Ezra Levant welcomes Ben Weingarten to critique Canada’s "fireproof house" complacency, exposed by Trump’s 25% tariff threats over immigration and fentanyl smuggling—now killing more than WWII casualties. Weingarten links Trudeau’s drug policies to China’s influence, citing CISAS claims of 11 pro-CCP MPs and 4.9M temporary residents with unclear exit plans. Levant contrasts Trudeau’s NATO summit chaos (riots while he traded bracelets) with Pierre Poilievre’s potential alignment, hinting at energy reforms like Keystone. Both argue Trump’s pressure could force Canada to abandon virtue signaling, prioritize sovereignty, and resist global censorship—benefiting North America’s future. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello, my friends, trying to wrap my head around what America is doing and how that could affect Canada.
Donald Trump will change our own country almost as much as he'll change his.
We have a feature interview with my friend Ben Weingarten, one of the smartest political commentators in the country.
I love that guy.
He works with the Federalist.
We'll have a full show with him today.
And very interesting.
I'm sort of excited about it.
It's going to be a little bit rough for Canadians who are used to, you know, Trudeau's mushiness, but in some ways, I think it'll improve us.
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Tonight, how will Donald Trump transform Canada because of his own American policies?
We'll talk to Ben Weingarten.
It's November 27th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious thug.
It was fascinating to see the reaction in Canada to Donald Trump doing two things.
Number one, lumping us in with Mexico when he made a threat of 25% tariffs if we don't get our border under control, both from an illegal migration point of view and from a drug smuggling fentanyl point of view.
So to be lumped in with Mexico, you saw sort of a haughty self-righteousness.
How dare you, sir?
But you saw something else, which is a terror that Canada had really been in an immature amateur foreign policy space for years.
And now suddenly we have to talk about grown-up things.
And we realize we really don't have a grown-up leader.
Our leader during the NATO conference in town was busy at a Taylor Swift concert.
Well, what does it mean?
What does it mean that Trump is already cracking the whip around the world and he's still two months away from being sworn in as president?
What other things are going on around the world?
Well, let's talk to one of our favorite Americans about that.
I'm talking about Ben Weingarten.
He's a journalist at the Federalist and a friend of Rebel News.
He joins us now via Sky.
Ben, great to see you again.
China's Influence Abroad00:12:37
Always a pleasure.
Thanks for having me, Ezra.
Well, thanks for coming on the show.
You know, I think Canada has been in an unreality for a while.
You know, there was an old saying in the 19th century, I think it was the 19th century, that Canada is a fireproof house far away from flammable materials.
That's what a Canadian diplomat said about 100 plus years ago.
And it's true.
Like, we've really never had a bad thing happen to us because of where we are.
We've always been lucky to be next to America.
I mean, sure, we did have that skirmish in the War of 1812, but everything's been friendly since then.
And there's a moral hazard there in that Canada can make performative statements about the world and not have to back it up with anything because we're safe over here.
But that's allowed a childishness to creep into our foreign policy, our military policy, and now our domestic policy.
And I feel like when Donald Trump said, get your border solved in two months, or I'm putting tariffs on on the first day, suddenly Canadians had to wake up and say, oh, there's some real life consequences here, and we can't just virtue signal.
That's how I see the whole thing.
What does it look like from an American's point of view?
Well, I think that's right.
And, you know, the issues which impact our border, the U.S. border, and our sovereignty, are the issues that are impacting all of the Western world, which is unfettered immigration without regard to assimilation, without regard to the composition of who is immigrating, how they're immigrating, et cetera.
There are all of these consequences to it.
And from the U.S. perspective, obviously, to the extent there aren't open borders to our north and open borders to our south, we already have a substantial amount of territory to protect and defend.
And so it makes inordinate sense when the mandate for the incoming Trump administration is to restore our borders, to restore sovereignty, to get a handle on immigration, those who are already within our borders to eject immediately criminal illegal aliens, those who are working on behalf of terrorist groups, transnational criminal organizations, adversarial regimes like the Chinese Communist Party, them out first.
And obviously, of course, in addition to dealing with the population already here, you want to prevent any additional illegal immigration.
And so it makes inordinate sense that the Trump posture immediately would be: what tools do we have in the toolbox to ensure that surrounding countries neutralize and deal with their own immigration issues, that they don't spill over into our borders?
And that, of course, involves the northern border and the integrity of it, as well as the southern border.
But, you know, to your point about Canada living in sort of a blissful existence, I mean, it's the same thing for the U.S. in many respects.
We're surrounded by oceans.
We've been blessed with these nations built on values and principles that are timeless, that have allowed us to prosper, to have peaceful, dynamic existences, but it can be squandered very quickly with the wrong policies.
And I think even there, I've seen footage recently of even Trudeau talking about, well, maybe we've gone a little far with the illegal immigration.
And you may take that as just rhetoric, and it probably is just rhetoric.
But there's a realization across the sort of globalist internationalist ruling class in the West that there's a populist nationalist backlash.
And the populist nationalist backlash is that the native citizens are being subordinated to non-citizens.
And there's something fundamentally wrong and unfair about that.
Countries are not putting their people first.
They're not operating from their first principles.
And consequently, it threatens the power of the ruling class.
That's probably why in part we've seen a tyrannical and totalitarian reaction from a lot of ruling class members in good standing in any number of capitals across the West.
But the bottom line is that if we are to have representative democracies, then what the people want should go.
The people ought to be sovereign.
We're not subjects.
We are the masters of our leaders.
And when that gets flipped on its head, it leads to disastrous outcomes.
But broad strokes, what Donald Trump is going to do is put America's national interest first.
And this policy of threatening tariffs, one tool in the toolbox, goes hand in hand with the idea of we're going to have mass deep in U.S. soil as well, because there's a mandate to do it.
It's good for the American public.
Hopefully it has a deterrent effect.
And hopefully it leads to self-deportation.
And hopefully it also leads to countries that are near abroad and are further abroad also managing their own sovereignty as well.
Because these are global issues, of course, when you're talking about transnational gangs, when you're talking about the Chinese Communist Party's infiltration, when you're talking about jihadists as well across the West.
You know, and by making these demands of Canada in a serious and frankly threatening way, it's causing a sobriety here that we haven't had in years.
All the things you've talked about.
I mean, right now, there is a senior credible allegation in this country by our version of the CIA called CISAS that there are 11 members of our parliament who were installed by the Chinese communists and installed because they gained the nomination process and they interfered and they bust in foreign nationals to vote who were temporarily in Canada.
Like it was quite a detailed operation.
I don't know if our country is taking those things seriously enough.
I don't think so.
But when Donald Trump says, guess what?
It's time to get serious.
And if you don't, we're going to devastate your economy.
A 25% tariff on Canadian goods to America would throw our country into a deep recession because we're so integrated.
I think Canadian pundits have to understand that's Trump saying, I really, really mean it.
It's not an economic war.
It's saying fix these non-economic things, the porous border, the drug sales, or we'll give you a punishment that's economic.
Like, I don't think Trump wants the tariffs.
I think he wants a proper border.
But it's up to Trump to make Canada grown up a little bit.
Hey, I want to play a clip for you.
In response to Trump's threat of the tariff, Canada's leader of the opposition, he had a tough balancing act because on the one hand, he despises Trudeau's policies, but on the other hand, he has to stand up for Canada.
And even if he agrees with Trump's substance, he can't be seen to be agreeing with threats against Canada.
So it was a very careful path he had to trod.
But I think he did it well.
He talked about Canada first and fixing those problems for Canada's sake, not because Trump wants it.
But he referenced this.
He said that in Canada, there are 4.9 million people who are here on a temporary basis and have to leave by the end of next year.
And he said to the government, do you have any plan on how to get them out?
And the answer was no.
And, you know, where will they go?
Will they go into America?
Will America's deportees come into Canada?
Here, look at this quick clip.
About a week ago, Justin Trudeau admitted that he broke our immigration system.
And that brings new challenges.
His own published documents show there are 4.9 million people here temporarily that are supposed to leave by December 31st of next year, 13 months from now, 4.9 million people.
We asked what the plan was to track their departures, and yesterday his immigration minister said, we're just going to take people at their word.
He admits that there have been two ISIS terrorists allowed into our country.
What is the plan to protect our security and reinstate sovereignty over who is in our country?
And finally, on drugs.
I don't want to stop drug overdoses to please Donald Trump.
I want to stop drug overdoses so that there's not one more mother with her face buried in a pillow sobbing that she just lost her kid after 47,000 other Canadians have died.
That's more than we lost in the Second World War.
A 200% annual increase in drug overdose deaths have resulted from Judge Justin Trudeau's radical liberalization of drugs.
Justin Trudeau must put partisanship aside, not just for the sake of Team Canada, but for the sake of our people and fully reverse his liberalization of drugs.
Ban them, prosecute those who traffic in them, secure our borders against the illegal importation of fentanyl ingredients, put people in treatment and recovery to bring our loved ones home drug-free.
That is necessary now more than ever.
I think that's the right response.
I mean, he's trying to sound like a grown-up in a country that is not being grown up.
Ben, I found that a shocking statistic.
And I like to think I follow Canadian immigration facts pretty closely.
4.9 million Canadians, that's more than 10% of our population, don't have tenure in this country.
I don't know if that's a big problem for America because I don't know if they're going to be going south anymore.
But the number of illegal crossings from the north to the south is skyrocketing.
It's not as bad as the Mexican side of the thing, of course, but it is growing very quickly.
What do you make of that statistic that you just heard?
Yeah, staggering.
You know, I was just looking at the total population size, and you're talking a country that's 40 million people, just an outrageous, overwhelming number.
And, you know, do the people have a voice in that?
Was there ever a referendum to say we want to have this high a percentage of folks purportedly temporarily there?
And do you really have a country at that point if you're talking about more than 10% of your population consisting of these purportedly temporary individuals?
And, you know, those numbers about, okay, two ISIS prosecutions potentially, or two ISIS members discovered how many countless others affiliated with the IRGC or with Hezbollah or with Hamas or with Al-Qaeda or any of the other umbrella groups, Shia or Sunni jihadist groups.
And what about Chinese nationals or what about agents of influence working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party or Russian agents of influence?
I mean, you can run down the list and just the responses from governments across the West, essentially, do not instill any confidence that they have any idea what the populations look like.
And, you know, there's a saying about in America, how America is an idea.
And of course, you know, there are the ideals on which the country is built.
There are the values and principles that are baked into the Constitution.
But it takes people to bring them to life and to manifest them and to fulfill them.
You don't have a country if you don't have the people who adhere to those values and principles at the end of the day.
So it's utterly outrageous, but I think this is a symptomatic of progressivism and progressive views that have prevailed across the West.
And then on that last point about the drugs, it's also worth noting, of course, that one of the key points of origin, really, when you look at the supply chain, so to speak, and the production and delivery of fentanyl is, of course, communist China.
And so you can call this a new opium war, essentially, that the Communist Chinese Party is engaged in against the rest of the Western world, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths across the West on these opiates.
And then you have progressive leaders who take a lax perspective and they basically want people to be able to ingest drugs in a safe fashion, as opposed to saving people's lives.
So they're basically doing the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party at the end of the day.
Nightmare On Drugs Street00:03:16
Utterly outrageous.
And it just speaks to the delusional views and ultimately the disastrous views held by far too many in the Western ruling class elite.
Yeah, it's, I mean, Trudeau has really emphasized the legalization of hard drugs.
And I recently had the experience of going to San Francisco's tenderloin district, which is one of the worst drug-infested neighborhoods.
And it was astonishing.
I went with Abiyamini as part of his RV trip across America.
Here's just a very quick clip of that.
Like, it was bad.
Take a look at this.
Is this city safe?
No.
No.
This is the most horrible place you could be in in San Francisco right now because it's like gunfire, yelling and screaming every day.
Everybody come out with the machetes, with the guns, AR, everything.
And that's why you think we should come out at night.
Yeah, to expose all this.
Yeah, walking zombies around here.
That's about it.
Is it easy to police this city?
Oh, no, absolutely not.
We're 600 short.
Yeah, that's a lot of people.
You say you're 600 cops short in the city.
How does that manifest itself?
Like, give any example of a problem that causes.
There's not enough police on the street.
So delayed calls for service, officer safety issues, because there's not enough people to back you.
As of right now, I hang out on the street.
I'm trying to get a job.
I just got out of jail, actually.
Where do you sleep?
Really?
I just stay up all night as of right now because I get my stuff stolen.
The moment you fall asleep out here, your stuff goes missing right away.
How is it living in this area?
Oh, man.
It's not safe.
And you can just walk around here by yourself.
You can do that, but then you never know what's going to happen.
This will put people crazy, you know?
Everything dead, everything closed down.
Can't do nothing.
Can't eat.
Can't shop.
All these restaurants got rats and roaches down here.
I don't eat down here.
They're robbing old people, even my mom and my sister, in front of our own house.
Democrats say they banned guns that it's safe now.
Is it not safe now?
I don't know.
I don't believe whatever they say.
I think it's a problem.
There's so many people on drugs.
They are drugs.
Why are so many people on drugs here?
Fentanyl.
It's killing people.
And they do it like it's water.
It's fit in all.
They need to get rid of that.
They need to get rid of a lot of things.
You see people having fentanyl, bidding over.
It's horrible.
I was smoking a cigarette.
I was smoking a cigarette, walking down the street.
Somebody blue fit dog in my face.
I almost died from that.
Get by the smelling of that almost killed me.
Did to bring me back to life.
What substances are you on?
Are you trying to get off them?
Yeah, fentanyl.
That's the boxing for it.
I'll try to wean myself off of it with.
How long you been on fentanyl?
About two and a half, three years.
But Ben, I got to tell you, the whole time I was in San Francisco, I was thinking, yeah, this is bad, but this is nothing compared to Vancouver's East Hastings Street.
Aggressive U.S. Government Leverage00:15:22
And even in Toronto, there's tense communities under underpasses.
That used to be purely an American phenomenon.
We held ourselves, we thought we were superior to that.
We thought, oh, that's American poverty.
And it's not just in big cities in Canada.
It's in medium-sized cities and even towns now.
I don't know.
It's just astonishing.
And what's incredible to me, as I'm trying to grapple with this, is Trump isn't president yet and not for two more months.
But simply by speaking with a combination of command and I would say threat, he's already causing the world to change and react.
Mexico has already said they will.
I think at the end of the day, Canadian business will say to Justin Trudeau, stop this border shenanigans or you will kill the auto industry.
You will kill the banking industry.
You will kill cross-border trade.
So I think that Trump is basically, in his rough way, achieving a policy outcome from Americans that is happy.
And I don't like Canada being threatened, so to speak.
But I think the outcome that will happen here is that Canada smartens up on immigration and drugs.
How's that not a win for Canada?
I just think it is, Ben.
Yeah, absolutely right.
And it is worth noting that in America in the 2024 election cycle, we did see a repudiation in any number of blue jurisdictions of the kinds of policies that, to your point, have led to the likes of the tender one district in San Francisco being completely anti-social and broken down.
So there is a pendulum swinging back.
Obviously, it's personified in Donald Trump, but it also goes down to state and local level elections as well.
But I think to your point, and he said this himself, I believe, that is the former president and now the incoming president, that his position with respect to the threats of tariffs ultimately, for example, in the economic focus, are about using tariffs as a lever to ultimately get back to genuine free trade, to get every side to drop their tariffs.
So it is a tactic.
It's not about a love of them for the sake of the tariffs, but as a tool in the toolbox to get to a desired outcome that ultimately is going to be better for every party, which, you know, in the case of economics and talking about European countries, for example, would be everyone dropping their barriers to trade.
So I think there's a realization of that on the economic side.
And then to your point here, this is really about using an economic lever to drive non-economic changes.
To your point, security changes, sovereignty changes, changes relating to the infiltration of drugs, the influx of drugs into the U.S., so from the North and the South.
It's not a bad faith effort.
It's a good faith effort.
And it's what are the tools in the toolbox?
And obviously, tariffs were a prominent part of U.S. policy for well over a century.
And it's really been a phenomenon in the last, call it 50 to 75 years in the U.S. where there's been less of a focus on them as a potential tool.
But it makes enormous sense.
If you're going to put your country first, you're going to use every tool in the toolbox, every arrow you have in the quiver to try and effectuate the changes that you want.
And to your point, this is going to be a win-win on both sides, but this is just one bargaining tool.
But it's made by a credible leader.
And that is the real difference at the end of the day is that foreign leaders know that Donald Trump means business.
Yes, this may be a negotiating tactic, but he's willing to go all the way.
And that's obviously imperative in any negotiation.
Yeah, I mean, literally the week Trump won the election, the Houthi terrorist group in Yemen announced it was going to stop hijacking freighters in the Red Sea.
There's only one reason they chose that date because they knew Trump was coming and they didn't want to be.
NATO leaders talking about upping their commitments all around the world.
You've seen immediately just the change in leader, the incoming change alone has caused a sea change.
And they disrespect the leaders, but through the disrespect, they had disrespected America for four years.
And it's like that meme that Trump always, that I see a lot, a very sober-minded Trump, and the words are, they're not coming for me.
They're coming for you, but I'm in the way.
There's some essential truth in that, is that Trump is the pointy edge of the spear, but it's Americans who will get the benefit of economic or national security benefit.
And what drives me nuts is how Canadians are saying Trump wants this lunatic economic policy of terrorist.
No, he doesn't.
It's the prod to get what he really wants.
It reminds me how I see some pundits saying, Trump will disarm NATO.
Trump will destroy NATO because Trump says if you don't increase your spending, we're out of here.
Well, of course, Trump wants them to increase their spending.
It's again a tactic, a lever.
You could say it's a threat.
And by the way, the old NATO boss loved it because Trump was scaring the NATO members into giving more because he was threatening to leave if they didn't to say, oh, Trump wants to destroy NATO.
No, he's making a credible threat that the other leaders respond to.
And that's the thing, Ben.
NATO had their summit in Montreal last week, which is a disgrace because Canada doesn't deserve it.
We're, I think, literally the last place in terms of our percentage of GDP towards the military.
And Trudeau couldn't even manage to hold the summit without having riots in the street by Islamists, by announcing he stood with Hamas and the International Criminal Court against Western allies.
Like, I don't think Canada had earned that NATO summit.
We're such a disgrace on the military side.
But even when it fell into our lap, Trudeau really didn't care about it.
He was at the Taylor Swift concert.
It was a bit of an embarrassment.
Did anyone in America even follow that?
I saw it on social media.
You could find it on X.
And of course, the powers that be here obviously want to cripple X, wanted to destroy Elon Musk, and he found himself or his businesses investigated by, I think I saw almost a dozen different agencies in the U.S.
But to that point, it was the split screen there of enjoying a concert, rioters out in the streets.
Again, the anti-social behavior on behalf of or executed by people who want to destroy our civilization and the values and principles and the people who have made Canada a great nation.
Again, I think this is just illustrative of the madness that has prevailed over far too much of the West.
And to your point, the sobriety that is coming very quickly when you have a populist nationalist leader leading America who says enough is enough.
And by the way, it's not just about making other countries pay their fair share to defend themselves and their people and combating free riding.
It's about having actual allies and partners, not client states who are reliant on America for everything and ultimately don't serve either side.
And that's a big change.
You know, I would argue that the Obama-Biden-Harris sort of view has actually been to try to create controllable client states, not allies and partners, preferring multilateral venues over bilateral negotiations.
And that's a massive change that you're going to see as well, is much more of a focus on bilateral relationships, burden sharing, everyone contributing equally to shared ends.
Otherwise, it just simply doesn't make sense.
What country would say that we're going to foot the bill disproportionately for institutions or PACs that end up disproportionately undermining that country?
It's just asinine.
No citizenry would want that from their leaders.
Yeah.
Now, you mentioned free speech and the platform X or Twitter, as I still call it, was how you saw the juxtaposition of the riots versus our carefree prime minister dancing like a teenage girl.
By the way, I'm not opposed to a guy going to a concert with his teenage daughter.
What was so bizarre to me is how Trudeau went around to talk to other teenage girls and trade what they call friendship bracelets.
I thought this is a deeply unserious man in serious times.
And I can hardly wait till he's replaced by Pierre Polyev, the conservative leader we showed earlier.
I think it'll be a productive fit, Polyev and Trump.
You know, unfortunately, we were mismatched.
We had the very serious Stephen Harper, who is a real conservative, matched with Obama.
Now, they managed to keep it together and actually be somewhat productive.
Then you had Trudeau and Trump together.
And then the last four years, you've had Trump and Biden.
But that did no favors to Canada, by the way.
I think that having Polyev and Trump together, I think both countries will be much stronger.
I think the two men will have a lot to talk about, including oil.
I'm very excited that the Keystone Pipeline is going to be green lit on day one, according to Trump.
That'll help both countries tremendously.
But back to free speech.
Elon Musk bet the farm on this.
I mean, you could see enemies of Musk saying if Biden wins, sorry, if Kamala Harris wins, we have to cancel contracts with Elon Musk's companies.
You could see they were already, as you say, investigating him through everything from the SEC to the Coastal Commission or whatever.
So Elon Musk bet the farm and he won for himself, but also for anyone who cares about free speech.
But look at this around the world, the attacks on X, the platform, the European Union, the European Commission writing a letter saying you better follow these rules.
The United Kingdom demanding that Elon Musk come and answer for the use of Twitter in some riots.
Like in Brazil, Lula seizing assets for Starlink because of a quarrel with Twitter.
Like all these censorship countries around the world who were gunning for Musk.
Well, now Musk is sort of like Batman and Robin or Batman and Superman with Trump.
And here in Canada, let me ask you this question.
Here in Canada, Justin Trudeau has introduced something called the Online Harms Act that would have massive fines for companies like Twitter, that would have massive censorship.
And Trudeau was going like a freight train, just like Keir Starmer in the UK, just like all the social democrat countries in Europe.
But now America, with Musk as co-pilot, is saying, no, free speech matters again.
How do you think America will treat, what will it do to so-called allies who want to fight with Elon Musk and censor the American company called Twitter?
What will Trump, with maybe Musk talking in his ear, do or say about would-be censors like Justin Trudeau and Keir Starmer?
Yeah, well, first, to your point, there are legislation, there's regulations out there in the EU.
For example, the Digital Services Act, we see in Australia, we see in the UK, and now I think you're talking as well to Canada and elsewhere, these crippling fines that can be put forth essentially if you don't adhere to the anti-free speech content moderation standards that these regimes want.
And this is a backdoor way from the American perspective for those of us who are fighting in the censorship industrial complex.
We see this as a backdoor way to curtail American speech by destroying the business models of these platforms or forcing them to adhere to policies that are going to stifle American speech on a whole slew of clearly protected buckets of rhetoric.
We did not have a situation before where you actually had a U.S. government that was going to be championing free speech on these platforms.
I wrote a piece about a month plus ago for Real Clear Investigations about this sort of global boomerang backdoor assault on American speech by attacking the platforms content moderate over content moderation standards, also trying to destroy their business models by getting advertisers to boycott them and beyond.
There's evidence to suggest, well, first of all, clearly that institutions, NGOs, for example, that the American government has either coordinated with or in some instances funded are behind some of these global anti-free speech efforts.
And then, of course, it boomerangs back on us.
You're going to have a sea change in the way of the fact that, first of all, Donald Trump himself, in a video that surfaced recently, but it's from 2022, I think maybe December of 2022, he put forth sort of his free speech agenda.
And essentially, he said, we're taking the federal government out of this business.
If you dry up the federal funds that go to both domestic and international organizations that are the ones pushing for and promulgating these rules, regulations, and laws, and also underwriting the NGOs that create the reports and the research that is used to say, look, there's a pandemic of dangerous misdis and malinformation, and consequently we need to censor you via these platforms.
When you dry up the government money behind the censorship industrial complex, it makes it infinitely harder for it to operate.
So that is one way in which I think you're going to see a sea change here.
But obviously, to your point, you have Trump essentially a one-man victim, first of all, of the censorship industrial complex, the platforms from all these entities.
Then you have standing next to him, Elon Musk, who they tried to destroy and make a $40 billion plus dollar investment go down to zero, who really literally put his money where his mouth was in defending free speech and bet it all, put all of his chips into the table.
As he said, he probably would have been arrested had Donald Trump not won.
Certainly, they would have tried to break and bankrupt him.
I think you're going to see an infinitely more aggressive U.S. government when it comes to using soft power where necessary as a lever to get other countries to take down these attacks on free speech defending and supporting platforms.
And we could very quickly go through a thought exercise and imagine all the different levers that can be used.
But there's basically been no resistance today.
I asked Biden administration officials, for example, the State Department, what are you doing to defend free speech against attacks from afar, global attacks on these platforms by way of these rules, regulations, and laws.
And essentially, I got a boilerplate response.
There's no way you're going to get that from a Trump administration because the Trump administration understands that fostering a dynamic, vibrant marketplace of ideals is essential to having a free country.
We don't have America without our First Amendment rights.
And the U.S. government's going to be out of the business of violating those rights.
And there's no way it's going to stand for foreign governments attacking Americans' rights through attacks on these platforms either.
Defunding Spies: Protecting Free Speech00:01:14
You know, you made me remember that the U.S. Naval Intelligence hired a military contractor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to do sort of an open source spying paper on rebel news.
I don't know if you ever heard that story, Ben, but we found out that the U.S. Navy was spying on it.
By the way, I'm pro-Navy.
You know, I'm worried about the People's Liberation Army Navy.
I just thought it was absolutely appalling.
And it was in the name of like what you say, disinformation.
And I mean, we couldn't be more pro-American as Canadians.
Listen, it's great to catch up with you.
I know you got to run.
And maybe another time we'll talk about the Department of Government Efficiency, Doge, as Musk calls it.
I think that's going to be part of it too.
You talked about defunding the instruments of censorship.
I think that really hacking away with large chunks at the permanent bureaucracy, defunding, disrupting, even abolishing agencies may in some ways be the longest lasting legacy of Trump.
I know you got to run.
Thanks for spending so much time with us today, Ben.