Ezra Levant argues UK riots stem from suppressed anti-immigration dissent, citing July 4th’s election of five Islamist candidates—four extremists and Corbyn—amid accusations like Sammy Woodhouse’s claims about Pakistani rape gangs being dismissed as biased. A YouGov poll shows 58% of Brits sympathize with protests, while deplatforming figures like Nigel Farage or Tommy Robinson may radicalize supporters. Levant warns the left’s crackdowns could backfire, fueling extremism, and criticizes CBC’s skewed U.S. election coverage under CEO Catherine Tate, a former Clinton donor, despite its Canadian mandate. Legal cases against critics, with no taxpayer compensation for wrongful prosecutions, highlight deeper institutional distrust, suggesting unrest grows when grievances are silenced rather than addressed. [Automatically generated summary]
I want to take you through an opinion poll in the United Kingdom that shows how many people support the anti-immigration riots.
It's probably a little bit bigger than you think.
And I'm going to make the case that if we don't allow anti-immigration parties some success in our political system, if we drive them out and cancel them, don't be surprised if that riot number goes up.
I'd like to show it to you, not just tell it to you, though.
So I'd love it if you got what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month.
And not only do you get great video, but you support Rebel News because Trudeau won't.
We don't take any money from him.
So we rely on you to stay strong and free.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, what happens if you drive anti-immigration viewpoints out of the mainstream conversation?
I'll give you a hint from the United Kingdom.
It's August 22nd, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
We have more work to do on the mass immigration story here in Canada.
We've covered it pretty well.
We've probably been to Wroxham Road a dozen times, just as one example.
I have a special reporting project that I'll tell you about another time, but I believe that looking at how mass immigration is handled and mishandled in other countries gives us a sense of how things could go here.
They're like laboratory experiments that we could learn from.
For example, I don't know if you recall, but I was in Hungary about a year ago.
I visited the great Jewish synagogue in Budapest.
No security guards.
I don't even think the front door was locked.
No anti-Semitic graffiti anywhere in town, no arson.
A lot safer than Toronto.
I spoke to some of the Jewish kids I saw near the synagogue.
They said it's easy being Jewish in Hungary.
That was the words they used.
And indeed, the World Jewish Congress said that Budapest is the safest city in Europe for Jews, along with Rome.
And my friends, there is an obvious reason why, because there is no third world immigration to Hungary.
There's no immigration from anti-Semitic countries.
Ethnic Hungarians are not anti-Semitic, just like old-stock Canadians are not anti-Semitic, and neither are the British.
Sure, there are some woke white leftists in universities and unions, but in the main, it's Islamist immigrants.
I'm sorry, that's just a fact.
For the rest of my life, I'll never forget what this Algerian man told me in Marseille, France.
He said to me, France colonized Algeria, and now Algerians are coming to colonize France.
Remember this?
Why millions of Muslims immigrate to France if France is racist?
Well, they have colonized us for 132 years, and it's our turn to come here to...
How can I explain?
I can't find the words.
And the colonization, and we're going to colonize.
Wow.
In the United Kingdom, they're about five years further down the mass immigration road than we are here in Canada.
But Trudeau's trying to catch up.
As I've reported to you before, in their last election, July 4th, five seats in their election went to Islamist candidates, not to Labor, not to Tories.
Four out of the five were Muslim extremists themselves.
One was Jeremy Corbyn, who had been kicked out of the Labour Party for being too anti-Semitic.
Seriously, this is what campaigning in the United Kingdom looked like in those districts that had about 40% or so of the voters from Pakistan and other Muslim places, like this guy.
Well, things popped off a few weeks ago in the UK after a mass stabbing incident killed three girls and a few other provocations and counter-provocations.
It ended in riots, including a hotel that had been turned into a refugee camp being set on fire.
Anyone on stage?
Why are you here today?
We're here to defend this hotel from the fascist mob that you can see over there.
Okay, so over the last few days, I've been speaking to people within the community.
They have concerns because some of the men have been following children as young as 12 years old and women.
Well, they're concerned for their safety.
Are they?
Do you think they'll lie in?
Yeah.
Yeah, I do.
Why would, why would children, well why not?
Well, because I can just tell from your approach that you're one of them.
Well, I'm actually a reporter and I'm going to be speaking to both sides.
Well, but if you're here to get your side across, you know, now's the perfect time.
Well, you can see why we're here.
I know, I know.
I've worked it out.
I've worked it out.
I could tell from the way that she spoke that.
Well, I'm speaking because children and women are concerned, which you seem to be completely ignoring.
There's children and women that are concerned for their safety and you don't seem to be interested in that.
Oh, they're asking.
That's not your agenda.
Oh, is it not?
Okay, then.
That's Sammy Woodhouse reporting.
She works for Tommy Robinson's Urban Scoop Outlet.
I hope to interview Sammy at length next week.
By the way, she's not just a reporter.
She's a survivor of Pakistani rape gangs herself.
An incredible and shocking story.
I'm against riots, in case you're wondering.
I'm against arson and stabbing, in case you're wondering.
Because although I think our democracy is failing, I still believe in it more than I believe in the alternative.
I am losing faith in our courts too, but I still believe in them enough to go to them to seek justice.
And a few times we've actually succeeded, such as when we fought back against Trudeau's Debates Commission censoring us or cabinet ministers censoring us on Twitter.
But let me say a word about how the left fights the right in 2024.
It fights not so much by arguing, but by silencing and canceling.
I mentioned Sammy Woodhouse, the victim of rape gangs, now a citizen journalist.
And the Times of London, perhaps the most prestigious newspaper in the world, dating back to the 1780s, for whom the typeface Times was created on your word processor, the Times did a smear, a hit job on Sammy Woodhouse, the rape victim, because she recently met with a Labour cabinet minister to talk about rapes against young girls.
If I recall, the meeting was about taxi drivers, but the details aren't important.
What's important is that a victim of horrific crimes met with a cabinet minister to talk about how to stop more horrific crimes.
By the way, she had met with the previous government's cabinet ministers as well.
And the Times of London's clear ambition in their article from the headline on through was to demonize Sammy, the victim.
But more importantly, to deplatform her, to cut her off, to make her toxic in the eyes of the government, to punish that labor cabinet minister for meeting with her, and to try to get Sammy canceled.
Is it because her attackers were immigrants that they are set against her?
Is it because she works with Tommy Robinson now?
Is it because she contradicts the regime's narrative?
Probably all of those things.
But do you see what they're doing?
Sammy Woodhouse is a marginalized person, a victim of a horrific crime, a working-class woman from a poor part of the country.
But look what she's daring to do: be a journalist, like the fancy people from Oxford.
She met a cabinet minister, like the fancy people from Cambridge, whatever.
Who does she think she is?
Drive her out, cancel her.
She's N-O-K-D.
Not our kind, dear.
That's cancel culture in a deeper sense than just banning the woman from Twitter, isn't it?
But here's my larger point: it's about Sammy Woodhouse and Tommy Robinson.
And it's about in the UK, Naja Farage and GB News.
It's about things in Canada, too.
It's about rebel news.
It's about past attempts to marginalize the Reform Party as some sort of far-right institution.
What it really is, is an attempt to drive people who have contrary views or even just grievances to drive them out of the political establishment and the entire system to make them pariahs, to send them into exile, to keep all the political institutions just for one group and no one else.
Even though our system in its brilliance contemplates an official role for someone called His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, where we take someone whose job is to be the leading dissident, the leading contrarian, and give him a job and resources and staff and protection.
We give him something called question period or question time, as it's called in the UK.
We institutionalize opposition.
So we don't drive out opponents and dissidents.
We embed it in our system.
You can see that in our legal system too.
We have a prosecutor, yeah, but we also have a defense attorney.
We have two sides to every story, sometimes more than two sides.
My point is: cancel culture is trying to remove the minority from the system.
By that, I mean political minorities.
Although people who disagree with mass immigration are not a minority in any Western country, that's what's even more perverse about it.
You can call anti-immigration people extremists if you like, but in fact, those who call for open borders are the extremists, the French.
Do you see my point?
Our system says don't throw out the opponents, don't throw out the dissidents.
In fact, put them in parliament, call them the opposition leader.
But look at how gleefully the British police are arresting not just rioters.
I support arresting rioters, but they're arresting people who tweet about riots.
There was a guy who was jailed for gesticulating at a cop.
How's that a crime?
More than a year in jail.
There was a guy who was jailed for saying mean things to a police dog.
Did the police dog get offended?
There was a guy who was jailed for saying that the riot police cracking down on Indigenous British are no longer British themselves.
I'm not saying any of those things are polite.
I'm saying they've got more jail time than some actual rapists have.
And the reason that prosecutions are such a spectacle is that the establishment is trying to scare ordinary Brits into shutting up.
They're trying to cancel about 80% of Indigenous Brits who are skeptical of mass immigration.
By the way, where is the opposition leader speaking of?
In the UK, his name is Rishi Sunak.
He's the former prime minister.
By the way, he completely supports open borders.
He expanded immigration.
Of course, he's not opposing anything.
Just like in Canada, the Conservatives have really never said a word against mass immigration for 15 years.
They're afraid.
It reminds me of the leaders' debates in Canada in 2021 when all five of the debate leaders agreed with everything the others did.
And they kept out the one dissident, Maxime Bernay, just to be safe.
Remember this?
We're all in this together.
We've come so far in the fight against COVID.
It's time to finish this pandemic for good.
So get vaccinated.
If you know someone who hasn't, talk to them.
For our kids, for our communities, for our economy.
It's how we get forward together.
Vaccines are safe and effective for use.
Vaccines are the best way for you to protect yourself, your family, and your community.
So get vaccinated.
Let's fight COVID-19 together.
Pour vous protéger vous-même, pour protéger les plus fragiles d'entre nous, pour protéger l'ensemble de la population, le meilleur moyen connu demeure le vaccin.
We all agree getting vaccinated is the way forward.
We're all in agreement.
This is not a partisan issue, so please get vaccinated.
We're united, and it's time to get the shot.
Vaccines save lives.
They're how we're going to beat COVID, and it's time for everyone to do it.
Get the shot.
Get the shot.
Yeah, total unanimity amongst the ruling class, no citizens allowed.
Not very democratic.
But let me show you what that does.
What that systemic, repeated, vicious denormalization and demoralization and marginalization of people does, people with a grievance.
That's where hate comes from, by the way.
I mean, do you think that guy who told the cops that they weren't even British cops anymore, do you think that arresting him and jailing him for saying that has convinced him he's wrong or convinced him that he's right?
Has it cured him of his underlying grievance?
So let me show you something.
It's a poll that a famous UK pollster called YouGov published.
This was right after the riots.
I referenced this the other day and I wasn't as precise as I wanted to be.
So I'm going to show you some of the actual numbers here.
On page five, here's a question they put to Brits.
Thinking about the recent protests and unrest that have taken place, the riots, how much sympathy, if any, do you have with the views of the following?
Those taking place in recent protests peacefully.
And you can see 58% of people support that.
So despite the hurricane and media attacks on the protests, 58% of Brits tell pollsters that they sympathize with the anti-immigration protests.
The pollster then asks people if they support those causing unrest, as in rioters.
Now, 8% say they do, which is pretty small.
But 25% of people who voted for Reform UK voters said they sympathize.
I'm going to come back to that and what I think it means.
But let me show you on the bottom of page six and top of page seven.
They ask, do you think the recent protests and unrest that have taken place are justified or unjustified?
So it's a little bit different than asking if you personally support it.
On the top of page seven, 12% of the general population says the riots are justified.
Nigel Farage's Supporters00:04:34
And again, for supporters of Reform UK, that's Nigel Farage's party, that number goes up to 33%.
I'll just show you a few more stats.
At the bottom of page seven, 16% of all Brits said the rioters were, quote, people with legitimate concerns.
And again, fully 49% of Reform UK voters say that.
By the way, on page nine, 69% of Brits say the news media bears responsibility.
Isn't that the truth?
I'll stop with the numbers.
Here's what I'm trying to prove with this poll.
Reform UK, that's Nigel Farage's party.
He's the man who successfully led the Brexit referendum to get the UK out of the European Union.
He's pretty much the only mainstream politician against mass immigration.
He got more than 4 million votes, but he only got five seats.
Came in second in nearly 100 ridings.
That obviously doesn't count.
So he would be like Maxime Bernier if Bernier got five seats.
But they're trying to drive Nigel Farage out, out of parliament, out of polite company.
They're trying to demonize him and cancel him.
Literally, his bank debanked him, firing him as a client and smearing him in public simply because of his politics.
They're trying to cancel Nigel Farage, even though he gets millions of votes.
They're trying to cancel Tommy Robinson, and they pretty much succeeded until Elon Musk brought him back on Twitter.
They're canceling any Brits who simply tweet or Facebook their opposition to the way the world is going.
And they're even trying to cancel Sammy Woodhouse, the victim of rape gangs.
They're literally trying to destroy her to drive her out, even as a citizen journalist.
What if they succeed?
What if in the UK they succeed in driving out anyone concerned about mass immigration, drive them out of politics and the media and the courts, drive them out of polite company?
That's what's happening.
I can see it.
What if they manage to do it, to effectively strip actual British citizens of their citizenship in a meaningful sense, to turn them into non-persons in order to continue with their mass immigration schemes?
What if they take away all the normal customs of being a Brit?
You can't speak out.
You can't run for office.
If you can't speak up on GB News, the last conservative TV station in the UK, because the government regulator silences you, if you can't speak up on your own citizen journalism website because the Times comes to destroy you, if you can't vote for Reform UK, if you can't win in court because woke judges and woke laws criminalize patriotic dissent, well, then what happens then?
If you are told you do not belong in the system, if you are told you do not count, if the rules are twisted, if there's two-tiered justice, if you no longer believe you can work within the system, what do you have to lose then?
That's what I'm worried about.
12% of Brits say the riots were justified.
16% say the rioters have legitimate concerns.
That's still a small minority, but it's not nothing.
And a big chunk of Reform UK voters say so.
If you tell everyone that you hate, that they are not allowed to participate in democracy, they'll finally get the message.
And it could be a terrible message.
Look, I'm against riots, but Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson and Sammy Woodhouse did not cause the riots.
They're actually the safety valve.
They're the preferable solution to riots.
They're the only people trying to keep dispossessed, working-class, Indigenous Brits still hopeful, still engaged in the system.
You cancel Nigel Farage, you jail Tommy Robinson.
Well, then why wouldn't their supporters riot?
It's the only path you've left for them.
And after all, isn't that what the authoritarian left really wants?
I think they want that.
They want right-wingers to riot.
They don't want them in parliament.
All this time, for years, for decades, the left has talked about defunding police and releasing criminals from prisons.
But it's only because it was the wrong kind of criminal.
They're emptying the prisons in the UK right now of real violent criminals because they can hardly wait to fill the prisons back up with their political opponents.
I think the UK is in for trouble.
And if we don't change our course, we'll go the same way.
Stay with us for more.
Following U.S. Politics00:10:09
I suppose I'm guilty of it myself, talking about a foreign country's politics when I should focus on my own knitting here in Canada.
Sometimes we study mass immigration in other countries, but in particular, I'm talking about U.S. politics.
I think Canadians like to follow U.S. politics because it's exciting.
It's the big leagues and we're in the minors.
I should say to our credit, Rebel News was really the only media outlet in Canada to fairly cover and indeed support Donald Trump's nomination back in 2015 and 2016 and his run for the U.S. presidency.
Other than Conrad Black, I don't think a single other journalist in Canada supported him.
And so, yeah, I suppose we cover American politics a lot too.
But what is the excuse for the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, that exists specifically, courtesy of the Canadian Broadcasting Act, specifically to promote Canada, Canadian culture, and Canadian voices.
Why are they so obsessed, not just with bashing Trump, but promoting the U.S. Democrat?
Is it that they themselves think Canadian politics is too boring by comparison?
Is it they secretly hope that they'll be plucked out of Canadian obscurity and hired by CNN or MSNBC that maybe they'll get the call to write a guest column in the New York Times or appear on some pundits panel.
I don't know what it is, but I find it sort of pitiful when I see calmness in Canada sort of mimicking and echoing the Democratic warrior calmness in the States.
But I say again, what is the CBC's excuse, given that the $1.5 billion they liberate from us through our taxes, is specifically excused by them doing Canadian content?
Well, our friends over at True North have looked into this question scientifically and mathematically.
And Cosmo Gierga, a reporter at True North, joins us now via Skype from Victoria, British Columbia.
Cosmo, great to see you again.
Thanks for taking the time.
Thanks for having me, Ezra.
You have a very interesting piece.
You actually counted the number of articles that the CBC did about their new hero, Kamala Harris, versus covering the prime minister of our own country.
Tell me what you found.
That's right.
So essentially, this was all prompted because over the weekend, I decided to stroll over to the CBC's homepage and I realized that it was entirely sprawled with Kamala Harris coverage.
And so I figured, let's just see how much they've covered Kamala Harris in the last month since Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic candidate for the presidential election.
And we found that the CBC covered Kamala Harris's campaign solely about 68 times.
So that averages to over two pieces a day of American election coverage.
And it was four times more than they actually covered Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over the same time period.
And I'd like to stress the importance of this is because CBC is mandated by law under the Broadcasting Act to cover distinctly Canadian content and to cover Canadian regions and Canadian cultural, social issues, political issues solely.
Yet here they are dedicating a ridiculous amount of time to a foreign election.
Yeah.
You know, if there was a Canadian angle, if she had policies touching on Canada, if she referred to Canada, if there was some legitimate reason to Canadianize the story, I'd get it.
Sometimes it's absurd the lengths Canadian journalists go to to try and find a Canadian angle in a foreign story, but that's not there.
I mean, the Democratic National Convention where they solidified her as the nominee, it really was policy-free.
If you go to the Kamala Harris campaign website, there actually is no policy section.
This was pure fanboy, fangirling.
This was pure, she's the Taylor Swift of politics, and we want to be there.
This was nothing but the semi-erotic emotional reaction by socialist journalists in Canada who have become disillusioned with Justin Trudeau, who have resigned themselves to the fact that Pierre Polyev is likely to win.
And so they've moved on.
They've got a new girlfriend now, and her name is Kamala.
What do you think of that theory?
No, I think it's a good one.
And it's funny because a few hours after we went to the CBC with our questions about their inordinate amount of coverage for Kamala Harris's campaign, the editor-in-chief of CBC News, Brody Fenlin, put out an entire blog post trying to justify their coverage of the American election.
Now, I don't know if that's political.
I got to know.
Yeah, so he went into all sorts of reasons about how, you know, it's our closest neighbor, we share a border, et cetera.
You know, and also he made this argument that because we're not an American outlet, we can have an objective.
The CBC can have an objective perspective on it.
Yeah, right.
But when you look at the actual coverage, they're covering memes about Kamala Harris.
They put out articles and videos titled, Why Are People Going Coconuts for Kamala Harris?
This is not objective coverage.
It's like it was written up at the DNC.
It's like it's propaganda, even worse propaganda than they've done for the liberals in some cases.
You know, every once in a while, a Canadian journalist does go on to bigger things in the U.S. Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star now does that, I think, for CNN.
So I think some American obsessed Canadian pundits secretly dream that they'll be picked up by an American TV station.
It's not just that they're pro-Harris, pro-Democrat.
The level of anti-Trump extremism is off the charts.
And by the way, it started way back in Trump's early days.
I remember they had a crazy show called The Trump Effect.
And they, you're not even going to believe me, Cosmond, but they hired actors, swear to God, they hired actors to sell racist merch on the street.
And by the way, no one was buying it.
And they like they, the CBC hired actors.
It wasn't a real thing.
They tried to create a news story to show how the Trump effect was making people more racist.
The story didn't pan out.
Like the thesis, their hypothesis was refuted by people's reactions.
But that's how desperate they were, literally creating fake news with hired actors.
They have been obsessed with Trump ever since.
I remember Wendy Mesley, before she was fired for repeatedly saying the N-word, she had a show that was basically every single week, another left-wing conspiracy theory about Trump.
There's just this weird, weird thing in Toronto where doing anti-Trump or pro-Democrat performances is just like the highest level you can get as a liberal for some reason.
I don't have to cover what's happening in Pickering.
I don't have to cover what's happening in Lethbridge.
I'm beyond that now.
I can go to the highest heights and give you my deep thoughts on Kamala Harris and the second husband and her daughter or whatever.
Like it's something actually anti-Canadian.
I cover the world and we cover the world because we try and learn from trends like mass immigration.
They cover Kamala Harris because that's what they want to be.
Yeah, and I think we have to look at who's in charge of the CBC.
Their CEO, Catherine Tate, is The record, a Democrat donor for the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.
And she lives in the United States, at least in part, because her husband owns property there.
And so it raises the question: who is she loyal to?
Is it, you know, it seems like she's totally skewed the coverage of the U.S. election in one direction, and she has a history of financial contributions to the Democrats.
It's ridiculous.
How can this person speak for Canadian people when they're out there advocating for a foreign party, essentially?
You know, I think you just answered my question there in that like losers like Andrew Coyne, who just parrot the craziest, like he's the Keith Olberman of Canada.
He'll never get picked up in America.
He's just too much of a caricature.
But the person who might get hired is Catherine Tate.
She knows she's done the second Pierre Polly becomes prime minister.
I mean, he said as much, she's said as much.
She never moved back to Canada, as far as I know.
She's still commuting from Brooklyn.
She's an executive.
She follows the cash.
She's good at lying, especially about bonuses.
She took a huge bonus.
If there's anyone at the CBC who can cash in chips with the DNC, the Democrats, it's Catherine Tate.
She has no future in Canadian broadcasting.
Polyev will fire her day one.
She would wreck any private broadcasters.
She's cut every year after year.
She's cut viewership of the CBC, which is an astonishing accomplishment given that our population is growing by 5% a year.
But she could get a gig in the States.
Absolutely.
That's what this is about.
Cosmo, great to see you.
Folks, if you want to read the story, you can get it at TrueNorth, which is tnc.news.
Keep in touch, Cosman.
For sure.
Thanks, Cesar.
Pay for Prosecution?00:02:36
All right.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me on my monologue last night.
Scott Halloween says, Canada is dead.
We are merely soil and tax cattle.
Well, look, I know I can be pretty pessimistic sometimes, but I actually think that I wouldn't do what I'm doing if I didn't have a drop of hope in me.
Some of my friends moved to the United States during the COVID lockdowns.
And a fair number of them said, why don't you move down to Florida?
It's the best.
Great people, great politics, great economy, great weather.
I mean, it's a wonderful place.
I visited there as a tourist, but I did not go.
And the answer I said was because I believe I got to stay and fight.
But I believe that there's a reason to stay and fight is that there's a hope of win.
That's why.
So I talk about negative things, but I am underneath it hopeful.
Otherwise, I wouldn't do what I do.
On our guests, the Justice Center lawyer, Monica Grenier, Walrus Almutt, says, now who will be prosecuted for the more serious crime of violating this man's rights?
Well, that's a question that I am asked all the time.
Because our criminal justice system, when someone is arrested, jailed, prosecuted, put through the ringer, and finally accused, they get nothing.
They get no compensation.
At least in a civil trial, two private parties are fighting.
The loser typically has to pay at least something to the winner in court.
Tamara Leach has been put through an endless trial.
And you mentioned Monty Greny's 22 cases, and the Democracy Fund has had 3,000 cases.
Not a single one of those people will get their money back.
In fact, they have to pay for their own case.
The Democracy Fund covered, you know, obviously, when there's a charity involved, it covers the case.
But let me say this: you have to pay for your own prosecution through your taxes.
I wonder if something should be done about that, because there needs to be a damper.
There needs to be a negative consequence for the police and prosecutors going after innocent people.
And right now, that's not a natural built-in part of the system.
It is possible if you can hire a lawyer and go after the government.
Once in a while, there's a case of false imprisonment or malicious prosecution.
We're doing that for some of our reporters, but it's rare and it's expensive.