Ezra LeVant and David Freiheit (Viva Frei) compare Florida’s personal liberties to Canada’s heavy-handed government control, like Quebec’s mandatory activity registrations and COVID-19 restrictions, while criticizing bureaucratic overreach—such as the CRA denying Rebel News journalism status or Elections Canada convicting LeVant’s book. They highlight U.S. Supreme Court rulings limiting executive power, including Trump’s immunity victory, but warn it leaves loopholes for future harassment, like reclassifying payments as "private." The prolonged legal battles, including New York and Georgia cases, strain public trust, while global conservative movements—from Marine Le Pen in France to Polyev’s potential Canadian leadership—signal resistance against authoritarian trends. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh boy, we got a smart guest today, one of my favorite freedom fighters, Viva Fry, real name David Fryheit.
He is going to take us through three important U.S. Supreme Court cases.
Well, why would you care about that if you're a Canadian?
Well, it shows the difference between a freedom-loving country like America and our own slow slouch towards authoritarianism, but also gives a flicker of hope.
I'm really excited about this.
Viva Fry is ahead.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Do it for the video side, but also do it knowing you're supporting Rebel News.
We don't take any money from the government and its shows.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
All right, here's our show today.
Tonight, catching up with Viva Frye, the freedom-oriented legal observer and a friend of the show.
It's July 3rd, and this is The Ezra LeVant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
One of the things that Rebel News is known for is our proximity to lawyers.
We fight for things in the court of law, not just the court of public opinion.
And it's a strange thing because, of course, we are journalists, but quite often we find we need to fight for our right to do journalism before we can do the journalism itself.
As you know, during the lockdowns, we also were involved with crowdfunding a new civil liberties charity in Canada called the Democracy Fund that represented 3,000 people, ranging from Arthur Pavlovsky and Tamara Leach to ordinary people getting tickets for not filling out their ArriveCan app.
Insurance Issues in Florida00:11:58
I guess my point is, maybe it's because of my own background as a former lawyer or just my interest in the law or my belief that there is something above the squalid politics of our day-to-day.
I still do believe in our legal system.
I know some people think that's foolish and naive, but I think there's still hope out there.
And there are still some judges who are, as the Lady Justice statue is, blind, wearing a blindfold, and who will rule on matters regardless of who the powerful or powerless are in the court.
It's one of the reasons I like Viva Fry, otherwise known as David Freiheit, a freedom-oriented lawyer-turned podcaster.
And we're delighted to have him with us today for the whole show.
David, great to see you.
Thanks very much for making the time for us.
Ezra, thank you for having me.
I'm sure everyone knows I've come back behind the iron curtain for the month of July.
And it's a different world stepping back into Canada from the free state of Florida.
That's right.
I mean, you have you're normally these days based in Florida, which I think has got to be one of the freest states in the Union.
And you've come back to Canada.
Just give me a minute on that.
Florida, Ron DeSantis, he challenged Donald Trump and didn't fare well.
But I think he's, I think, frankly, his place is to be the best governor in America.
Compare that to Canada in general and Quebec and Montreal in particular.
Tell me some of your observations coming back from exile.
Well, so it's true.
There are pros and cons about living anywhere.
Florida has its pros, it has its cons.
Some of the cons are, you know, health insurance, car insurance, home insurance.
Insurance issue is something of a problem in Florida.
I mean, everybody can admit it.
There's some places where there's some crime as well, and everybody recognizes that.
Politically speaking, however, it's a different world than stepping back into Canada, or at least in Quebec in particular.
Freedom has a price to some extent.
And living in Florida, you see what it's like to live not shackled by a government, not totally oppressed by a government.
You might be somewhat oppressed by the federal government.
It certainly exerts its power over the states in America, but there is far more of a respect for state rights in Canada than there is a respect for provincial rights by the federal government in Canada.
I might have said the U.S. there.
But it's a different world.
Ron DeSantis, you know, did not succeed what he wanted to succeed at in running for president.
Some people take it as an insult to say he's a good governor.
He should stay governor, fill out his term there, and should have run in 2020.
What year are we going to be?
2028.
Bottom line, he's a good, he's a great governor, despite what the, I'm going to say the fake news in Canada would have you believe.
It's, you know, they try to refer to Florida as a bigoted, racist, homophobic state where the freaking government here issues travel warnings to the 2S LGBTQIA plus community not to go to Florida as if they've never been to Miami, the most multicultural, I would say, LGB friendly community anywhere on earth.
So it gets its demonizing.
DeSantis has been a great governor by and large.
But no, just coming back here, it's a different world.
It's a world where people walk around thinking they need to ask for permission to leave their house as opposed to having been born with God-given rights to do what they want, save and except for where the government needs to exert its force and influence.
And one of the interesting issues, and I know you're fairly libertarian.
I'll let you describe yourself, but I think you love liberty, is one of the functions that we give to the state.
I guess it's the Hobbesian social contract is we give the state the right to use violence to keep us safe so it's not a war of all against all.
I'm using old-fashioned phrases here, but I guess what I mean is there are some things where I think you sort of want the state, like to stop shoplifting, to shots, to stop crime.
Toronto has an extreme crime wave.
I know it's also in Montreal and Vancouver.
Auto theft, home invasions.
Those are the things you actually want the police and the government to stop.
Whereas in other states, like say California and San Francisco in particular, police don't even react if it's shoplifting under $950.
It's a weird rule.
So that's something where Florida is free, but where the state ought to lawfully exert its power, it does.
I'm not saying it's crime-free, but I think the woke defund police from doing their policing work.
That has gone nowhere in Florida.
In fact, he's sort of praising police, isn't he?
But making sure they're not woke.
For sure.
And the funny thing is, the irony is when you don't defund the police and you let the police do their job, not with impunity, but with confidence that they'll be supported by the people and the government, they do their job better.
Like there isn't, as far as I can tell, really the same resentment towards the police in Florida or the fear of the police in Florida as in other states.
And so look, every, there's definitely pockets of less safe areas of Florida.
But by and large, it is not a live and let live, but it's the police are sort of on the side of the people as opposed to the guardians and the tyrants over the people for and on behalf of the government compared to what you see here.
The idea, I mean, I'm going to go back to the trauma that we've all experienced through COVID, but the idea that you would have police breaking up parties in people's homes, pepper spraying people for not wearing masks, it's somewhat foreign to the zeitgeist of Florida.
And so with freedom comes a certain bit of risk, but with prison comes a guaranteed degree of certainty.
And it's just like it's a different culture.
It's a different spirit of the state of Florida compared to other states in America, but certainly the state of Florida as compared to Canada.
There are, I would say, Floridian spirits in Canada, but by and large, you come back here and you realize that people want to be told what to do.
They want the government to dictate their lives so that if and when mistakes happen, well, they don't get to blame it on themselves.
It's the government.
If things go to hell, it's the government's fault.
And it's never the individual's fault or responsibility because they've abdicated all.
They've abdicated all responsibility to the government, who will invariably screw things up more than the individual would if they had their own way.
You know, I know that people in Vancouver and Calgary, when they go on a holiday, I know Calgary because I'm from there originally, a lot of them go down to Phoenix, Arizona.
And in Montreal, a lot of folks, when they go on winter holiday, if they can, they go down to Florida.
In fact, walking around Florida, you can often hear French accents.
And I'm not just talking about people from Haiti.
There's a lot of Quebecers down there.
And it's my observation that a lot of people who had the means and the ability to work from Florida just went down there to escape most of the lockdowns, but also the political class, the political class that locked down Montreal so hard, including with curfews.
Whether you were jabbed or not, they had curfews.
That same ruling class then skedaddled down to Florida for their own personal freedom.
So they ruled over Quebec with a brute force, but then they themselves chose the lifestyle of Miami and Florida when they went on.
Like it was, it's quite something.
And this is one of the things that infuriated Albertans when they saw Jason Kenney's staff flying around on holidays when he was ordering everybody not to.
It's that even the locker downers don't actually believe in it other than for the little people.
That's a crazy quirk about Quebec and Florida, isn't it?
Well, it is.
It's the hypocrisy of government is that, I mean, I would say by and large, they understand that they don't actually believe in the rules and the rules are totally unscientific and totally idiotic to begin with.
It's a means of control.
And I mean, the names of politicians, media types that went to vacation in Florida or elsewhere, St. Bart's, I forget who the liberal guy was who pre-recorded a video from Canada saying, we've got to celebrate Christmas.
Right.
I always forget his name, but I'm probably better off forgetting it.
Pre-records a video saying we've got to celebrate Christmas differently this year while he's in St. Bart's.
There was a famous Quebec radio guy.
They all go to Florida.
AOC, Eric Adams, they all go down to the state because they love it, but they love bashing it.
And it's, I don't know, it's hypocrisy.
It is only a means of gaining control over people and retaining that control.
And, you know, it's not without its flaws.
Health insurance costs out the wazoo in Florida.
Home insurance, because of issues, costs a lot in Florida.
But at some point, you have to take the pros with the cons and make a decision as to what is the place in which you want to live.
Ezra, I was up in the Laurentian Mountains five days ago and I hit a hiking trail.
And the first thing I see is I'm getting beautiful green scenery, a big yellow red sign that says in French, you must register online.
And there's a QR code.
And I'm like, this might exist elsewhere.
Maybe I'm a little bit cynical and angry at my home country that has turned into an open-air prison, but I got to register before I go on a hiking trail.
I mean, that's it.
Even brought my phone.
It's wild, but you step back into Canada and you really feel the oppressive, full control that the government is trying to exert over everybody in all aspects of life.
It's like taxing you up the wazoo so that you effectively are working for the government.
You're reliant on the government for all essential services that are failed.
They're not even able to provide traffic-free roads.
I had a map, you know, the image of the map of Montreal.
And it was like, it was a heart attack.
It looked like you have the red arteries everywhere around the heart of Montreal.
And I was like, oh my goodness, if this were a heart, it would be indicative of a heart attack.
And we're witnessing like an effective heart attack of construction, crippling infrastructure.
I'm at a Tim Hortons listening to the two people in front of me complain about how they were waiting for six hours in the ER.
And one guy's saying, Yeah, I got to wait for two or three or four years for elective surgery for something.
But if I have the stroke because I don't get the elective surgery, well, then they'll treat me right away if I can get it.
So it's just like you see it in the starkest contrast when you come back and you get to compare it to where you've been.
And I feel bad having these feelings, but it's like I come back to Canada and it sincerely feels like a failed country.
And my sorrow is that there are many people who say, Viva, you got out just in time and we can't do it for X, Y, and Z reasons, which I totally understand.
I just have a tremendous amount of sorrow coming back here.
And it's like returning to the scene of a crime where it's like sort of sitting shibba.
You come back and you see people mourning the death of their country that was once free and beautiful.
And now it's the symbol of international tyranny.
Well, hopefully it can be fixed.
I observe a trend around the world, whether it's El Salvador, Argentina, the Reform Party in the UK, Marine Le Pen in France, Alternative for Deutschland in Germany, Viktor Orban in Hungary.
I see in some places the pendulum swinging back.
I mean, I just saw a new poll in the United States that suggests Donald Trump will be restored.
So I think that not everyone's going quietly.
You know, you said so many interesting things there.
I just got to say some of my reactions.
And then I want to move on to a few court cases that I want to ask you about because I know that you're a lawyer as well.
And so you follow these cases.
My first thought was when you talked about that hiking, and I saw your tweet of that sign, is they're asking you nicely to register, but it wouldn't surprise me if a few years from now they just automatically track you with the GPS in your phone.
And we know that the government did that during the lockdowns, that they got the cell phone companies to give them the data of where people were.
Remembering The Judge's Court Cases00:03:21
You mentioned the MP who recorded his winter greetings, even though he was in the Caribbean.
I don't know if you know this, David, but there was a judge, an Ontario judge, who went down there and was holding court cases on video.
You know, a lot of courts were done over.
He was in the Caribbean.
I don't know if you remember that story.
No, but it's like it's straight out of the Simpsons when Mayor Quimby is on, you know, he's giving a press conference and the guy with the steel drum comes from behind him when he's on the kitchen.
It's out of a cartoon.
But the QR code, Ezra, it's only a matter of time before they track you automatically.
They're doing that already.
But it's just, we are, if I didn't even check to see if the rules, if there's a fine for not registering, it's controlling every aspect of your life and imposing these disguise taxes.
Oh, you didn't register with the QR code?
$150 ticket.
We're there.
You know, let me, you made me think of one last thing, and I just want to show it.
I haven't shown this video in three years, but it was the video that really put the fear into me.
This is a video going from memory, I think, is Trois Riviere, where there was a party in a house, police came to the front door and were pulling, pulling people out of the house.
And there were people in the house pulling them back in.
There was literally physic, without a search warrant, without a crime being committed, the police were physically pulling people out of the house because allegedly it was violation of.
I don't know if you recall that video.
I remember that.
I remember the guy getting a ticket for eating a muffin in his car at a Tim Horse.
I remember the guy in Montreal?
Yeah.
New Brunswick, the guy in Montreal getting pepper sprayed because he wasn't wearing a mask.
I mean, what's amazing is that some.
It's for his health.
It's for his health, David.
You have to understand.
We have to spray him in his face with pepper spray for his health.
Because of a respiratory illness.
It's Robert.
Robert, sorry, Robert, I'm a force of habit with Robert Barnes.
Nobody, like, some police forces revealed themselves as being petty tyrants looking for an excuse, and others revealed themselves as the heroes behind the badge.
No, we're not doing that.
I don't care what the government says.
We're not doing that.
We're free.
All right.
Well, listen, you and I both cared a lot about the lockdowns.
And in that way, you and I were a very small minority because most of the regime media were either silent or cheering on the lockdowns.
And I remember very clearly February 14, 15, 16, 2022, when the Emergencies Act was deployed.
The general reaction from the regime media was, what?
You're not going harder.
You're only seizing some bank accounts.
You're not throwing people in jail by the hundred.
Like all these journalists who for decades said they cared so much about the Charter of Rights, they were egging Trudeau on to go harder.
I'll never forget that.
Deference To Administrative Tribunals00:15:07
And I'll never let them again take the moral high ground when they say they believe in the Charter.
But listen, David, I want to move on from things about the lockdown, although it's a very important thing and we should never forget it.
There are other battles, current battles, future battles.
And one of the things I look up to you for is that you analyze court cases.
Now, there's a few court cases in the States that I've seen out of the corner of my eye, and I have a very shallow understanding of.
And I'm not asking you to go really deep.
And remember, most of our viewers are interested, smart, but they're not legal experts.
So with our viewership in mind, can you help explain some of the recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings?
I know you do that on your show with the great lawyer Robert Barnes.
Help us understand what just happened a couple of days ago with the Supreme Court ruling about Donald Trump, because I see apoplexy amongst the Canadian commentariat, but I know they haven't read the case.
And I know that they're against Trump.
Give us what happened the other day in the Supreme Court about Donald Trump?
Well, we'll get to the, I'll do the immunity third.
We'll skip over the less interesting ones first.
There was the SCOTUS decision on what they called the chevron.
SCOTUS, that's Supreme Court of the United States.
Supreme Court of the United States.
So we got it.
The acronyms are everything.
You got the Mojag in Canada, Minister of Justice and Attorney General.
Yes, SCOTA, Supreme Court of the United States.
They issued their final rulings for the session.
And there were three big ones that people were waiting on.
One is big for administrative law, which was overturning what is referred to as the Chevron doctrine.
And this is when I say like the states I see going in a separate direction from Canada.
In Canada, I see continued and more and more doubling down on deference to administrative tribunals, giving them the power because they're specialty tribunals to make their laws, interpret their laws, adjudicate on their own laws.
And you have an administrative state run amok.
So let me pause for one second.
And I'm sorry to interrupt you.
I just, you mean all the agencies, boards, commissions, little bureaucracies that aren't real courts, but have the power, of course.
That's what you mean.
Everything from the liquor board to the IRS to the CPU.
To the human rights.
Yeah, human rights.
There are hundreds of these boards and commissions, some with a very small focus, some with a very wide one.
So that's what you mean by administrative law, right?
Yes.
In the administrative state, where you have these tribunals that are not court systems run by judges who are not appointed judges, and they have more power than anybody can really appreciate.
In Canada, you say, like, how did you get a human rights tribunal to order a restaurant in British Columbia to pay $40,000 to a transgender employee that was misgendered?
Well, it's because you have these administrative tribunals.
The court system shows deference to them because they're specialty tribunals.
And who's the court to get involved in these tribunals that were created under statute?
And so while in Canada, you have increasing deference that is afforded to these administrative tribunals.
In the States, you have now an absolute pushback and a pullaway from it.
The Chevron doctrine was deference to administrative tribunals to administer and interpret their own laws with minimal court intervention.
I'm very, very much oversimplifying it, but this is what's the big takeaway.
Supreme Court comes in and says, no, we're reversing the Chevron doctrine.
The courts are going to be able to get involved and basically ensure that these administrative tribunals are not running totally, not lawlessly, but rather autonomously.
And so hitherto or prior to this, there had been deference to the administrative tribunals' interpretation of their own rules as they administered them.
And now they basically say, no, that doctrine is overturned.
The courts can get involved and make sure that what they're doing is actually lawful and judicious.
That was the chevron, more or less interesting, but some people might be interested in it.
Well, the other big one.
And that's not very sexy.
Even the word administrative law, I'm half asleep before you even finish that two-word phrase.
But that is actually, I mean, just think about, for example, Canada, they're talking about bringing in a plastics registry.
Not even kidding.
So who's going to run that?
Who's going to make rulings over that?
Not a court.
They'll probably have a little appointed board or commission, and they're going to make insane rulings.
And in the States, this new Supreme Court doctrine would say you can't go totally wacko.
You have to follow some rules of law.
Whereas in Canada, that's how they're going to get you.
They're going to get you with these boards and tribunals you've never heard of and you can't fight back against.
The newest one there, the Online Streaming Act, when they say, well, how's this going to be?
They ask the government, how's it going to be implemented?
And they say, we don't know.
The CRTC, the body that interprets, hasn't issued its directives yet.
Great example.
It's like, who's running the country, the government or these administrative bodies?
And in the States, they basically say, look, there's going to be judicial oversight, and you don't get to enact your own rules, interpret your own rules, and apply your own rules.
So give me 30 more seconds on this.
I mean, I'm just thinking the way you phrase that about the CRTC.
Rebel News has been denied official journalism status by the CRA.
My book, The Libranos, was convicted by Elections Canada.
We had to fight twice against the debates commission to get in.
So four battles involving freedom of speech weren't in a real court.
We were not prosecuted.
It was Trudeau's hand-picked, busybody, fake, not they weren't actually even judges.
Four times, our freedoms were censored by the administrative state.
Those were not real courts.
Now, we went to real court to overturn some of those.
Sorry, I'm just when you mentioned the CRTC, it just a light bulb went on.
That's how they're getting us.
Well, absolutely.
And it's the most concrete example where they ask, who is the online streaming act going to apply to?
Is it going to apply to individual creators?
Well, we don't know.
The CRTC will decide when they issue their direct.
How does the government pass a law and not tell you who that law is going to apply to?
We'll let the administrative body, and why would the administrative body want to limit their own power?
They'll say, hell no, it applies to everybody.
And then the government's like, well, what can we do?
That's their decision, not ours, although we pass the law.
That's how it goes nuts.
And so in the states, you have the reversal of the Chevron doctrine, which I tell you, it shows a shift in the zeitgeist of two different countries.
Canada wants more of the full control, and America says, no, no, we're going to pull away from the administrative state.
Chevron.
The other great one was the obstruction charges in the January 6th cases, which indirectly impacts Trump as well.
That was the big one that we were waiting on.
A number of the Jan 6ers were charged with and convicted under an interpretation of the obstruction witness intimidation statute, which by all accounts, anybody who has half a legal mind knew was not what this law was intended to do.
It was obstruction, destruction of tampering with evidence for the purposes of impeding government proceedings.
It was an Enron era piece of legislation that intended to punish the Enron execs who destroyed evidence in their possession before the subpoenas came because they knew they were coming.
They say, oh, crap, there was nothing that prohibited you from doing that.
So we issued this law that says if you tamper with, obstruct government proceedings, well, then it's a charge under 1512 and it was subsection C2.
The issue there was they were charging the Jan 6ers with obstruction of congressional hearings under that statute for merely protesting.
And everybody's like, no, that's not what Section 2 was supposed to say when it says or otherwise obstructs a congressional, a government proceeding.
The otherwise wasn't a catch-all to apply to everything even as innocuous as constitutionally protected protest.
And lower courts disregarded it.
And the Supreme Court came and said, no, this was never the intention of the statute.
If otherwise includes any and all behavior, then the first subsection, which specifies methods of tampering with evidence, is rendered moot, you know, non-existent.
And canons of interpretation are a legislator doesn't enact a legislation to say nothing, which is effectively what the sub-paragraph one would have said if the sub-paragraph two consumes it and everything else.
I hope that's clear enough.
But the bottom line, the Supreme Court said, all of these felony charges for obstruction for merely the act of protesting is not what was intended by otherwise obstructing or tampering with evidence.
Well, let me jump in there because basically they, I mean, most of the people that day on January 6th were peaceful protesters.
Some of them smashed windows to get in.
Some of them did some minor acts of mischief or vandalism.
To call it a riot, I think, is overstating it.
My friend Gavin McInnes calls it the great meandering.
But to find felonies and to jail people for years there shows such an overstretch.
And here's what caught my eye.
And you tell me if I read this wrong.
One of the judges that sided with the majority against this extreme interpretation of the criminal law was a Biden appointee who, on the face of it, is ultra-liberal, even woke.
I think her name is Justice Katangi, a black woman leftist who, correct me if I'm wrong, she sided with the conservative majority because she knows what goes around comes around.
And if the government can way over prosecute and overjail people who are protesters by finding some legal trickery, that's going to happen to Democrats too, just as it happened to Republicans.
Did I get that right?
You got that right.
It's KBJ or KJB.
I forget, I always said it's Katangi Brown Jackson.
She's the Supreme Court nominee, the Biden pick, who infamously could not define what a woman is because she's not a biologist.
And that, you know, and there's a number of issues with her.
She was trivialized and nominalized and basically reduced to an ethnicity because Biden says we need a black woman.
So I'm going to pick one.
And, you know, qualified or not, that's her legacy and how she got appointed to the Supreme Court.
But she sided with the majority.
And oddly enough, Amy Coney Barrett sided with the dissenting minority saying, well, that's what the government, that's what the statute reads.
And it's not us.
It's not up to us to limit the powers of the executive.
But no, Katangi Brown Jackson is 100% right in law.
In reality, they just don't prosecute lefty protesters the way they prosecute righty protesters because everyone who protested Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings would have been arrested, could have been charged under that statute under that ludicrous interpretation of it.
Everyone who protested trans laws in, I forget what state, gun laws, I mean, they would be charged under this insane interpretation.
So she got it right.
They got it right.
I mean, bottom line, the first section says tampering, altering, or impairing evidence for the purposes of, you know, to impede a congressional hearing or otherwise obstruction section two.
Well, if the or otherwise includes everything and anything, including subparagraph one, as the majority said, it consumes subparagraph one.
And that interpretation renders a piece of legislation meaningless.
You know, you say that when you mention that freedom-oriented, conservative-oriented, republic-oriented prosecutors generally don't go nuts like this.
Like, I can't think of the opposite of January 6th.
I can't think of where hundreds of people were scooped up for for nonviolent protests.
In fact, we see violent protests from Antifa, from Black Lives Matter.
I mean, the summer of 2000, of 2020, rather, the country was ablaze.
And those were actual crimes, actual violent crimes.
And there were no mass prosecutions, even in conservative jurisdictions.
Anyway, I'm glad that Katangi Jackson Brown, if I got her name right, was on the right side of that.
Well, you see, I think the conservatives, the argument would be that the conservatives might have implemented something along those lines with the Patriot Act and the secret courts following 9-11 and maybe learned a little bit of the abuses of government and why the Patriot Act was a grotesque piece of legislation.
And so there's sort of been a shift now.
The other dynamic shift is that the party that's in power implements and enforces laws different than the party that's not in power.
So I said, it's sort of analogous to free speech.
Everybody loves free speech until they're in a position of power and other people use that free speech to challenge them.
So Democrats are in full power.
They control the media.
They control the deep state apparatus.
So they're going to abuse the law in a way that Republicans won't because they're not in power.
And I hope that they don't ever abuse the law like the Democrats have done if and when they ascend to power.
It should be righteous application of the law and not vengeful politicized application.
But that interpretation of the obstruction charge was a way of felonizing, criminalizing a swath of protesters who were nothing but peaceful meanderers.
You know, every once in a while, I see someone, a pundit, say something really funny, and it goes like this.
When Trudeau gives power or cash to hand out to journalists, like this $100 million a year Google slush fund that Google pays basically a shakedown tax to the government of Canada and it's divvied up amongst media companies or the debates commission that chooses who can or can't go.
Every once in a while, someone says, if you're happy with this now, how, and this is the joke and it makes me smile every time, how happy will you be when Ezra Levant is appointed as Pierre Polyev's boss of the Debates Commission or hander outer of federal cash?
Now, obviously, it would never happen, but the point they're trying to make is if you're fine with far left-wing partisans choosing who has freedom or not, who has money or not, you better be ready for, if a conservative appoints someone just as prickly.
Now, obviously, I would not be appointed and I most likely would not accept such an appointment.
But you've got, you know, another way of saying is that what comes around goes around.
Or as they would say in Latin, stare a decisis, stand by the president.
So, people who say, I'm going to use the law to get my enemies, well, you better hope you maintain the whip hand because if tides turn, your enemies will have those powers.
But that is the issue.
And then it does result in a doubling down and a tripling down of ensuring that now that I've abused my adversaries so much, if they're especially angry and if they ever get power, they're going to be even worse on me.
So, I've got to make sure to actually suppress them and crush whatever life they have left in them.
That's what we're sort of witnessing right now with the Trump persecution.
You are so right, which is going to bring us into the last one.
But no, it's like they know that they have been unfair, they've been unjust, they've been unlawful, and they're so fearful of even the most minor of stabilizing of the system that they know they cannot let their adversaries get into power now because of all the wrong that they've done.
Imagine the Jan 6 Committee, imagine if we had an actual bipartisan investigative committee investigating the January 6th Committee.
They would go to jail for actual obstruction, for actual destruction of documents, actual destruction of evidence after their hearing to impair further investigations.
Merrick Garland would actually, you know, potentially be looking at impeachment and other sanctions for his weaponizing of his attorney general.
Uh, the other guy there, Alejandro Mayorkas, the uh, the borders arc, he would arguably be facing uh consequences for dereliction of duty and facilitating the invasion of his country.
Impeachment and Beyond00:06:45
And so, what they have to do now, they have to try to like smite whatever breath of life is remaining, and they're trying to do it by keeping Trump out of office at all costs, which brings us back to the immunity case, or at least brings us to the immunity case.
That's the biggest one where you're seeing not just a meltdown, not just a hysterical hissy fit.
You are seeing people in real time lying about it to whip people up into a frenzy so they should do atrocious things in the name of what they now believe is their own self-preservation.
The immunity ruling came down six to three, and the greatest part of this decision, other than Claris Thomas's independent opinion in the middle, was what the majority said about the dissent.
And they basically said the dissent has no arguments, has nothing to rely on in the Constitution.
And so, their reasoning, you know, basically resorts to fear-mongering and lying about hypotheticals, extreme hypotheticals that have not been and will not be about what might be based on their incorrect interpretation of one of those hypotheticals.
I was reading this, and one of the dissenting uh Democrat judges says, Well, this is going to allow them to send SEAL team six to kill their opponent.
Like, I just thought that is so nuts that it was so weird to see that in a Supreme Court ruling.
That's something that you'd expect like a freshman in college to write or something.
Well, that is the joke: the dissenting opinion would be a failed answer on a bar exam.
I mean, they basically say, Yeah, oh, it author it green lights, uh, death squads, murders or death squads, I think, according to Rachel Maddow.
Uh, it's now created a king.
It's not, uh, they're they're smart enough that you can't chalk it up to stupidity.
It's malicious, uh, and it's projection, it is utterly prediction, projection to Trump.
Anyway, I shouldn't have interrupted you.
Tell us what the ruling actually said.
This was a six to three ruling.
I'm sorry, I interrupted your stream of opponents there.
The decision looks longer than it is.
It's like 120 pages, but there's 10 pages of executive summary, 40 pages of the major majority opinion.
Then there's a Clarence Thomas independent opinion, which concurs with the majority.
And then there's a ridiculous, insane, dissenting opinion.
The summary of the decision is that the president enjoys absolute immunity for everything, everything that he carries out under his constitutional duties, period.
So, if he's got a constitutional right to act in that capacity as president, absolute immunity for whatever he does in his purely private capacity, there is no immunity.
So, If he kills it, if he kills his chef because he doesn't like his food, I don't think you're going to get a court to say that even fits within the middle range.
The middle range is there's a presumption of immunity if the act fits within the outer bounds of his duties as president.
And in order to determine whether or not he actually benefits from immunity, there needs to be an analysis of the act to determine: is it a constitutional act that he's entitled to as president?
Is it a purely private, or is it somewhere in the middle?
And then we have to determine if he gets immunity or if he doesn't get immunity for that act.
And the dissent has pretended that this has somehow authorized the president to do whatever he wants willy-nilly, but call it a presidential act.
And you're right, Ezra.
It's pure, pure projection because when they say, well, all he has to do is kill his political rival and call it a presidential act and he's immune.
I mean, first of all, they're telling on themselves.
They're absolutely telling themselves.
The only people who've done that are the debt or is Merrick Garland's weaponized DOJ, sending the FBI with license to kill to raid Mar-a-Lago in plain clothes officers with box cutters.
I mean, they're the only ones who are doing this.
But the idea that, well, just call it something so that we can then make it presidential for immunity, what they're basically telling you, just call it private so that we can prosecute for being a private act and therefore go after the president.
They're telling you what they're doing in reverse.
But the bottom line, in my view, the decision didn't go as far as it should.
I think they should have just said, you are impeached and convicted, and then you can face prosecution and otherwise not, because otherwise there will just be harassment, judicial harassment, once you're out of office.
And all they'll have to do is call it a purely private act.
Oh, yeah, when you executed that American citizen by drone strike in wherever it was, Afghanistan or Iraq, well, that was a purely private act.
And then he'll say, no, it was a presidential act, but then they'll still go through the process.
So that's, I mean, it's, I think they should have done that.
But what they ended up saying is, no, there's presidential immunity for constitutional, constitutional acts, no immunity for private acts.
And then we have to do a test for within the outer orbit of presidential conduct.
And what the Supreme Court majority decision said, and needling Jack Smith, needling Judge Chutkin out of DC, needling the dude out of New York there, Justice Marshall.
She's like, no lower court ever carried out this analysis in RICO, the RICO, Georgia case.
Did you ever do an analysis as to what was a purely private act, what was clearly a presidential act, and what might be within the outer orbit?
They never did it.
So now what has to happen and what is going to happen in New York, all of these cases, including the conviction out of New York, have to go back for that analysis.
And Justice Marchand in the New York Alvin Bragg Soros-funded Alvin Bragg case, where Trump was convicted for 34 counts of felony, what are the falsification of business records to conceal the payment to Stormy Daniels?
They need to go back now and say, oh, crap, when he did that, all of those charges relate to acts that he carried out once he was president.
So some might say purely private to hush money payment a porn star.
Others might say within the outer bounds of his president.
It had nothing to do with the election anymore because he was already elected, outer bounds.
Others are going to say presidential.
So they've got to go now and do that assessment, but there's already been a conviction.
And so Justice Marchant, Judge Marchant of New York, says, I'm going to postpone sentencing.
And we might very well, he says, or postpone sentencing if it occurs, because they might actually have to toss that conviction entirely and then decide whether or not they go back, analyze the indictment, and flesh out what's a charge, what's an act that he can be charged with versus what isn't.
Rico, same case.
Imagine in the RICO, Georgia election interference case, they're charging Trump with acts of having discussions with his attorney general, having discussions with his internal members of governments as relates to what he felt was a fraudulent election.
Well, that's not a, that's definitely not a purely personal act.
And so they've got to go back and say, okay, well, can we even charge him for this?
They got to do it in DC.
They got to do it in Florida.
And so this has upended everything.
The only conviction they got before the election, it was always going to get overturned.
I just think Mershawn now can weasel out of it and say, set aside the verdict because of the Supreme Court.
Day in Day Out Battle00:03:39
Not my fault.
Wash my hands like Pontius Pilot and go back if we recharge him.
You know, obviously a huge legal victory for the president.
But as they say, the process is the punishment.
How many tens of millions or even $100 million has he had to spend on lawyers?
How many hundreds of hours has he had to spend on this?
How much stress and distraction and how much damage?
I mean, I think by this point, a lot of people have their minds made up about Trump and no one will change.
But I think a lot of people, in fact, there's a perversity to it that I think people do think that Trump has been victimized and attacked unfairly.
So in fact, I think there has been a net benefit, even though I hate to say it that way, because people say they're just picking on him now.
But what an atrocious thing he's had to go through.
I'm really excited about these cases because it gives me some hope.
All is not lost.
And of course, I love being a Canadian and I still have hope for our country, but it is deeply reassuring to me that the greatest democracy in the world, the country upon whom we rely for our security, still has some checks and balances.
And the Supreme Court is one of them.
And Viva, David, you have a deep understanding.
And, you know, it's somewhat a technical understanding sometimes, but I know that's why you bring the smarts to it because you yourself are a lawyer and you have a show with Rob Barnes, who's a constitutional lawyer.
I really appreciate you giving us a briefing.
And I think our Canadian viewers, even if they're not lawyers, I think they understand what's going on and you really helped us today.
I really appreciate you taking the time.
Before we say goodbye, tell us what you're doing.
Where's the best way we can get your content?
I know you caught a couple of different podcasts.
Is there a website?
Is there a place you would invite people to go?
The best place is vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
That's where we get support from the community with a monthly subscription or an annual.
But look, I'm the VivaFry on Twitter, VivaFry on Rumble, and I'm going to be in Toronto, Ezra, for the event on the 12th with you.
And then I head to Milwaukee for the RNC.
It's going to be amazing.
But I'll give everybody a little bit of a white pill here.
And everybody knows, look, I'm not a Piet Polyev fan, and I'm sort of stubbornly supporting the PPC because I ran with the PPC and I believe they have true principles.
There's a lot of similarity between conservatives and liberals in Canada and Republicans and Democrats in the States.
Liberals are closet tyrants.
All they care about is control and they don't care about the will of the people.
They just want to rule, much like the Democrats in the United States.
Republicans are sort of more like conservatives as well in that they're susceptible of public opinion, for good and for bad.
And so when I say that, you know, Piet Polyev is a bit of a, he's a fair weather politician.
That could be an insult.
That could also be not a compliment, but something that could be used in that he listens to the people and he listens to public opinion.
If you imagine in the states, Trump will be re-elected a third time, as the joke goes.
Trudeau is out.
Trudeau's out.
And then you're going to have something of a conservative government in Canada.
And they might actually listen to the people.
And you might have a shift in this global zeitgeist where no, we do not want this one world government.
We do not want to subjugate our national interests to the WHO or the WWF.
And you might have a politician who might listen to that, not necessarily because he believes in it, but because the people want it.
And that's the popular thing to do.
I think we're in the early stages of seeing that right now.
And the only question is how crazy are Democrats, deep state globalists going to go?
We'll see.
But I'm seeing that flicker of hope in Canada.
We're seeing it in the States, but it's a battle.
Battle for Public Opinion00:00:57
It's a day in and day out battle.
Yeah, very interesting.
do sense something afoot.
I mean, New Zealand recently threw out their Labor government.
Maureen Le Pen is in the poll position in the French elections next week.
Nigel Farage won't win, but he will surely get a seat in the parliament there in the UK.
I'm excited about these things.
It's great to catch up with you.
And we'll put some of the links you mentioned to your locals page and other pages on our website so people can click on them.
Welcome back to Canada.
I will see you on July 12th, folks.
That's the Democracy Fund student journalism conference.
So unfortunately, it's just for student journalists.
But David, thank you for making the time for that charity event.
Great to catch up.
We'll keep in touch.
And I'm so glad you're fighting.
You're firing on all pistons on both sides of the border.