EZRA LEVANT | Trudeau’s immigration minister invites tens of thousands of migrants from Gaza — but don’t worry, Hamas will make sure they’re not dangerous
Ezra Levant exposes Ontario’s Solicitor General Michael Kirzner’s failure to prosecute anti-Semitic attacks—five shots fired near a Jewish girls’ school, vandalized stores, and illegal pro-Hamas encampments—while deflecting blame to silent Attorney General Doug Downey. Federal immigration minister Mark Miller’s invitation for tens of thousands of Gaza migrants raises concerns about unvetted arrivals from high anti-Semitism regions, with Levant warning of potential escalation. Guest Heather McDonald links student protests to cult-like behavior, citing social contagion and weaponized youth movements like Hitler Youth, while criticizing professors and media for enabling radicalization. The episode reveals how Canada’s universities and policies risk fostering hostility toward free speech and intellectual rigor, undermining future workforce stability. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, I've been thinking about my very brief interview with Ontario's Solicitor General.
I have a few thoughts on his answers.
He said some really wacky things.
I want to take you through it line by line.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
I want to show you a few things that you can't just hear.
So please go to RebelNewsPlus.com and click subscribe.
Thanks for your support.
Tonight, Trudeau's immigration minister invites tens of thousands of new migrants from Gaza.
But don't worry, Hamas will make sure they're not dangerous.
It's May 29th, and this is the Esser Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Thinking more about my short interview with Ontario's Solicitor General, Michael Kersner.
The Solicitor General and the Attorney General could be considered cousins.
One is law and one is order.
The Attorney General is the lawyer, really, the prosecutor.
In Canada's legal system, most crimes are prosecuted by provincial prosecutors.
So that's the law side.
The other side is the Solicitor General, the guy I interviewed on Monday.
He's in charge of the police and the prisons.
In Ontario, the Solicitor General is the minister responsible for the provincial police force called the OPP, the Ontario Provincial Police.
It's a pretty large police force, actually, with nearly 6,000 uniformed officers.
It's actually a huge police force.
The Solicitor General is also the minister for other police forces in the province, including the Toronto Police Service.
So he's the guy.
There probably is no single person in Ontario, perhaps no other person in all of Canada, given how big Ontario is, more responsible for the policing in this country, with the possible exception of the commissioner of the RCMP.
But in terms of the absolute chaos in city streets, Toronto has been hit the worst.
I'd say Montreal is a close second.
In Canada, the University of Toronto is the largest university by far, and they have had an encampment there, a Hamas encampment there, for more than a week.
There are massive street marches in Toronto by Hamas all the time, including one that disrupted a meeting between Justin Trudeau and the Italian prime minister.
Can you believe that?
Toronto is the city where Jewish-owned stores like the Indigo Bookstore and Jewish-themed restaurants have been attacked and vandalized by these Hamas hate marches.
It's where Jewish kids have been beat up on the way to school.
It's where just this past weekend, gunmen pumped five rounds into a Jewish girls' school.
All of that is a matter of law and order.
The law being the prosecutors, the order being the police.
Neither are working in Ontario.
I want to show you my quick interview with Kirzner again because I've been thinking about it a bit.
You know, I didn't expect to see him there, so I hadn't prepared a lot in my mind for what to ask him.
That's sometimes how it goes.
You go with what pops into your head in the moment.
I don't think he was ready either.
I don't think he's ever been asked any critical questions ever, actually.
That's just not how the media party is these days.
When I went to the Toronto Police Press Conference at that girls' school on the weekend, there was a whole phalanx of cameras.
Like, holy moly, the mainstream media were there in force, but there was only one or two questions from one reporter at CTV, and they were sort of note-taking questions, like nothing probing, nothing challenging, just, oh, could you clarify this or could he give me a detail on that?
There were a bunch of cameras there from various news organizations, but literally none of them had anything to say or ask.
They were stenographers with video cameras.
And when I asked a probing question, and by the way, I deferred to the CTV guy just because he's more on the beat.
I wasn't going to get in the way.
I mean, okay, he asked his one clarifying question, and then there was silence.
So I, okay, I'll ask a question.
And when I asked the question about anti-Semitism and how it's a rising tide in Toronto, the cop canceled the press conference, got on his phone with a fake phone call, ran away, and locked himself in his car and ended up the window.
And a lady cop told me I shouldn't be so pushy.
Pushy?
That's what they call any question.
It's not just, how do you spell that, sir?
So I think Solicitor General Kirzner was not expecting any questions.
So both of us were surprised by what happened.
Here's a reminder of how it went.
This guy is Ontario's Solicitor General, the man in charge of policing.
He's in charge of the order side of law and order.
How come there were no charges under Section 176.2 of the criminal code besetting a house of worship when all those protesters were outside the Bayette Synagogue in Thornhill?
Well, that's a question that you're going to have to ask the York Regional Police or the Attorney General.
I'm here because I'm not going to see my community intimidated.
I speak out all the time in support of our Jewish community.
I'm not afraid to wear my kippah.
I'm not afraid to go to synagogue every Sabbath, every Shabbat.
And I'm going to do everything that I can to stand up for our inherent right to live safely in our own homes and communities.
And I'm not going to stop.
Everything short of prosecuting them, though, right?
I mean, the U of T remains encamped with an illegal encampment.
You're very good on Twitter, but have you actually done any prosecutions?
Well, again, this is something that you have to speak to the Attorney General.
He's your colleague.
You're in the government.
Why shouldn't you inside?
No, what I can tell you is I'm working every day to tell that our legislation, that our regulations are adhered to.
I'm standing up with my community.
I've been 34 weeks almost every single week to the rally of Bathurst and Shepard in support of remembering the hostages who have been held against their will in captivity in Gaza.
And it's not acceptable.
Well, and that's exactly.
And that's exactly what I'm saying.
It obviously is acceptable since you're not prosecuting it.
You have condoned it.
You've created a new normal where people can engage in low-level, permanent, anti-Semitic crimes, assault, threats, mischief, because you guys don't prosecute.
But there you are on Twitter, though, so congrats for that.
It's important that the Jewish community sees a person from their own community in the Ontario legislature standing up against hate every single day who has the support of a premier who has called it out.
Where are the other levels of government today who exercise the same voice that Premier Ford does, that we will not accept anti-Semitism?
And have accepted it.
Where's the prosecution?
Again, this is something you could ask Minister Varani.
You can ask the Prime Minister.
The province, the province prosecutes.
The province prosecutes.
Better save your boss.
Yeah, that's what he had to say.
His press flack helped him get out of that.
Look, it's on him.
The policing in Ontario is on him.
He tried to pawn me off onto his colleague, the Attorney General, who wasn't there, because the Attorney General is the man in charge of prosecutions.
It's true.
Can you even name the Ontario Attorney General without looking it up?
I bet you can't.
I bet not one in 100 Ontarians could.
I had to Google it.
His name is Doug Downey.
He's been absolutely invisible these past eight months.
He's had nothing to say about our streets being turned over to these Hamas thugs.
But as you saw, Kirzner kept saying, well, why don't I ask the Attorney General?
It's a pretty lame answer to my questions.
But the real answer is because the Attorney General doesn't arrest people or charge people.
That's the police's job.
And then the police, well, with their Kirzner's department, you can't prosecute someone who's not charged.
You'll notice he ended our little chat by asking me to ask Arif Varani, Trudeau's Attorney General, these questions.
Again, believe me, I am no fan of Trudeau or Varani, but what on earth does a federal attorney general have to do with policing in Ontario or prosecutions in Ontario?
The answer is nothing.
I think the lamest part was his attempt to play the Jewish card on me.
He proudly wears his Jewish yarmulke on his head.
He goes to synagogue.
All right, well, thanks for that irrelevant personal update.
Save it for your diary.
I mean, good for him, I guess, but what does his personal religious practice have to do with his duties as a solicitor general?
I'm not coming to a press conference to grill him on his personal religious beliefs.
I actually couldn't care less.
Am I supposed to be somehow mollified, satisfied with the carnage on our streets and university campuses simply because this guy said he's a really good Jew?
How about being a really good solicitor general?
And that part about him going to the weekly protest in that mention, he mentioned Bathurst and Shepherd.
That's a Toronto neighborhood.
That's a really Jewish part of town.
It's actually where I did my streeter interviews about Ya'ara Sachs the other day, if you remember that.
And every weekend for about an hour, I don't know, about 20 Jews gather in that shopping mall outdoors, and they wave Israeli flags and people honk their support as they drive by.
And that's great.
But what does that have to do with his dereliction of duty as a Solicitor General?
And who exactly is he protesting at his rallies?
I mean, typically rallies like that, even positive rallies, are some sort of call to action, like calling on the police to act.
Imagine the Solicitor General, the Ontario minister in charge of police, is at a rally demanding that police do something.
Yeah, that's your job, buddy.
There's millions of people in Ontario.
Only one is the Solicitor General.
Who on earth are you protesting?
How about don't go to the protest?
How about go into the office and do some work about policing?
I think I've never seen worse answers in my life.
I'm not looking for special favors.
I'm not looking for an answer tailored to me because I'm Jewish.
I don't know of any Gentiles other than a few woke university students who are happy with what they see on our streets and universities.
This is not special pleading.
I'm not calling for hate speech laws.
I think we have too many of those already.
I think that's an excuse.
It's a distraction from the fact that we have all the real laws we need right now to deal with the problem and we lack the political will as demonstrated by Kirzner.
Just enforce the law.
At the University of Toronto, it's trespass and mischief, maybe assault.
Other city bylaws could be used too.
They're camping.
You can't camp in the city.
They're having open bonfires on campus, for example.
You don't need any fancy laws.
Most of the perpetrators, by the way, aren't even students.
There are lots of property crimes going on, plenty of death threats, by the way.
There are other parts of the criminal code, too.
The very first thing I asked Kirzner about, I don't know if you caught it, I mentioned section 176.2 of the criminal code.
It's very short.
Let me read it to you.
It's one sentence.
Everyone who willfully disturbs or interrupts an assemblage of persons met for religious worship or for a moral, social, or benevolent purpose is guilty of an offense punishable on summary conviction.
One sentence.
That means if you're going to bust up some church service, that's against the law.
And here's what I'm talking about.
Here's when I asked him that.
I don't know if you remember, but a few weeks ago, the Hamas hate march, it was in a residential area in Toronto outside a big Jewish synagogue.
They brought loudspeakers, for heaven's sakes.
went on for half a day.
Krishna's police just stood there and watched.
I don't think they arrested a single Hamas protester.
They arrested a couple of local Jews who reacted poorly, probably because they were so stunned that Kirzner's police were standing by and doing nothing.
And I'm saying Kirzner's police because he's the cabinet minister in charge of them.
I think a lot of the problems in Canada on this issue come from Justin Trudeau.
He has normalized anti-Semitism by standing with Hamas against Israel.
He has parroted Hamas propaganda, including various accusations against Israel that have very quickly been proven to be false.
Trudeau is doing this because he can do math, at least simple math.
There are about 400,000 Jews in Canada, but there's about 2 million Muslims.
And unfortunately, a significant number of them have been admitted to Canada without any screening for radicalism.
And they have brought with them anti-Semitism.
And some of them brought with them violence to Canada.
And Trudeau wants their votes.
So Trudeau has demonized Israel and he's demonized Jews.
And he actually hasn't said a word against these Hamas hate marches.
Actually, the couple of times he's been asked, he praises them as being free speech.
He has let in millions of people from countries where anti-Semitism is natural.
But provincial premiers are no better than him.
City mayors are no better.
Police chiefs are no better.
And of every single person in Canada, other than Trudeau himself, I actually think Michael Kirzner is the most responsible for what's going on in our city streets.
It's happening in Vancouver and Montreal and Ottawa too, but Toronto is the biggest and the worst.
Toronto's Worst Problem00:03:39
And it is literally Michael Kirzner's job to enforce the law, to arrest lawbreakers, and then to hand the prisoners over to the prosecutors and the courts.
The prosecutors and the courts can't do their job if criminals aren't arrested.
You know, we hear about the George Soros district attorneys in the United States and places like San Francisco and Portland.
Those are far left-wing prosecutors who are funded by Soros.
They're elected down there, the DA, and Soros has bankrolled DAs who drop charges against criminals, who don't ask for bail, who tell police not to bother to enforce laws like shoplifting.
We've all heard about that.
That's a far-left-wing activist gaming the system down in America.
Really, how is Michael Kersner any different?
He's like a Soros operative.
He just doesn't enforce the law.
He just doesn't.
He just doesn't arrest criminals.
And I'm not calling for him to use fancy hate speech laws.
I'm talking just about law laws.
He won't do it.
Oh, and expect it to get a lot worse very quickly.
Did you see this insane news on Monday?
Trudeau announced he is quintupling the number of people he is importing from Gaza along with their families.
Trudeau's immigration minister says if you don't like it, if you're afraid of it, well, he doesn't want your vote, you Jew.
But also here in Canada, with Islamophobia running rampant, anti-Semitism running rampant.
And I think we need to estimate, because perhaps we've underestimated the damage that this has caused us as a country and the divisive politics that comes out of it.
I don't need votes from this.
I just need people to stay alive.
And I don't want the vote of someone that thinks that legitimate criticism of the Netanyahu government that I share equates to picking on Jews in this country and targeting them.
If those people have that type of thinking, I don't want their vote.
Oh, and they don't talk about Hamas being hostages, releasing the hostages anymore.
I mean, for at least the first six months, Trudeau would say, Israel's really bad.
Oh, yeah.
And Hamas, can you please release the hostages, the women and children?
They've stopped doing that.
They no longer even ask Hamas to release the hostages anymore.
They say, actually, Israel is the criminal hostage taker.
Look at this insane line by Mark Miller, the immigration minister.
But we are all failing Gazans at this point.
And I think that is something that we need to realize.
They are under, it's probably the largest hostage taking right now in the world.
And it is something that Canada can play a small role in it.
We can't be everything to everyone.
But if Canada can play a role in this, in getting people out and safe, we're willing to play it.
But right now, we haven't had the success that we wanted to.
And that means that people are in and around Rafah are very exposed to death, starvation, to bombardment.
Yeah, hey, I wonder if 80% of people in Gaza support Hamas, what do you think he's going to look like when we bring them to Canadian streets?
Who knows?
Just don't bother Michael Kirzner with any such questions, though.
Stay with us for more.
Queers, Palestinians, and Complexities00:11:25
You know, I've attended a number of these encampments supporting Hamas, and I think it's accurate to say many of them outright support Hamas.
Others would say, no, they're merely pro-Palestinian.
I think it's fair to say that all of them are anti-Israel.
There's gradations, and different people have their different reasons for being there.
But one of the things that has struck me, and I saw this when I was at Columbia during their encampment, is I was surprised how many young women are in these battlements.
And one particular observation was young Asian women.
And, you know, I've been doing up of these encampments now in different cities where it seems to be a trend.
And I can understand if someone is of Middle Eastern heritage, there's a tribal instinct, you know, stand with your clan.
And I can understand if people come from a radical background.
But in my mind, young women, and especially young Asian women, it's a stereotype, are Peaceful, compliant, rule-following, scholarly, merit-oriented people who go to school to learn, go to school to better themselves.
Often, they're children of first-generation immigrants who work hard and save up to send their kids to get a medical degree.
Why are so many young women a part of these radical protests?
Well, someone who's been thinking about this question a lot is our guest today.
Her name is Heather McDonald.
She is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
She's a contributing editor at City Journal and she's the author of When Race Trumps Merit.
And I wonder if that answer will answer some of these questions.
Heather McDonald joins me now via Scout.
Heather, help me understand.
Maybe it's just me and my stereotypes and prejudices, but I did not expect to see so many young women, especially young Asian women, manning the battlements for Hamas.
Well, there's two issues here, Ezra.
There's the Asian part, and then there's the female part.
I think they both have somewhat different explanations.
It is astounding that Asians are at all attracted to left-wing causes because the left-wing hates Asians.
The left wing says they are, you know, this terrible want to be model minority.
And all of the democratic left-wing policies like racial preferences are working in the exact opposite of Asian interests.
Asians are successful academically, but they are being kept out of universities disproportionately to their qualifications in order to make room for far less qualified, so-called underrepresented minorities, which is code for blacks and Hispanics.
But nevertheless, you have a very large percentage of the Asian population in this country identifying with Democrats and with the left because that is the path towards elite status.
The elites dominate our most high-status professions, whether it's in tech or medicine or the media.
And so, if you want to credentialize your children for admission to Harvard and whatnot, you're better off identifying as a Democrat.
So, that explains that.
But the other part of the Venn diagram here is the female component.
And that is partly the fact that females simply dominate more and more in universities, which explains why universities have become hostile to free speech and academic inquiry without any inhibitions from claims of safetyism.
And, you know, this idea makes me feel unsafe.
The more that the females dominate a university, the less it is dedicated to its core function of the uninhibited pursuit of knowledge.
Females gave us trigger warnings, they gave us safe spaces, they gave us the therapy dogs, and they, females in general, on average, and there's obviously exceptions, are less prone to weigh costs and benefits, to follow rational policies.
And I would argue that the great mass hysteria that we've seen on behalf of Hamas, and I'm going to be much more blunt about this than you are, Ezra.
I think this is a movement founded in utter ignorance.
It is a mass cult.
It is a social contagion.
These students know nothing about the Middle East.
It is based on ignorance and following the most irrational instincts because look at these intersectional coalitions.
I was at Columbia too, Ezra.
You probably saw this.
One of the signs was bags for Palestine, i.e., a variant on the various queers for Palestine combinations we've seen at these protests.
That in itself discredits this entire movement, because as we know, as has been said endlessly on conservative media, you try holding a gay pride march in Gaza or in Somalia or in Nairobi, you're going to get thrown off of buildings.
You have Muslim countries that have death penalties for homosexuals.
This is a movement founded in irrationality.
Females dominate the growing irrational strain on our campuses.
They dominate the various left-wing majors, the ethnic studies, the women's studies, the gender studies, the anti-white studies.
So really, this whole thing is a match made in heaven.
Wow.
You said so many things there.
One of the things you said is, you know, safetyism, you know, is a feminine idea.
That's why I find it odd when you have women, young women, siding with the violent revolutionary.
I mean, you would think that would be terrifying.
And also, I mean, maybe, again, I'm engaging in stereotypes here, but I just find it so hard to believe that a young woman would throw away 100 grand of her parents' cash and tuition to throw her lot in with these would-be she Guevaras.
Is it, you know, a theory that my friend Gavin McInnes, who's a bit of a wild man, says, is that maybe these young Asian women are rebelling against their tiger moms and saying, you know, I just find it a strange demographic.
I get some of the queers for Palestine stuff because that's tear down the Western patriarchy.
And if Hamas will tear them down from the outside, we'll tear them down from the inside.
The issue is never the issue.
The revolution is the issue.
So I actually totally understand queers for Palestine.
All they know is that Hamas hates America and so do they.
That's why I don't get it when a polite, normal, healthy, happy, you know, Korean-Canadian kid says, I'm with Hamas.
Since when are you in the tear down America business?
That's what I don't quite get.
Well, I think that, and I think you're absolutely right that this is ultimately, and I think a lot of the sort of Jewish advocates in Congress don't get this.
It's a mistake to characterize this hysteria as predominantly traditional anti-Semitism.
It's not.
It has very little to do with traditional anti-Semitism with the exception of the Muslims on campus.
And let's be honest, blacks also have a long history of fairly traditional anti-Semitism, of hatred for the Jewish landlords, hatred for the Jewish shopkeepers.
We saw recently in the last couple of months, a black student organization sent out on social media an extremely traditional caricature of Jewish power.
But by and large, this is not motivated by the genteel WASP anti-Semitism of, well, Jews are just not clubbable.
It's motivated by hatred of the West itself, of which Israel is now seen as the embodiment.
This grows out of the current academic context.
It's what's being taught across the board.
It's very hard to find a humanities course today that does not take an extremely cynical, critical approach towards the greatest monuments of Western civilization, an approach I have to add that is completely fallacious.
The West has nothing to apologize for.
It is the beacon of tolerance and rights the world over.
It has done nothing that is at all worse than what every other culture has done as far as genocide, expropriation, trying to wipe out your enemies.
But that's absolutely right.
You're absolutely right to say that the queers simply say the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Of course, it's not a reciprocal.
Uh sensation, you know it's it.
Uh the the, the queer the, the Palestines are not saying, well, the enemy of my enemy, which is the queers, are my friends.
This is not a transitive operation.
But to get back to the Asians, that what you see as sort of the docile would-be medical students, it again it is just the lure on campus, it is the lure of the oppositional and it is the lure in our culture.
Uh, to be affiliated with causes that are seen as anti-establishment.
It's an ironic impulse because the establishment today is the left.
We just heard this from president Biden in his appalling commencement speech at Morehouse College, where he was reiterating the usual lies that he ran with to get into the White House and he's kept going since being in the White House which is that this is a white supremacist country, that whites are mowing down blacks, that you have to be 100 times better to be to if you're black to get a qualified position.
That's just the opposite.
Blacks get racial preference all the time.
But that is the face of the Democratic Party.
Uh, you know Biden goes around saying we have this permanent stain in the white soul of of racism and hatred.
That's all lies.
But that is the Democratic Party and a lot of these students are simply conforming themselves uh, to the status quo.
You know, you're so right.
When I was in New York to go to Columbia, I saw on my UH twitter feed that the Fashion Institute OF Technology had an encampment start, so we rushed over there.
We got there within minutes of it happening, so people were still trickling in and I asked some students.
They were holding flags.
They were not the Palestinian flag.
I said, what flag are those?
And it it was.
They didn't know what flag it was.
It was not the right flag.
I asked people like after a while, once they get organized, they don't talk to journalists.
They have their spokesmen.
Mindless Chants Repeated00:03:23
But for everyone who would talk to me beforehand, they didn't know anything about anything and it really is cult-like.
They just have these chants, free free, free Palestine.
They have a few rhyming couplets and the endless repetition i'm talking about hundreds of times.
They just repeat that message track.
It's a mantra, it's hypnotic, it is so cult-like.
It's like Hara Krishna Krishna Krishna, Krishna Hari.
It is the same low information kids.
It's.
Fun, it's rebellious, you can be rock and roll.
All the kill.
Cool kids are doing it in some cases.
There's food, there's drugs, there's sex, there's whatever's going on um you will be affirmed.
You didn't have any friends yesterday.
Come, we'll be your instant friend group.
And you've never been on TV before.
You'll be on TV.
You'll be the center of the action.
You can tell your friends you were there.
This is like the exciting days of 1968 or Occupy Wall Street.
And I think when you said the word cult, you were spot on.
And there are some cult leaders who are dangerous operators, but I think these lovely young kids are getting caught up in exactly that, a social contagion.
That is what this is.
Well, you know, I don't know if you felt this tension, Ezra, which is that these students should have no attention paid to them whatsoever.
Ideally, now they're breaking the law when they're doing encampments.
They're trespassing.
So you've got to enforce the law.
But ideally, we would all just pay them no attention whatsoever because that's what we crave.
The idea that they have any bargaining chips to play in dealing with universities, it's absurd.
This is, it's created from nothing.
It's like alchemy.
They only have the power that the university confers upon them, a power which they then turn around and use to leverage against the university.
But they deserve no attention.
These people know nothing.
Why are any of us paying attention?
And yet, there you and I are.
I went up to the Columbia encampment on, it was April 29th.
It was the day that the president had delivered her final second ultimatum saying, clear by 2 p.m. or we're going to arrest.
It took her much longer than that.
That night, they went and broke windows and doors at Hamilton Hall, calling in the males, of course, because they need males to be the muscle, but generally it is a female-led cult movement.
And I hated myself in a sense for going and being in the part of that huge media scrum to look at these people because it is a mutually codependent relationship.
The best thing is to turn off the cameras.
On the other hand, one can't resist covering them to get just their sheer idiocy.
And I, too, was struck.
You know, these students were walking for hours at a time around a very large greensward underneath the magnificent neoclassical Butler Library at Columbia, which has the names of some of the great Greek orators, philosophers, literary dramatists, Sophocles, Virgil, Cicero, Homer, Demosthenes.
And underneath them are these robots chanting these idiotic chants for hours at a time.
Mindless MAGA Demonstrators00:02:57
It is the absolute opposite of what students should be doing, which is one, to absorb wisdom and beauty.
And here they are engaged in the most mindless activity.
I would think it would be embarrassing and simply boring to be hours around and they're getting sprayed with little water bottles by the females and given sunscreen and masks, the N95s if they don't already have them.
But, you know, my question to you, Ezra, I kind of think, and I haven't pursued this, but do right-wing demonstrators do these mindless, repetitive call-and-response chants, or is this really a function of the left?
Because I'm trying to think, you know, we don't have that many right-wing demonstrators, but Tea Party or MAGA people, but MAGA, well, I guess we had the January 6th riot, but that wasn't really chanting.
But I think that maybe that modus operande is really a left-wing thing.
You know, I've been to, I agree with there's not a lot of right-wing protests in Canada.
I can only think of two.
One was the great trucker convoy and the associated anti-lockdown protests.
We really focused on that a lot at Rebel News.
And I found whenever I would attend those events, if you asked someone, why are you here?
They would talk to you for 45 minutes.
I mean, they had extreme detail.
And they wouldn't say, oh, I don't know, talk to our leader over there.
In fact, it was a rather leaderless movement.
And there's also some anti-carbon tax grassroots protests and some anti-transgenderism in school protests.
And at those events, everyone knows exactly why they're there and they'll tell you.
Whereas I get the feeling, I mean, there's Greta Tunberg.
First, she's talking about climate.
Now she's an expert on the Middle East.
It's just following, you know, what's the cause du jour?
That's on the left.
You know, I learned this when I covered the Occupy Toronto movement, which was an echo of Occupy Wall Street.
I would see the exact same individuals at any protest in Toronto.
They're funded.
They're organized.
They just pick up the placard and go.
So I think, I don't know of any of that on the right.
I think people on the right don't tend to protest.
I just think it's crazy.
And you're so right at Columbia that it's in this gorgeous, beautiful learning oasis with this classic architecture.
And then these kids at the bottom, it feels like they're the peasant who picked up a pearl and threw it back into the sea, not knowing its worth.
That's all I could think of when I saw these kids throwing away the 100 grand a year education they had.
I did see a couple of normal kids who stopped to talk with me.
They were so mad at their peers.
I know you've got to go, Heather, but I just want to throw one thing to you.
I want to add one thing.
Empowered Youth, Empty Promises00:10:09
I mean, the other problem here is that you do have the older adults egging this on.
And we have this whole tradition now of romanticizing college protests.
I remember the 90s, 1990s, you'd get op-eds saying, where's all the student protests gone?
You know, we had the wonderful years of the Vietnam protests, and then we had the anti-apartheid encampments and whatnot.
No, I'm sorry.
And you have, there was an editorial board member of the New York Times, Shme Man, who wrote this nauseating encomium to these student protesters and how they're leading us towards a more righteous world and they show that we can change things.
No, students do not know anything.
They are right maybe once every 24 hours.
The students at Tiananmen Square were right.
But other than that, students have tended to be completely wrong.
They simply don't know enough about the world to be listened to.
And yet, there is this whole epic among older adults that, oh, this is what students should be doing.
If you're not protesting, you're not really fulfilling your obligation as a university student.
And that also is what's egging on these students.
And that's just simply a complete misapprehension of students and ignoring the fact that they are utter adults and ignoramuses.
Yeah.
She Van Fleet, who is a Chinese-American woman who grew up in communist China and experienced the Red Guard and Mao's great purges and the four olds, old habits, old ideas, I forget all four of them.
The young people were weaponized.
And same in every regime.
Hitler had the Hitler youth.
In Soviet Union, they had the young pioneers.
And the reason is young people are full of passion.
They want to change the world, but they know nothing.
They don't know history.
They don't know any lessons from the past.
And if you can break them away from their parents and have them affix their emotions to a revolution, they're the most brutal and terrifying of all.
They certainly were in the cancel culture extremes of the Cultural Revolution in China.
And I think that's what's scary to me is to see how these mild-mannered, typically wealthy kids and luxury campuses can say blood-curdling things so easily can affiliate with terrorist groups.
Well, we've seen that throughout time that young people are the vanguard because they can be weaponized.
And I mean, not to be rude about it, they're the dumbest people because they haven't learned.
They haven't experienced.
They haven't learned the lessons of the past.
They don't know the past.
They just know that they're the most important thing in the world.
And this feels right.
Last word to you, Heather.
Well, you know, that's an interesting question, whether this is something that we've seen throughout time.
I would say that the empowerment of young people is something relatively recent.
It's partly a function, at least in the West, of prosperity.
Capitalism became so successful in the 20th century that for the first time in human history, adolescents had spending power, power that was conferred upon them by their parents.
They didn't earn the money that they were spending, but there was enough wealth sloshing around in the culture that parents could confer credit cards or whatever on their children who then, you know, corporations spotted a new market.
Fantastic.
You know, a whole new bunch of consumers that we can sell to.
So you have the evolution of youth culture with music and television and pop stars, which became a trillion-dollar industry.
And that conferred on youth power.
Because if you have spending power in this culture, you are powerful.
But the idea that 100 years before that, that anybody would have paid attention to students, I think is very unlikely.
The great German sociologist Max Weber wrote an essay on the mission of science in universities, and he said that a college professor should never adopt an explicit political position in his classroom because the power imbalance between the professor and students was so absolute,
that is, the professor had absolute power and students had zero power vis-à-vis the professor, that they would have no capacity to disagree or engage him and they would be basically under his thumb.
So he presumed that students in a university setting were basically worthless.
They were there to absorb the professor.
It was only over the course of the 20th century when you had also the rise of consumer culture on college campuses where the students are the consumers and they're going around sticking their noses up in the air if they don't have their extra virgin olive oil tasting bar, as I've seen at Yale University.
The college dining room, they have extra virgin tasting oil, extra virgin olive oil tasting bars.
It is that resplendent in superfluous wealth that students now feel like they're entitled to set the moral and intellectual tone of a campus.
That's a very new development and it's obviously an extremely unfortunate one.
Yeah.
I will note that in every protest I've visited, Columbia, U of T, UBC, I haven't been to a campus in the UK, professors are involved.
And I think, so it's not just the foolish youth.
It's not just the cult-like youth.
I think in some cases it's professors trying to relive their own youth.
It's professors who were always about the activism, the long march through the institutions.
I see University of Toronto that the professors are saying, hey, cops, you're going to have to come through us first.
And I don't know.
I find it fascinating because as you point out, the administrations of all these universities are at least partially and somewhat significantly sympathetic and in agreement with the protesters.
We all saw the testimony of the Harvard MIT and Penn presidents in front of Congress.
It was shocking to most people, including the Congress, how captured those institutions are.
Last word to you, Heather, you've been very generous with your time.
How is this all going to end, or will it end?
It's going to end poorly because these students are going every year out into the real world, which is simply remade in the image of academia.
And they're bringing their left-wing convictions.
They're bringing their hatred of free speech.
We have the Biden administration.
Canada's really bad in shutting down free speech.
The Biden administration claiming to protect democracy by shutting down dissenting views because it's unsafe.
I mean, this is an appalling thing.
We are eating away at the very foundations of liberal democracy.
And, you know, I don't think anybody is really trying to correct these students.
The faculty are guilty not only when they're out there actually protecting the students and smashing windows with them or chanting with them, they're guilty simply in what they teach.
They have betrayed their mission of teaching students why they should be down on their knees in gratitude and awe before the greatest monuments of Western civilization.
So I think unless, for one thing, nobody should give another goddamn dime to their college alma mater, none of them deserve it.
There's maybe three in the United States who do.
And so we have to absolutely defund the universities, but we also have to take on the anti-Western hatred and start defending the West against these phony charges of white supremacy and colonial settlerism.
Well, you've said a lot there.
It's great to meet you.
I came across you from your essay called Hysterics for Hamas.
Why have young women been so prominent in the recent campus chaos published by City Journal of the Manhattan Institute?
And of course, Heather McDonald is also author of One Race Trumps Merit.
you next your letters to me James Purchase says, if this organization was listed on a stock exchange, then the info would by law be publicly available in the annual accounts.
There's no justification for a state-run company to be less transparent, the public and the shareholders, and making a very poor investment.
I think you're exactly right.
I think it's even worse than that.
I think the CEO of the CBC is being compensated as if she were the CEO of CTV or Global or some private sector outlet.
But why?
She's failing every year.
Things are going in the wrong direction every year, but she's being treated as she's some great corporate leader as opposed to a government bureaucrat.
Brad Mitchell says, Pierre has a plan for the CBC.
They best update their resumes.
Pierre Polyev has indeed repeated his call to sell, privatize whatever the CBC.
He said it so many times.
CBC Compensation Controversy00:01:11
I think he has to do it, which is sort of incredible.
Callan Vandendreischer, if I'm saying that right, says, what the hell even are these stupid degrees?
I knew what three of them meant.
You're talking about that NYU Gallatin school.
That just popped up on my feed.
You know, the algorithm thought, I am destined to see this.
I did not understand what it meant.
And a point I didn't really emphasize yesterday is these entitled kids, because they are the children of privilege who are going to $100,000 a year school.
I mean, I can't even think, that's after tax money.
They're probably graduating and saying, okay, where's my elite place in the world?
But what are you going to do with those goofy, made-up BS degrees?
Who's going to pay you six figures for, I don't even know how to describe some of that.
I mean, I guess you could get a job being a professor for more BS, but there's only room for so many professors.
I don't know.
Maybe they're just children of such wealth that they don't ever have to work.
But it's astonishing that people would pay for that.