that was a pretty good idea.
In fact, if there were anything to praise him for, it would be investing in the network that would be necessary for the country to move to electric vehicles.
Okay, that's a pretty good idea.
It's now been more than two years, and we haven't seen, I don't think, more than a handful of these stations built.
How can it take two years to build at least a significant portion of the electric vehicle charging stations?
The difference between Biden and Trump is Trump is a builder and he knows how to cut through red tape and he knows how to get things done.
And Biden just is a politician.
He wants to pass legislation and hand out money to interest groups.
And the Democrats are the party of government.
So they apply all the regulations and all the environmental rules and all the rigmarole and the union requirements and everything like that.
They're not focused on getting the job done.
They're focused on getting paid and keeping the issue alive so that Biden can refer to it in speech after speech.
So I think Americans feel that the future is uncertain, not bleak necessarily.
And I do think that if our economy weren't growing and we had higher unemployment, people would feel much worse.
But I just feel that there's a lack of confidence in our leadership.
The approval rating of the president is abysmally low, certainly relative to the economic performance that he's had in office, although the inflation is almost entirely of his own creation.
We had 2% inflation when he took office.
He then spent all this money that was unnecessary to spend, and the inflation promptly took off.
Now, the Fed has had to raise interest rates to bring it back down.
And I think that the economy has so far had a soft landing.
But people just don't trust Joe Biden's leadership, not since Afghanistan in 2021.
They don't trust that he knows what he's doing.
And we haven't even talked about the border yet.
I mean, the border is the most important crisis facing this country.
And Biden is trying to say it's the Republicans' fault because they haven't funded what he wants to fund and they haven't passed a law that he would sign, which would basically accept current levels of illegal migration, several thousand people crossing the border every day.
Well, Republicans won't accept that and can't accept that.
Trump's TikTok Dilemma00:08:58
And Biden's claiming that it's only because Trump opposed the bill that Republicans have refused to take it up in the House of Representatives.
If Trump supported that bill, Republicans would tell him to get lost, just like many Republicans are telling him today that he's wrong about TikTok.
Trump somehow decided to defend TikTok.
And many Republicans and conservatives, including strong Trump supporters, are telling him he's wrong.
That TikTok is a threat to American national security and culture.
And it's a threat to kids.
And it's not about free speech.
It's about foreign propaganda coming into our living rooms and coming into our devices.
So people are telling Trump he's wrong about that and he'll probably change his view.
But if Trump supported Biden's border security bill, which really belongs in scare quotes because it's not about border security, then the Republican Party would tell him to get lost.
Because if you read the bill and look at the bill, which they hid for as long as possible, the bill is unacceptable.
It does not actually provide border security.
The bill simply accepts the status quo, which is a crisis level of migration.
So Biden's not grappling with the real challenges facing the country.
People like the fact that the economy is growing, but Americans are so resourceful and entrepreneurial that the economy will almost always grow if you just let Americans do what Americans do.
So I'm not even sure how much credit Americans give to Biden.
And they really shouldn't give much because the recovery started under Trump.
It started in May 2020.
There was only a two-month recession under Trump in the COVID period, as hard as it may be to believe because the media have downplayed all of Trump's economic accomplishments.
But fundamentally, Biden did enough in the State of the Union to show Democrats that he deserves to lead the party.
But he also showed the country that he really has run out of things to do as a leader.
There's not much more he can do.
And we're hearing the same lines over and over again about lowering the prices of insulin, which is something Trump did, and then Biden reversed so that Biden could say he did it.
You know, there's no direction left in this administration.
And the fact that he started with Russia just tells you how directionless it is.
Were there any interesting responses?
Of course, the president gives a state of the union, and there's a time slot for the opposition to respond.
I understand that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a response.
Did you see any of those responses and were any of them interesting?
Kennedy's response was interesting only because he said something that I think is important.
He's not the first to say it, but I think it is important to say that there is a spiritual and social crisis in America at the moment.
People are lonely.
And if you look at young people in particular, young people don't go to church.
They don't get married.
They don't have kids.
The birth rate has collapsed.
20 years ago, when George W. Bush was president, it was fashionable to look at the United States and Israel as two Western countries that had defied the general demographic decline.
You could look at Israelis having a lot of kids and Americans having a lot of kids.
And Americans and Israelis both have high levels of religious observance.
Most Israelis are secular, but there's a huge religious portion to Israeli life.
So the U.S. and Israel were in a category on their own.
Today, Israel is still religious, and Israelis are having more kids.
But the birth rate in the United States has fallen off a cliff to almost Eastern European post-communist levels because we are not going to church.
We're not encouraging young people to meet each other anymore.
We're not even encouraging romance.
And people have deeply unfulfilling personal lives because they're spending all their time on their phones.
And because we're not led by people who set any kind of example, I'm not talking about moral example that, you know, that was the idea of a president setting a moral example went out of fashion with Bill Clinton.
But that's not what we need.
We just need examples of adults being grownups and raising families and enjoying themselves and each other.
And we don't have that.
And that's what Kennedy's address was about.
So I think that he is on the right wavelength, even if he's not necessarily talking about the economy and foreign policy and other issues that he talks about in other contexts.
The Republican response to the State of the Union was given by Senator Katie Britt, and it was terrible.
It was just terrible.
I turned it off in the middle because I had to take care of my kids, but there was nothing compelling about it, nothing really worth seeing.
I'm a fan of the guy.
I know he's not a true conservative.
He doesn't say he is.
He's a true Democrat, which I think is more accurate.
But I find him interesting.
Joel, great to catch you.
No, I'll tell you something about Kennedy.
I'll tell you something about him.
You know, and a lot of people I know in LA know him because he lives in Los Angeles.
Everybody who knows Robert Kennedy tells you that he's a fantastic guy.
And I have actually had a few opportunities to interact with him.
And he is, in fact, a very fine person.
And if you look at how much abuse he's taken for supporting Israel against the wishes of the left, you know, he's really a man of the left, but he supports Israel against Hamas.
And so he has lost donations.
He's lost campaign staff.
His campaign manager quit.
He has really taken some arrows for supporting Israel.
And yet he's still in the fight, polling at around 12% nationally.
That's not going to win him the presidency, but it makes him a very important spoiler and possibly a kingmaker.
So, you know, he is surviving, hanging in there, but he has, in fact, proved that he's a good guy because he's willing to sacrifice first principles.
Well, and by the way, he's done this at great risk.
The Homeland Security Secretary himself personally made the decision to refuse RFK Secret Service protection, despite the fact that so many members of that family have been assassinated in the past and that it is.
It's worse than that.
It's worse than that.
The Homeland Security Secretary wrote to the Kennedy campaign that he had consulted with a committee of five people with whom he consults about these kinds of decisions.
It turns out that four of the five are the leaders of the parties in Congress, Senate majority leader and minority leader, House Majority Leader and Minority Leader, or Speaker of the House.
And so the committee is comprised of four out of five people who are from rival political parties and they get to decide whether Robert F. Kennedy, who's running as an independent, deserves Secret Service protection.
It's like a political cartel.
Well, you know, we're used to that in Canada, but it's shocking that a decision about security, which is not a political matter, it is a scientific matter.
Does he need security?
Are there threats?
It's a policing matter, an intelligence matter.
It's not a political matter.
And frankly, shame on those political parties, especially the Republicans, who denied him that.
That's disgusting and a disgrace.
And I certainly hope nothing bad comes from it, although he's spending an enormous amount of money on his own security.
Well, very interesting.
And it's already March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, eight months till the election.
It's coming up quickly.
And of course, we care about our Canadian election.
A lot will turn on it.
But I put it to you that the difference between a Trump or a Biden win, that difference will have a greater effect on Canada.
Well, I mean, I suppose a polyev or a Trudeau win is a big difference too.
But the American decision will have an enormous effect on Canada.
Well, listen, I think if I can make a prediction, you know, I'm always wrong.
I predicted in 2016 Hillary Clinton would win, so that was wrong.
Even though I didn't want her to win, I thought she had to be inevitable because there was so much opposition to Trump.
But let me say this: I don't think Joe Biden is going to be re-elected as president of the United States.
I think Donald Trump is likely to return for a second presidential term, but he will do it with help from Kennedy.
I do think that Kennedy is going to spoil the race in enough states to allow Trump to take those states and their electoral college vote.
And there will be a huge outcry about it.
But Kennedy is where the Democrats are on social issues, especially on abortion and other issues that are very important to female voters.
But he's also where conservatives are in terms of his regard for free speech.
And I think that many people who can't bring themselves to vote for Biden are going to choose Kennedy.
He's going to hurt Biden more than Trump, even though he'll hurt Trump a little bit.
And I think that puts him in a very important position to make decisions or to perhaps serve in a next Trump administration in some capacity or to guide the policies of that administration.
I think we could be sitting here in mid to late November this year talking about what Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s role will be in a Trump administration.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Role00:01:50
Isn't that interesting?
Well, you know what?
From your mouth to God's ears, I think that would be wonderful.
I've never met the man.
We actually host in the Democracy Fund, a Canadian civil liberties charity hosted Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for an hour on a giant Zoom screen.
We had a town hall meeting with him.
I found him very strong charisma and personality, but I found him substantively a thinking man who gave real answers, not just political clichés, a man who cares, who spent a life actually trying to do the right thing in his mind.
Like he's been an activist rather than a political hack.
I hope he has a role in American public life, and I hope he has a role in government.
Joel, great to catch up with you.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
All right, there you have it.
Joel Pollack, Senior Editor-at-Large of Breitbart.com.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Peter Somer writes, my wife was there speaking about Thornhill.
Unfortunately, I could not make it as a Jew and a volunteer in the 67 war.
I have real concerns, but what concerns me more now is how it was possible for the police to arrest six Jews and no Palestinians.
As I said, my wife was there, and if anybody should have been arrested, it was some of the Palestinians.
Thanking you.
Well, I think that the police must have instructions not to arrest Palestinian people.
They literally let a woman go who hit a cop.
Can you imagine that happening during a trucker convoy?
These are dark days, but I think they'll get better.