Ezra Levant celebrates Calgary’s new 8’4” Winston Churchill statue unveiled June 6, 2024—D-Day’s 80th anniversary—contrasting it with Toronto’s removal of Sir John A. MacDonald’s monument under conservative leadership. Randolph Churchill praised his great-grandfather’s fight for freedoms, while Premier Danielle Smith and Jason Kenney highlighted Canada’s WWII contributions: 1M+ volunteers, fifth-largest naval fleet, fourth-largest air force, and Churchill’s opposition to anti-Semitism and segregation. Levant dismissed protesters as a "rent-a-mob," linking them to Gaza or climate activism, warning of vandalism amid UK attacks on historical art. The episode frames Churchill’s legacy as a bulwark against "cancelled culture" and woke erasure, defending public commemoration of leaders who shaped democracy. [Automatically generated summary]
I want you to see it with your own eyes because it's not often that a statue of Churchill gets put up.
More often, statues of great men are torn down.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, a statue of Sir Winston Churchill goes up.
It's not torn down.
It's June 6th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious thug.
Hi, everybody.
It's June 6th.
You may know that as D-Day.
June 6th, 1944 was the day that the greatest seaborne invasion in history happened, launching from the United Kingdom and attacking the shores of Normandy, France.
And thus began the liberation from the Western Front of Nazi-occupied Europe while the Red Army came in from the east.
It was an enormous invasion led by Dwight D. Eisenhower.
There were different beaches.
There were the American beaches, Omaha and Utah.
There were the British beaches, Sword, and there was the American, sorry, the Canadian beach, Juneau Beach, where Canadian troops participated side by side with the Brits and the Yanks in the liberation of France going on to liberate Europe and end the Nazi regime.
That's the anniversary today, but I don't think a lot of people even know that history because I don't think that history is taught much.
And it does feel so long ago.
And we're very forgetful.
I put it to you that most people on the street wouldn't even know what happened on 9-11, wouldn't know what date it was.
And that's only 23 years ago.
D-Day was 80 years ago today.
The reason I set the table that way is because today in Calgary, Alberta on this sunny day, the latest statue for Sir Winston Churchill was unveiled.
And to me, that's an important moment because we live in an era of tearing down and smashing statues.
I'm embarrassed to say in the city I now call home, Toronto, which is the capital of Ontario, in front of their provincial parliament is a mighty statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, the founder and first prime minister of Canada.
You can't even see it.
They put a wooden coffin around it.
They have built a wooden sarcophagus around Sir John A. MacDonald, and that is under a conservative premier.
What a disgrace across the country.
Statues being torn down.
Of course, you remember when they literally tore one down in Victoria, B.C. Why don't you just go ahead and rename the city now?
We know you're going to do it later, named after Queen Victoria.
Alberta itself was the middle name of a British royal.
So many things about our country are named after people from the past.
You certainly couldn't name anything after people from the future.
And although the past may be flawed, at the time, it was progressive.
It was an innovation for freedom and prosperity and justice.
And for people in the comfort of 2024 who luxuriate in the freedoms hard won 80 or 100 or 200 years ago to denounce the past and tear it down is not just in grateful, it's historically illiterate and it irks me badly.
So that's why I think we have to celebrate a dead white male like Sir Winston Churchill being elevated in a statue.
And I was delighted to be invited here and let me show you how it went.
Let me start with some excerpts of some of the speeches.
Of course, Sir Winston Churchill died more than half a century ago, but his great-grandson, Randolph Churchill, was here and he had some remarks.
Here's a taste of that.
Honorable Premier, honored guests, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honor to be with you in what my great-grandfather, Sir Winston, called affectionately the Great Dominion.
The words from your national anthem are poignant.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free.
And so it is.
Today is D-Day plus 80, and it's right for us to remember those Canadian heroes who won our freedoms.
In two world wars, Canadian young men, including from the Indigenous population, signed up in droves to aid the mother country.
As the late Brian Marlborooni pointed out at the dinner I attended 10 years ago at Blenheim Palace, Churchill's birthplace, he said, in World War II, from a population of only 11 million, over 1 million Canadian men and women, mostly volunteers, served in uniform.
Canada fielded the fifth largest naval fleet, the fourth largest air force in the world.
Canada suffered over 100,000 casualties, half of whom were killed in action.
D-Day was the beginning of the Allied liberation of Europe when Canadian troops would join their British and American brethren in the daring assault on Normandy beaches.
Canada did not have it easy.
This project was undertaken when the last Premier, Jason Kenney, was in office, and the current Premier, Danielle Smith, who was here today, was gracious enough to allow Jason Kenney to give some remarks.
Here's an excerpt from that.
On this day, eight decades ago, farmboys, shopkeepers' sons, proud young First Nations braves, southern Alberta Cowboys, young recent immigrants to the Northern Dominion, and so many others landed at Juneau Beach as part of the greatest ever army of freedom.
Today, we gather to remember their heroism and sacrifice.
And today, we also gather to honor permanently their extraordinary leader, without whom D-Day, the liberation of Europe, and the defeat of the Nazi menace and of fascism are unthinkable.
To honor forever here in Calgary the legacy and the memory of the great Sir Winston Churchill.
It is astonishing to think that in our own time there are some who seek to cancel the memory of this, the greatest leader of the modern era.
Those who seek to do so apparently do not understand how he stood in the breach between freedom and tyranny in a way that was Extraordinary and essential to ultimate victory.
He understood the stakes, but he understood the stakes years before others did.
If one of the virtues that was necessary at the landing on D-Day was vigilance, this man was the voice of vigilance for the free world.
Of course, Premier Danielle Smith spoke herself and she made time for the event.
Here's a look at her remarks.
It is an honor to join all of you as we mark the incredible life and legacy of Sir Winston Churchill, a remarkable man whose courageous actions and leadership changed the course of history.
And we are doing so on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, when 160,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy in the largest seaborne invasion in history.
It was a day that altered the direction of the Second World War and proved to be one of the ultimate turning points of the 20th century.
And today, 80 years after one of the great military operations, we still remember the heroes who landed up and down the shores of Normandy, who parachuted behind enemy lines, and who fought so that we can enjoy the freedoms and comforts of today.
It's quite fitting then that today we are unveiling a statue that commemorates one of the greatest leaders of all time.
Sir Winston Churchill's unwavering defense of democracy in the face of tyranny, injustice, and oppression is one of the reasons why we are free to gather here today.
He is a champion of human rights and freedoms.
He opposed anti-Semitism, fought against segregation, and fought for the fair treatment of all workers.
He firmly stood up for what he believed, and his love of freedom was a love of freedom for all.
He also loved Alberta.
Nearly a century ago, Sir Winston visited our province where he saw the potential of our energy industry and fell in love with the beauty of the Rocky Mountains.
He carried that beauty in his heart, memorializing the Rockies through his many watercolor paintings.
And today, through that art, we, through art as well, we memorialize him with this bronze statue that is like he was larger than life.
Why We Tore Down Statues00:02:06
I mentioned before that we live in an era of canceled culture where people tear down the past.
Even if you disagree with certain elements of the past, should you not learn from them?
I mean, I can only imagine the horrific things that the pharaohs did, and yet we don't raise to the ground the pyramids.
If you think they're bad, you know what happened on the pyramids in Central and South America.
They literally had human sacrifices on those pyramids, but the Mexicans and other Latin Americans would never in a second talk about detonating their history.
At least learn from it, at most celebrate it.
But to erase it and destroy it, that's a uniquely woke Western self-loathing.
You know, I think of slavery, which is the alleged cause of so much of wokeism.
I recently was reminded by Christopher Hitchens in an old video, the late Chris Hitchens, that 400,000 black people from Africa were sent as slaves to North America, 99% of them to the United States.
1.5 million Europeans and Americans were captured and sold into slavery.
Here's a little reminder of that from Hitchens, a man of the left.
In 1788, when the United States was barely a country, it was having its sailors taken as slaves by the Barbary states, the states of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa.
Tripoli.
Tripoli.
Shores of Tripoli.
The shores of Tripoli.
And its people, its ships stopped, its crews carried off into slavery.
We estimate one and a half million European and American slaves taken between 1750 and 1815.
Jefferson and Adams went to their ambassador in London and said, why do you do this to us?
The United States has never had a quarrel with the Muslim world of any kind.
We weren't in the Crusades.
We weren't in the war in Spain.
Why do you do this to our people in our ships?
Why do you plunder and enslave our people?
And the ambassador said very plainly, Mr. Abdulrahman, said, because the Quran gives us permission to do so, because you are infidels.
And that's our answer.
And Jefferson said, well, in that case, I will send a navy which will crush your state, which he did.
Masked Sounds Suspicious00:12:25
And a good thing.
But Islamic fundamentalism is not created by American democracy.
It's a lie to say so.
It's a masochistic lie.
And it excuses those who are the real criminals, and it blames us for the attacks made upon us.
Yeah, I don't know why the West is tearing down its statues while statues around the world of horrific and bloody tyrants remain up.
I mean, it's do you think that Genghis Khan and the great horsemen of his tribes, they don't destroy them, even though he killed in percentage terms as many as Hitler or Stalin.
I despise the tearing down of statues, and that's why I was delighted to see the unveiling today.
Take a look at this.
This is the moment where they took off the veil.
And the veil on the statue, by the way, was a parachute.
How fitting for D-Day?
Take a look at this.
They will know better than I how to take down the...
This is a parachute, by the way, so very symbolic.
A parachute.
So well, that's
a very interesting looking statue.
And I had a moment with the sculptor himself, who has a personal story here.
Take a look at that.
Well, today's a big day, the unveiling of the statue.
It's tremendous.
Tell us about the project.
How long have you been working on it?
Four years.
Four years.
Wow.
Hallelujah.
And are you Canadian?
Where are you from?
Yeah, I was born in Edmonton.
And tell me what attracted you to this project, and what research did you do into Winston Churchill?
Well, I tried to find every image of him available.
And I culled the lot and made copies of the ones that were informative.
And that is, I needed to understand what his head was shaped like from every direction.
So a lot of those are just marginal photographs in archives, but they're, for me, a treasure trove.
You know, sort of glancing views from the side.
You know, how is a person's head shaped, really?
You know, every head is very unique, and I had to capture that intensely.
And what scale is that?
How tall is the actual statue?
It's eight foot four.
It's somewhat larger than one and a half life size.
Wow.
I'd like to ask you a cultural question that I put to Randolph Churchill a moment ago, which is, I believe we're in an era where we're tearing down our history.
We're canceling our history.
We're renaming institutions.
We're even tearing down statues.
And yet here we are putting up a statue to someone that the left would call a dead white male, a warmonger.
They would call him these things.
In fact, there are a few protesters here saying that.
What's the importance of remembering the past?
What's the importance of not canceling the past?
Well, for me, I wouldn't be here if the war hadn't been won.
So there's no possible victory, there was no possible victory without Winston Churchill.
I think the entire past should be comprehended and assessed.
We need to come to terms with the past as it was and direct us in the future.
I caught up with Randolph Churchill, the great-grandson of Sir Winston Churchill himself.
He was very proper and very gracious to everybody.
He just had that class and style to him.
Here's his words to me.
Thank you very much.
So good.
You've all come today and magnificent.
What do you think of the statue itself?
It's quite impressive.
It's bold.
I love it because it shows the man of action.
And Churchill was a man of action.
And to unveil it today on the 80th anniversary, that we celebrate those brave young Canadian men who stormed ashore to give us our freedoms and liberties.
It's absolutely thrilling.
Now, you can feel the energy in the statue.
It's in a fantastic place in the McDougall Center.
And no, I'm very, very proud of this and a great turnout today.
Thank you.
I'd like to ask you one last question.
And I don't mean to be political.
It's more a cultural question.
We live in an era where statues are being torn down, where the past is being erased or cancelled.
And I feel like today is a resistance to that trend, where we celebrate the past.
Do you have any thoughts on the global trend of tearing down our history and the self-denunciation that's happening in the West, both in the UK and here in North America?
We've all got to remember those people that gave their lives so we could have our freedoms.
And the great thing about our freedoms is we're allowed and people are allowed to demonstrate and make their points of view known with dignity and they can do it.
In the totalitarian states, there's no right to demonstrate.
There's no chance of having your views heard or listened to.
And my thing, which I'm passionate about, is people understand the history.
They learn the facts.
They learn the context.
And in terms of education, to enable young people to form their own skills and their own views, that's what makes a great society.
And there's great spirit in Canada, and it's thrilling to be here.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
Last question, if I can sneak one more in.
Can you tell us just a tiny bit more about yourself?
Do you go around the world celebrating the history of your great-grandfather or are you a private citizen most of the time?
Give us just one minute on yourself.
The great thing is I'm a private citizen.
We've all got to get on and contribute to society.
So it thrills me to do these sorts of things from time to time for the Churchill Legacy.
And when you see those veterans on the beaches of Normandy, you know, not one of us cannot shed a tear for what they did and how they served and how selfless those people were.
So in my life, I love to celebrate these remarkable heroes that came ashore and gave us our freedoms.
Well, shortly after this all happened, when all the dignitaries were taking pictures in front of the statue, wouldn't you know it?
Some woke leftists came down to have a protest.
Now, police stopped them from interfering with any of the VIPs.
I went up to them just to introduce myself because I'm a friendly kind of fella, and they really didn't have a lot to say.
I will give them credit.
Some of them were not wearing masks.
I come from Toronto where every thug wears a mask.
They love it.
They wear a mask either because they're still living the COVID dream, but mainly to hide their identity.
I don't want to overemphasize these folks, but the fact that they're there proves my whole point, that they would rather tear down history than learn from it.
They would rather destroy statues than erect them.
Here's my attempt to chit-chat with them.
It didn't go very far, but I think that's because they really don't know why they're there other than it's the protest du jour.
They were probably up at the Gaza encampment a few weeks ago.
They probably go to all the climate protests, and this was just their project for the day.
They didn't know what was on their sides, signs.
They couldn't back it up.
They were just there to, well, I don't know, collect a check.
They wouldn't tell me.
Take a look.
Are you guys going to try and take down the statue or deface it or something?
I'm just hanging out in the park, buddy.
Well, but you're denouncing Churchill.
Do you have any plans to vandalize the statue?
I'm just hanging out in the park, buddy.
So who are you and why did you come here?
I like hanging out in the park.
Sounds like you don't really have a lot to say.
Do you know why you're here?
No, I'm rarely confused right now, buddy.
How about you?
Why are you here?
I'm just hanging out in a public park.
It sounds like you aren't very articulate.
Did someone tell you what to put on your sign?
I'm just chilling in the park.
I'm allowed to do this.
What's your name, and why are you here today?
To make fun of you and make you look like an asshole.
Now, how are you doing that?
How are you making fun of me and how are you making me look like an asshole?
By just making you talk.
You're natural at it.
Well, you're covering your eyes with reflective sunglasses.
You're covering your face.
It sounds like you've got something to hide.
Why won't you show your face?
I won't be embarrassed by being seen talking to you.
Well, you had your mask and sunglasses on before I even came over.
I think you're ashamed of yourself.
Yeah, I mean, I knew you were going to be here.
How did you know that?
Well, your losers are always at things like this.
You know, you're the guy wearing the mask in 2024.
It's a bit rich having you call anyone a loser.
And who told you to be here today?
I'm just hanging out in a park now.
Are you with any organization?
Just a regular person.
It sounds like you're sort of ashamed of yourself if you're not saying who you are or why you're here.
Like, it sounds like you're maybe a little embarrassed.
I'm impressed that you're not wearing a mask.
That's new.
Yep.
How about yourself?
What's your name?
I'll speak to real media, but not you.
Sounds like you're ashamed of yourself if you won't even put your name to what you're doing.
I mean, are you not proud of what you're doing?
I don't make content for Rebel News.
Well, you're here at a protest, I presume, so you want to send a message.
I don't think you even made your own sign, did you?
No, this third grade handwriting is mine.
That, I believe.
Who are you with?
What group are you with?
Did you make your own sign?
I made it with your mom.
I don't think you did, but it sounds like you're not really proud of yourself.
You don't really have anything to say.
You don't know what to say.
Do you need like a spokesman or something?
I mean, yeah, I guess I don't really know because I was hanging out with your mom earlier and it takes up all my time.
All right, man.
I think you've shown that you really, you're like a rent-a-mob.
You pick up a sign that someone gave you.
You have nothing to say.
You're hiding your face.
I think you are an excellent representative of your side, whatever that is.
Later, Geroni.
Okay.
How come you're covering your face too?
Oh, now you're hiding your face altogether.
I think you're ashamed of yourself, aren't you?
Don't follow you.
Why, is that interfering with your space or something?
Not sure if I said hi to you.
I'll give you a half marks for not wearing a mask.
I mean, it is 2024 and all, but how come you're sort of hiding your face from the camera?
Are you ashamed of yourself?
What's your name?
Why are you here?
Do you know why you're here?
Who made the sign for you?
Because I don't think you made it.
You don't really know why you're here?
Did someone pay you to be here?
Are you having some you're shaking?
What's that?
Are you nervous?
No, you're not nervous.
Are you mute?
Why don't you?
I mean, you're here to protest, but you're not saying anything.
It seems to me like you just are a rental mob that'll, you know, next week it'll be Gaza.
The week after that, it'll be climate.
Like you really, it seems like you really don't know what you're doing here.
Now you're wiggling your eyebrows at me.
Looks like you're shaking a little bit.
I will give you marks for not wearing a mask, though, because most of your tribe does.
So that's my day in sunny Calgary this June 6th, the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
Defacing Priceless Artwork00:00:50
I came out here because I wanted to be there when a Churchill statue was actually put up rather than when a statue of a great man was torn down.
I am slightly worried that this statue will be vandalized either by the handful of protesters who are here today or by Gaza protesters or climate protesters.
You know it's coming.
I mean, just the other day, I saw someone attack, I think it was the Mona Lisa, or there was some gorgeous painting in Europe that was smeared on.
That's a real tactic they have in the UK, defacing artwork, priceless artwork, if you can believe it.
I have a terrible prediction that that kind of vandalism will target this statue, but it looks like a fairly sturdy statue.