Ezra Levant exposes the DOJ’s indictment of two Russians linked to Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based firm funneling $10M to conservative YouTubers like Tim Poole, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin—paid up to $100K per video under fake investor "Edward Gregorian." Suspicious shifts to anti-Semitism and anti-Trump rhetoric raise questions about Russian influence, despite Putin’s past Trump support. Levant contrasts this with CBC’s transparent government ties while warning of foreign funding in Canadian media, including Qatar’s alleged role in pro-Hamas campus takeovers. Legal skepticism and a tease for September 7th’s undisclosed "major story" follow, hinting at deeper revelations post-customs. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't know if you saw that curious story out of the United States.
Their Department of Justice has indicted two Russians for trying to set up a YouTube network in the United States with about 10 million bucks, hiring some fairly well-known conservative and libertarian YouTubers.
And it's very interesting to see who knew where the money was from and who didn't and what their messaging changed or didn't change.
I'll take you through it today.
I know some of the folks casually, I'm not close with them, but I'll tell you their different reactions to it.
Very interesting story.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe.
And, you know, I do the show every weekday so you get the video version.
But more important, you'll support Rebel News because we don't take any money from the Canadian government or the Russian government or any government.
So we need your help.
All right.
here's today's podcast.
Tonight, two Russians are accused of setting up a $10 million YouTube channel featuring conservative talent.
It's September 6th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you sensorious bug.
Oh, hi, everybody.
I'm in our Toronto studio, of course, but I'm very excited.
I'm getting on a flight at midnight tonight, and I really want to tell you where I'm going, but I don't want to announce it until I land and through customs on the other side, because there's a chance if the people where I'm going know that I'm going as a journalist, that I'll be put on the next plane back home.
But tomorrow, if I manage to get off the plane and through customs, boy, do we have a big story we're going to be covering in a very far away place.
Believe me, I wish I could tell you more, but I just want to keep it to myself until I am through the customs police on the other side.
And then I'm going to be doing videos and tweets all day long.
And I hope you tune in for that.
If you follow me on Twitter, it's just simply my full name, Ezra Levant.
So that's Saturday, September 7th, I will be in the field in an undisclosed location that I will disclose tomorrow morning.
We've already filmed a little intro to what we're doing, but we're not going to release that until the minute I am across the border.
How's that for a puzzler?
Don't worry, I won't keep you in suspense for long.
But speaking of international intrigues, I saw the most interesting thing a couple days ago.
Lauren Chen And Russian Money00:16:19
The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI, which are a little bit compromised, I think most people would agree when it comes to political matters.
They indicted, I think is the phrase they use in the States, two Russian nationals, two members, two citizens of Russia, who are alleged to have worked with the Russian propaganda TV station called RT, or it used to be called Russia today, to set up a company in the United States that hid all traces of the Russian control and Russian money to set up this company in Tennessee,
run by a fairly well-known conservative YouTube talent, recruiting other conservative YouTube talent.
And according to the shocking document released by the Department of Justice, they recruited other talent, paying them up to $100,000 a video.
I have to tell you, that's the most astonishing thing of it.
The fact that Russia is interested in influencing the U.S. or any country's debate is not that surprising, although it's always interesting.
But the fact that they were paying up to $100,000 a video is the most astonishing thing I've ever heard.
You know, $400,000 a month, some of these folks were making for four videos.
Now, the company is called Tenant, T-E-N-E-T Media.
And they announced yesterday that they're shutting down because of this Department of Justice investigation.
Tenant Media was run by a young woman originally from Montreal named Lauren Chen and her husband Liam, who since relocated to Tennessee.
And I remember when Tenant Media was born, they hired some very interesting people that I would call sort of the dissident right.
Tim Poole, who actually started off on a, you know, the Occupy Wall Street type side of things.
I think he's one of the smartest guys in the business, by the way.
Very clever, very thoughtful.
I had the pleasure of being on his show once.
Benny Johnson, who you might know from the States.
He's sort of a Trump supporter who sometimes goes out into the field.
Dave Rubin, who used to be a comedian, used to be a man in the left.
Then he went on tour with Jordan Peterson, thoughtful YouTuber.
Lauren Southern, one of our long ago alumni who we parted ways with, I don't know, about seven or eight years ago now.
So these were some recognizable names, a couple of names I didn't know.
And I was just blown away when I heard how much money they were being paid.
And I checked my notes and I wrote to one of my friends.
I said, who's behind this?
Like, in what possible universe can you build a company paying people $100,000 a video?
Now, there are some YouTubers who are so huge that, yes, they will make $100,000 per video in ads.
I don't know if you've heard of the YouTuber Mr. Beast or I suppose some pop music.
If you're getting 100 million views, sure, you'll make $100,000 or even more.
But this $100,000 per video were for videos that were getting 50 or $100,000 views, excuse me, which maybe would be worth $1,000 or $2,000 in the YouTube market.
So I thought something was very strange.
I didn't quite understand it, but I didn't put a lot of thought to it.
But boy, does it look different now that I see this Department of Justice memo.
I mean, here, let me quote from it.
A key member identified as commentator number one was to be paid $400,000 per month plus $100,000 signing bonus, while commentator two's contract was for $100,000 per video.
Just astonishing.
So you'll see in the Department of Justice document, they don't actually name anyone other than the two Russian nationals who are facing charges.
So Lauren Chen and her husband and these contributors, as far as we know, have not been charged with anything, although I find it hard to imagine that Lauren Chen wouldn't be charged.
Some of the people I've mentioned, such as Tim Poole, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin, have put out statements on Twitter saying they had no idea that the money was from Russia.
They were told when they asked that it was from an investor named Edward Gregorian.
And frankly, if someone offered you $100,000 a video, maybe you wouldn't ask too many questions, especially according to Benny Johnson, Tim Poole, and Dave Rubin and their statements online, especially if there was no editorial control.
I mean, I suppose if someone ever said to me, Ezra, you're making videos every day.
Give us one of them and we'll put it on our YouTube channel and pay you $100,000 a pop.
You keep doing your thing.
You keep choosing your content.
We won't have any say in it.
I mean, that just sounds so fantastical and unrealistic.
I hesitate even to think about it because that's just such a fantasy scenario.
It would be like being asked, what happens if you win the lottery?
I suppose if I could be totally certain that I was in complete control of what I said, why wouldn't I take $100,000 a video?
And if I said, well, who's behind it?
And I was told some mysterious European was behind it.
My spider senses might be tingling.
But on the other hand, there would be a pile of money.
I don't know.
So I do accept that Tim Poole, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin had no idea where the money came from.
But I'll notice that Lauren Southern and Lauren Chen have been completely silenced since the Department of Justice made their announcement.
It tells me that perhaps they weren't caught off guard from things.
So I watched Tenet with some eagerness because I saw, wow, they're assembling sort of this league of superheroes from conservative or dissident YouTube.
And I thought it was interesting.
And I was sort of waiting for the action.
And the first real thing that I viewed as a tenant media production was this bizarre moment when an anti-Semitic, alt-right, I don't know, bomb thrower, jokester, comedian, I don't even know how he would be described.
He's very racist, very anti-Semitic.
His name is Nick Fuentes.
He had some sort of a counter-rally against a conservative rally, and tenant media covered it like it was a serious, credible political event.
I was astonished by this, that something which had the formidable names I mentioned before would be giving so much attention to a fringe, bizarre, clownish, anti-Semitic character.
I didn't get it.
I mean, normally, if someone is that extreme, a racist, they don't have access to significant investors.
They're sort of on their own citizen dissident.
I thought something was funny.
And I didn't pay a lot more attention to Tenet after that.
But in the wake of the DOJ Department of Justice announcement a couple days ago, I've gone back and I've seen some of the things that Lauren Chen, the boss of Tenet, were saying.
And they definitely took a turn when Tenet Media started towards anti-Semitism, which is weird, and towards being anti-Trump from the right.
And what I mean by that is, you know, Lauren Chen and others in that circle, it would not be credible if they were to attack Trump from the left, because the names I mentioned are pretty much all pro-Trump.
But Lauren Chen in particular was saying things like, well, Trump is not pro-life enough.
I'm out.
To sort of cause some dissonance and dissonance on the right.
And now that these charges, these accusations of Russian money, it starts to make some sense.
It runs counter to the traditional narrative that Putin wants Trump to win.
Putin is supporting Russia.
If you look at what the money was paid for based on Lauren Chen's own posts, it was to attack Trump to make him seem iffy, which suggests they want, you know, the more malleable Kamala Harris to win.
I didn't really know Lauren Chen that well.
I saw her out of the corner of my eye over the years, and I invited her to work with Rebel News at the time.
But she was working with RT even back then.
And of course, we couldn't have someone who was an RT personality also doing videos for us.
And there was a strange phenomenon where she started attacking people who were pro-Israel.
And generally, if you're pro-Israel, you're pro-America.
I really don't know one without the other.
Accusing people of taking shekels, that's Israeli money.
If you were Jewish money, if you were pro-Israel, it's because you were taking shekels from a foreign paymaster.
That's sort of an anti-Semitic slur, sort of a light anti-Semitic slur.
But now that you see that Lauren Chen herself was the funnel for almost $10 million, it's even more ironic.
The commentator Will Chamberlain saw this and made a point, which I think is right.
He says that there is no such thing as authentic anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism amongst American conservatives, or for that matter, I think Western European conservatives.
And I think he's dead right.
And I say this as someone I'm 52, and I think I've been political since I was in my teens.
And I literally have been to nine out of 10 provinces.
I've been all over the West where rednecks are supposed to be.
In my entire life, I promise you, hand to God, I have never seen anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, anti-Israel extremism on the right.
I just haven't seen it.
I've seen a lot of it on the progressive left, the coalition between Islamists and woke critical race theory, Marxist cultural activists who say that Israel is the oppressor.
So I think that when you see people like Lauren Chen and others, perhaps like Andrew Tate, online, taking a hardline anti-Semitic stand, now that we know that Lauren Chen was taking Russian money, I think it's worth asking: is that what caused that?
Now, look, I don't think that there's anything on the face of it that's illegal about taking money from a secret investor to have a certain political point of view.
I think it's perhaps unethical to not disclose that you're actually a propagandist or a salesman when you're pretending to be a business person.
But I think what the criminal matter may be is that if they were working for a foreign government, doing errands for a foreign government in the United States and not registering as a foreign agent, that could be what gets them in trouble.
Unfortunately, we don't have that law in Canada, which is why Canada is overrun with foreign agents.
Like I say, the Department of Justice accused Lauren Chen and her husband of funneling about $10 million into this little company over the last year.
And holy cow, did some of those guys get paid.
But $10 million, even real U.S. dollars, let's call that $13 million Canadian, it is a sliver of a fraction of what state broadcasters get away with in Canada.
I mean, I see that CBC is feasting on this story because Lauren Chen, like I say, is originally from Montreal and Lauren Southern, one of the talent, was from Vancouver.
And fair enough, those two, I think, were amongst the ringleaders.
But it's a little bit much for the CBC, which is a state broadcaster, to criticize Russia today, another state broadcaster, as if the CBC is morally superior.
I mean, I suppose they're more open about that they're a state broadcaster, whereas Lauren Chen's little Russian team was secretive about it.
So I suppose in that sense, the CBC is more ethical.
But it's a bit of chutzpah for Canada's state broadcaster to be really mad at Russia's state broadcaster.
I mean, you guys are all state broadcasters.
None of you are real journalists.
You're government journalists, which is something very different.
I saw the usual suspects like Andrew Coyne retweeting that story with glee, but Andrew Coyne is on the dole also.
The CBC is owned by the government, but journalists in the private sector like Andrew Coyne are rented by the government.
They get their annual subsidy, and in some ways they're worse because they have to show Trudeau every year that they deserve the money.
The average Canadian newsroom gets about $30,000 per reporter from Justin Trudeau.
And sure, you and I know that, but when was the last time that was disclosed on TV?
You have reporters, and I'm not just talking about the CBC.
I'm talking about every print reporter in this country.
They're doing a story about Justin Trudeau, which without disclosing, they're getting paid by Justin Trudeau.
That's pretty much exactly what Lauren Chen and her little Russian sludge fund did.
I mean, yeah, Vladimir Putin is a darker character than Justin Trudeau, but they're both governments.
Now, we should also beware that the Department of Justice is a highly political organization and has been for some years.
They've rung the alarm about Russia, Russia, Russia before, claiming that Donald Trump was in collusion.
As you may remember, more than five years ago, there was an extremely expensive, exhaustive inquiry by Robert Mueller into the question of whether or not Donald Trump had engaged in collusion.
And by the way, it was a Democrat-run inquiry that was completely exhaustive, and they found there was nothing to it.
The Department of Justice and the FBI have lied before.
They lied claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was a fake story.
So they lie with positive, they create stories that they lie with, but they also lie to kill stories like Hunter Biden's laptop.
This story about Lauren Chen rings true.
I mean, I tell you, when I spoke to two of the people involved and I said, where is all the money coming from?
They were, the one fellow I spoke with said he, you know, European investors.
But, I mean, just an astonishing amount of dough.
There's no way that that made business sense.
It was obviously a political operation.
I see here that it was very quick for Canada's Homeland Security Minister to put out a press release saying how serious he's taking this whole matter.
And if any Canadians are engaging in illegal activity, they'll face the full extent of the law.
Like I say, I don't know what that illegal activity would be because Canada doesn't have a foreign agent registry.
The Liberals have been holding that up.
So whereas, so I just don't know what law would be broken in Canada if someone took Russian money to be a Russian propagandist.
But like I say, the amount of money involved here is a trifle.
We've learned through parliamentary hearings and from ordinary Chinese Canadians that there's an astonishing amount of Chinese money sloshing around Canada, including in Chinese language Canadian media.
When I say Chinese money, I mean money from the People's Liberation, sorry, the People's Republic of China.
So it's quite something when you look at all the foreign actors doing, especially ethnic politics in Canada, whether it's Iran bankrolling the Hamas protests or some of the Sikh Khalistan protests or the Chinese movements to get critical MPs out of parliament.
Oligarchs And Journalistic Power00:02:53
There's much more than $10 million afoot.
And it's strange to me that the only matter about which this government puts out a press release is the one involving conservatives who were swept up by this operation.
So yeah, there's a ton of government money in our journalism.
In fact, I think government money is one of the largest sources of journalistic revenues.
I'm not sure it's any better if it's oligarchs like Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon.com.
He owns the Washington Post.
He uses it as a political plaything.
Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico, owns the New York Times.
You can buy a yacht, you can buy a private jet, and those things are lovely luxuries.
But if you want to feel important and have a seat at the table and influence things, you buy newspapers.
Canada's richest man, do you know his name?
It's David Thompson.
He's tens of billions of dollars.
He owns the Globe and Mail.
Do you think he's really interested in the news business?
He might be.
I mean, it's where his family money came from in the first place, several generations ago.
But no, I think it's more he likes to control the narrative in the country.
So you have big money control the narratives, either oligarchs or governments.
But even that pales in comparison to the largest foreign source of money sloshing around our country and in the United States too.
That's the tiny oil-rich country of Qatar, who made a decision about 20 years ago that if they were going to buy any Americans, sure, you could buy journalists.
But if you buy the universities, if you buy MIT and Harvard and Ivy League universities by pouring money into think tanks, into the universities, you can control a much larger narrative.
And if you're wondering why places like Columbia, Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania had the anti-Semitic pro-Hamas takeovers that they did, I think the Qatari money is part of the answer.
Let me close by telling you what you already know.
Rebel News doesn't take any money from any government, by the way.
I would like to think that if someone approached me and said, I'll pay you $100,000 per video you're doing anyways, that I would ask a few questions.
I'm sure my missus would say, take the dough.
You know, we need a retirement plan.
But I would hope that alarm bells would go off for me and I would say, this doesn't make sense.
It is not a genuine financial payment.
It's for something else.
I don't know, but lucky enough, I've never been faced with that bizarre temptation.
Rebel News lives off the avails of our viewers.
The average gift to our company is $58.
And that's a much more honest way to make a living rather than taking the money from the Russian government or the Canadian government.
Complex Trial Insights00:10:01
Stay with us for more.
Ezra Levant here.
I'm in Ottawa with our billboard truck.
We're taking it around town with our messages against Trudeau's undemocratic appointments to the Senate.
But how could I come to Ottawa without popping by the leading criminal lawyer in Ontario, Lawrence Greenspawn, who, as you know, has been the lead lawyer with his team defending Tamara Leach in this very long mischief trial?
I thought I'd pop by, visit him in his natural habitat, which I suppose I've seen him at the courthouse a dozen times, and just get a bit of an update in the final stretch.
Lawrence, great to see you.
Thanks for meeting with us.
Sure, sure.
Thank you.
Yeah, this is actually the building that William Lyon and McKenzie King lived in for a period of some 10 years, burnt to the ground.
So when they rebuilt it, they kept the heritage style.
And this is the building where we do our thing.
We've been here for, I don't know, five, six years now, and it's a good location.
In terms of the Freedom Convoy, We're down to the last hurrah for the Crown.
On September 13th, they've got another half day of reply in addition to the already six days of oral submissions and the 140 pages of written submissions by the Crown and the 100 pages by us and the 100 pages by Chris Barber's counsel.
So it's going to end on September 13th and then the matter, the whole thing will be put over to her honor and she's got a mountain, a mountain of evidence to go through and come up with her decision.
You know, I don't know this judge at all.
You obviously appear in Ottawa courts regularly.
What struck me about her was how attentive she was.
Like this is the longest running mischief trial in Canadian history, possibly in the whole Commonwealth.
Yet she's very engaged and attentive.
In fact, I saw her constantly giving feedback, challenging, questioning.
To have that kind of attention span, you need it for a lengthy trial like this.
Absolutely.
And that's been her way, not only on this trial, but on everything.
You know, we're very fortunate with the bench that we have and the Ontario Court of Justice in Ottawa and the Criminal Division.
And this judge has been on this for, I think we're up to 46 days of trial now.
And she doesn't sit unless she's listening and taking it all in and making notes.
And she's been very, very involved in it.
And I expect she's going to need a large amount of time in order to get through it all and come up with her decision.
I mean, I sense that she wants to write a judgment.
This is my sense as an amateur observer that is appeal-proof.
As in, I mean, listen, I suppose every judge wants to get it right, but it felt to me she was giving every benefit of the doubt procedurally to the Crown.
And I thought, why is she doing that?
Why is she allowing Crown witnesses to go on for a full day who admit they never saw, spoke to, or interacted with Tamara Leach or Chris Barber?
And I thought, the only way this makes sense is if the judge is leaning over backwards so the crown can't say, you didn't let us bring our witnesses.
That's my only amateur theory.
I don't know if you even want to comment on that.
Well, I mean, she's run an incredibly long trial, as you point out.
The Crown has had every opportunity to call all the witnesses that they called.
As you know, we didn't call any evidence.
So we feel we've made our case out through cross-examination of the Crown's witnesses.
And, you know, it's a tough call to make, not to call any evidence, but there's, you know, it's pretty clear from the witnesses that have testified.
It's pretty clear what happened here.
I think everybody knows what happened here, how long it lasted.
And what's also clear is that none of the Freedom Convoy demonstrators were charged with anything even as much as a parking ticket until, you know, a few days after Justin Trudeau declared the Emergency Measures Act.
So it's, you know, the judge has got it all.
It's taken an incredibly long time, but certainly I don't think the Crown would ever be able to say that they weren't given every opportunity to make their case.
I want to ask you about something I saw when I was here about a week ago or so.
I didn't quite understand it because I haven't been here every single day.
So your team, I think it was Mr. Granger was his name, showed five social media clips in which Tamara Leach was apparent.
And I didn't understand them because she was just there and she was bantering.
Like there was a lot of loitering and milling around and sort of the call and reply was hold the line, hold the line.
Like it was just sort of a phrase.
Do you want to know what my response would be if I get arrested?
What's the response?
Hold the line.
Hold the line.
And I watched these five clips and Tamara Leach was only speaking for a few seconds in them and nothing was happening.
Like people were just milling around.
There were some cops in the background.
And I thought, why are they showing this?
I didn't understand it until he said, Your Honor, that's the only evidence whatsoever of what Tamara Leach actually did in her entire time in Ottawa.
Those five nothings, those vignettes, those cameos.
And then I thought, aha.
I was thinking, what's the point of these videos?
Well, that's the thing.
There is no point.
And that's all the government has.
Well, that was the sum total of what they had of Tamara, actually, on the streets of Ottawa.
And I think that, you know, the Crown is well aware from the beginning that they've got nothing on Tamara as far as her actual involvement on the streets.
And which is why, as I said the next day, that they have to resort to talking about metaphorical shoulder-to-shoulder and metaphorical megaphones because there were no actual megaphones and there was no actual shoulder-to-shoulder in the sense that we commonly know it.
So, I mean, the case really against Tamara is not for whatever little she did on the street.
It's whether her messaging was such as to encourage others to act unlawfully.
And from what I can see, her messaging was exactly the opposite all the way through.
It was always peaceful, lawful, demonstrate, come to Ottawa, stay in Ottawa, peaceful, lawful, demonstrate.
So, you know, that's really the basis of the defense.
And, you know, we'll see how the judge deals with it.
There was even one moment where the judge herself remarked that the phrase, hold the line, could mean many things, including when the police say it, she noted.
I thought that was very interesting.
There was clearly some evidence on the, I think it was the 18th or the 19th of February in front of the Chateau Laureate, where the police were yelling, hold the line.
And the demonstrators were yelling, hold the line back.
Everyone's holding lines.
Yeah, it's, you know, the fact is that up till the time that Tamara was arrested on the 17th of February, there was no line to hold.
It wasn't a line.
It was just walking.
It felt like a festival.
Yeah, it was, you know, it was very well.
You know, there wasn't any violence.
There was a lot of camaraderie as between the police and the demonstrators.
You know, it's what it was.
And, you know, nevertheless, the Crown has put all of that evidence before the court, and the court's going to have to deal with it.
Got one last question, and thanks for letting me interrupt your day to give us an update.
I just thought we're in Ottawa.
We've got to say hi.
You've taken some very serious court cases before.
You're a criminal lawyer, which means you've dealt with even terrorism cases.
Complex, serious cases where a person's liberty is at stake.
They could go away for many years.
Have you ever run a trial, even for a murderer, even for a gang member, even for a terrorist, that has taken 46 or 37 days?
What's the longest trial you've ever had in your life?
Or is this Tamara Leach trial it?
I'm thinking, of course, of the various murder trials that I've done, and I can't recall any of them taking up 46 days of trial.
I don't think it's not in my career anyway.
Astonishing.
Lord Screenspawn, thank you so much for your work.
Really enjoy watching you and your team in court.
And I look forward, as I'm sure you do, to what I hope will be a happy conclusion here.
Yep.
Hope so.
All right, there you have it, Lawrence Greenspawn.
Folks, by the way, if you want to chip in to help cover the legal costs for Tamara Leach in what is the longest trial for mischief in Commonwealth history, go to helptamera.com.
And by the way, you'll actually get a charitable tax receipt for that gift from the Democracy Fund.
That's helptamera.com.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Calvin Arn says, Hey, Ezra, I'll go with you to England for the Atherstone event, except we're not watching it.
We have to participate in it, and I'll buy you a pint at the local watering hole afterwards, too.
Islam: Fear vs. Love00:02:44
You're talking about that crazy game, the Atherstone ball game.
And I don't know why I spent so much time on that, other than it's got to be the strangest thing I've ever seen.
And it actually does sort of feel medieval.
And when I first saw those videos, I thought this can't be real.
But then I saw sort of the Marshalls with their high-vis vests, and that this was obviously, you know, done with the consent of the town.
I don't know.
That just seems like something that if you saw it, you would remember it for the rest of your life.
Joe Boudreaux says, Ezra, your final topic with David Atherton was Islamophobia.
I thought Mark Stein once expressed it the best.
Genuine Islam, right from the Quran, actually promotes hatred and the killing of infidels.
So do their hadiths.
That's scary.
So Stein is right to say we should fear Islam, but now it's a crime to fear something real.
Well, a phobia, I mean, if you look at the Greek root of the word, it's sort of a fear or a loathing or a terror of something, which is largely an emotion, isn't it?
And I don't know how you can criminalize an emotion.
Either you feel it or you don't.
It's sort of like hate or love.
You can't pass a law to direct someone to love you.
I mean, in every genie movie, you know, like Aladdin, you know one of the rules, you can't make people fall in love.
It's the thing about love and hate.
You just cannot legislate it.
And even genies won't give it to you as a wish.
So I don't think you can just tell someone you're not allowed to fear this doctrine of Islam, or even more than the doctrine, the way that it plays out with jihads or other social manifestations.
I think the world is afraid of Islam.
And I think a lot of Muslims are too.
I think that Islam needs a reformation in the way that Christianity changed, evolved, sometimes revolutionarily over the years.
You know, I think it's different to be afraid or to criticize a philosophy, an ideology, a set of ideas called Islam versus how you treat an ordinary Muslim person.
I don't believe in discriminating against a person because they're Muslim.
I think we should treat people based on the content of their character, as Martin Luther King would say.
But I just don't think that you are, I don't think it's coherent to say you're not allowed to feel fear or negative emotions about a religion.
And you'll even notice that when the question was put to the labor cabinet minister, she had no idea how to define it.
And that's part of the beauty of it from the other side: it's so malleable, it's so vague, you can basically swallow up any criticism and say that's Islamophobia.
Boy Wish Tomorrow00:00:19
Well, that's our show for today.
Boy, I wish I could tell you now where I'm going to be tomorrow.
I can't, though, until I'm safely in that country.
But tune in tomorrow.
I'll be in the field all day long, tweeting up a storm with lots of videos.
Until then, on behalf of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.