Ezra Levance critiques Justin Trudeau’s policies—like removing Sir John A. Macdonald from the $10 bill, altering the anthem, and selective genocide claims—arguing they erode Canadian identity while praising Danielle Smith’s sovereignty stance. He links Trudeau’s leadership to economic decline, border failures, and fentanyl crises, contrasting it with Harper’s strength. Levance and Mark Milke’s The Victim Cult condemn endless historical grievances, from Indigenous discrimination to slavery, as barriers to progress, citing the Good Friday Accords’ success over Hamas-style conflict. Cultural Marxism’s shift to race/gender divides in wealthy nations traps societies in blame cycles, stifling solutions like free markets or rule-of-law prosperity. Meanwhile, tech giants Google and YouTube’s censorship of Rebel News costs $10M in lost ad revenue, fueling distrust in platforms. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my friends, I want to share with you my theory about why Trump's jibes and jokes and trolling comments about Canada being the 51st state hit so hard with some people.
I want to show you some video clips of different reactions to it.
I want to tell you why I think Trudeau is actually to blame.
That's today's show.
To see the video of it, I'd like to show you some clips.
So make sure you get the video version of the podcast.
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You can call them at 905-631-5462 or email them at info at rocklink.com.
That's Rocklink with a C. Info at rocklink.com.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Why Canadians Are So Sensitive00:15:42
Tonight, why are so many Canadians so sensitive about Trump's 51st state comments?
I'll give you my theory.
It's January 9th, and this is the Ezra Levance Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
So why are Trump's 51st state comments resounding so loudly in Canada?
I mean, take a look at some of this reaction.
Well, I think Prime Minister said it right.
There isn't a chance in hell it's going to happen.
They'd have to find us on a map, but it'll take them maybe a few years.
Look, I said a couple weeks ago, this is like an episode of South Park.
I'll start to get worried when they confirm Eric Cartman as the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Like, this is silly.
It's unbecoming, frankly, of a president.
Any president that would say that.
But we do have to take it seriously.
Well, I know under my watch for Ontario, it would never be for that at all.
We have the greatest country in the world.
We have the greatest province anywhere.
Any sub-sovereign nation is Ontario and the rest of the provinces as well.
You think he's joking?
You know something to the president?
I'll make him a counteroffer.
How about if we buy Alaska and we'll throw in Minnesota and Minneapolis at the same time?
So, you know, it's not realistic.
I know he likes making these comments and he likes joking around.
I take that seriously.
He may be joking, but under my watch, that will never, ever happen.
Hey, Donald, have we got a deal for you?
You think we want to be the 51st state?
Nah, but maybe California would like to be the 11th province.
How about it?
California, Oregon, Washington?
You've got geography in common goes.
And not only that, we've already got a carbon trading system between California and Quebec.
We've got some strong alliances on our west coast from British Columbia.
There's been a lot of academic papers on the idea of Cascadia.
So California, Governor Inusom, and Washington State, Jay Inslee, and newly elected governor of Oregon, Tina Kotak.
How about it?
Want to put a referendum to your citizens?
Because this is what you deal.
Have we got a deal for you?
This is what you get.
Free health care.
Universal free health care.
No more one-year-olds who suddenly fall off the Medicaid list and their parents are in the news because they're trying to do a GoFundMe so they can get their daughter to a doctor.
Universal, free health care.
And guess what?
Those gun laws that your Congress is too afraid to pass because of the national gun lobby, we already got our strict gun laws.
That's why we have the safest streets around the world.
Or at least in the United States, by the way, the most recent stats, 5.9 out of every 100,000 people is killed in a fatal gun incident versus 0.88 per 100,000 in Canada.
We already have good gun laws and women have a right to an abortion under our universal health care system.
But, you know, we don't have to stop there.
Donald, think about it.
You could get rid of all these states that always vote Democrat.
You know what else?
We'll take Bernie Sanders off your hands.
Proud new Canadian citizen of the great province of Vermont.
Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine.
We'd love to see you.
Our maritime provinces already have deep, deep links and ties.
Well, enough kidding around.
But honestly, President Trump, get used to it.
Canada is a sovereign nation full of, guess what, proud Canadians.
We're not jingoistic.
We don't boast a lot.
That's one of the things we kind of have in common with Jimmy Carter.
We're not a big nation for braggarts and bullies.
We actually like to think we're of service in the world.
We could do better.
We can always do better.
But we love our country.
And it's a country.
It's a nation.
And we do not aspire to be the 51st state.
So let's not hear that anymore.
If it was a joke, it was never funny.
And it ends now.
Elizabeth May was my favorite.
She talked about annexing California.
I think part of the reason why we're so sensitive, or at least our ruling class is so sensitive about this, by the way, about a third of Canadians, I think, would welcome this.
I think Trudeau himself is to blame, actually.
When Justin Trudeau first won election in 2015, he told an American newspaper, not a Canadian newspaper, he told the New York Times, and I quote, there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.
He said we're, quote, the first post-national state.
Where did he get off saying that?
It wasn't true.
But since then, he's gone about making that true, hasn't he?
He's taken our founding prime minister off the $10 bill and generally purging Sir John A. MacDonald from all public discussion other than calling him a racist.
Trudeau has altered our national anthem.
Who let him do that?
He's accused Canada and therefore Canadians of committing a genocide against our Indigenous people.
But, you know, he won't say that same word about China and its treatment of the Uyghurs, even though they have a million of them in a concentration camp.
Trudeau has removed historical symbols from our passport, just little symbols, just to tell us to forget who we are.
Trudeau regularly accuses Canadians of being racist and sexist and transphobic, even though he's the one who dressed up in blackface and he's the one who sexually assaulted Rose Knight in Creston, B.C.
He just said he experienced it differently than she did.
Remember that?
It's not just one side of the story that matters.
That the same interactions could be experienced very differently from one person to the next.
And I am not going to speak for the woman in question.
I would never presume to speak for her.
But I know that there is an awful lot of reflection to be had as we move forward as a society on how people perceive different interactions.
Like I said, I do not feel that I acted inappropriately in any way.
But I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently.
And this is part of the reflections that we have to go through.
Trudeau has devalued our citizenship, giving millions of foreigners unvetted access to Canada.
Did you see that little social media video circulating in the past couple of days?
Take a look at this.
The world's laughing at us.
It didn't used to be that way.
Trudeau actually says we have lots to learn from returning ISIS terrorists.
Remember that?
There's a range of experiences when people come home, but we know that actually someone who has engaged and turned away from that hateful ideology can be an extraordinarily powerful voice for preventing radicalization in future generations.
Some immigrants probably really want to know more about Canada and how to be Canadian.
Trudeau is opposed to that.
He scrapped the Canadian citizenship test for new Canadians.
You don't have to know anything about Canada anymore.
Other national symbols, well, he's denuded our military to the point where we can't even participate in NATO war games because we lack modern equipment to fly along next to our allies.
But he can afford tampon dispensers in male bathrooms on Canadian forces basis, you bet.
You know, Canada's Veteran Affairs Department now constantly recommends assisted suicide to vets with PTST.
They claim it's a mistake every time, but they keep doing it.
I could go on, in short, Justin Trudeau has done everything to demoralize Canada, to denature us, to de-racinate us, to cut us off at the roots.
That's why Trump's statements about becoming the 51st state sting.
That's why they hit home, because for a decade, Trudeau and every institution in the country, the regime media, they've been awful, the universities, the courts, the parliament, worst of all, school for young people.
They've said Canada means nothing.
Actually, if it means anything, it means bad things, colonialism, settlers, climate crimes.
Every one of Trudeau's actions says Canada means nothing.
Canada's just a hotel.
Well, Donald Trump knows a little bit about hotels, doesn't he?
Why wouldn't he try to buy one, especially one that's for sale cheap?
It's dilapidated.
You know, we really should rehabilitate Sir John A. MacDonald.
Think about when he was prime minister.
He understood why Canada was not America.
We could be friends.
We could be best friends, but we were different.
It's one of the reasons why he built the Canadian Pacific Railway.
He saw America eyeing Western Canada.
Remember, they had just bought Alaska from the Russians.
And if you think BC is disconnected from Ottawa today, imagine what it was like back then.
No railway, no telephones.
That's why they called it the Canadian Pacific Railway.
It was his way of bolting the country together so America didn't take all the land all the way up.
They call it Manifest Destiny.
And look at that name, CPR.
Canada is different now.
I think the CPR is actually owned by Americans.
Isn't that symbolic?
Now, some of the differences between us and Americans, they're not that big.
I mean, we're more passive than them.
I think we can admit that.
We don't fight for our freedoms as hard as they do.
I mean, remember, they were born in a revolution, a military revolution.
We sort of had an evolution or a devolution, you could say.
We were created by the British North America Act, an act of parliament, weren't we?
That's why we still have the king.
That's why we, you know, by the way, there's a lot to be said for it.
After the U.S. Revolutionary War, people who were loyal to King George, they moved north in big numbers.
They were called the United Empire loyalists.
They came to Ontario mainly.
That was 250 years ago, but it's still in our blood, you know.
I wish we had more American weather up here.
I don't think we can ever change that.
But many of the other reasons to love America are things that we used to have here, but have been taken away from us.
We used to be more prosperous.
I don't know if you remember this, but under Stephen Harper, we actually reached the point where the average Canadian was earning more than the average American.
It's hard to even believe that because now we're as poor as Mississippi.
Our Canadian dollar, actually, I don't, do you remember this?
Used to be worth more than a U.S. dollar.
So going to the U.S. was cheap and fun.
I remember people were buying cars in the U.S. and driving them up because they were so cheap given our dollar.
Canada was always smaller than America, but we were proud, weren't we?
I mean, Stephen Harper made our voice heard on everything from Israel to Russia to Ukraine to China to India.
And there were Canadian values that he projected around the world.
Trudeau flipped that around, didn't he?
We don't project Canadian values to the world anymore, do we?
We have imported foreign values, as Trudeau panders to every foreign diaspora here, especially the pro-Hamas extremist.
He's brought in by the million.
That's where we are now.
After 10 years of getting poorer and getting more alienated, more demoralized in our own home.
Can you blame someone, especially someone who can't make ends meet, someone who's being called a racist by Trudeau?
Can you blame someone who says, yeah, maybe we should be part of the USA?
For one thing, under Donald Trump at least, they're proud again, aren't they?
They have hope again.
They're patriotic.
Again, Trudeau turned the flag and the anthem into hate symbols in Canada.
They really did after the trucker convoy.
Trump loves patriotism.
I don't think we need to be taken over by the United States, though.
I say that as someone who is patriotic, but I say that as a matter of common sense.
I mean, you can have your best friend live right next to you as your neighbor, but you wouldn't join your houses together.
You'd still have doors and probably a fence between your properties.
Could be your best friend, but you don't actually join your houses together.
I believe in selling our resources to the U.S. as our best happy customer.
Trudeau doesn't.
He cut off all sorts of pipelines, didn't he?
I like having an ease of travel between us.
I like having a military alliance with America.
They protect us from the bad guys.
I like being next to the freest, safest country in the world as opposed to being in a rougher neighborhood like Israel or Taiwan or even Australia.
That's just dumb luck, though.
Trump is angry with Canada.
More to the point, I think he's angry at Trudeau.
He's angry that illegal migrants and illegal drugs come across our border into the states.
Not as much as on the Mexican border, but we were supposed to be good buddies, weren't we?
Again, good neighbors have good fences.
Trump is angry that we're pro-Hamas and pro-China and that we've neglected our military.
I'm angry about those things too, by the way, and I'm not an American.
The great irony is that Trump is demanding that we do things that we ought to do in our own interests, not his interests.
Fix our borders, stop the drugs, stop the illegals.
Trudeau literally won't.
He needs a foreigner to tell him that.
As I've said before, Trudeau actually wants a trade war with Trump.
Trudeau wants to be the hero defending Canada against the foreign menace.
And everyone cool hates Trump, right?
Well, not quite so much anymore, actually.
I think a lot of Canadians sort of like Trump these days.
And everyone hates Trudeau.
I saw him at 16% in the polls.
Trump is ahead of Trudeau in Canadian polls, believe it or not.
But Trudeau wants the tariffs so he can blame Trump and blame the bad economy on Trump instead of the last nine years of Trudeau's own budgets.
By the way, it's not 100% certain that Trudeau is gone.
He said he will resign, but he didn't give a specific date now, did he?
And maybe he'll change his mind.
His father, Pierre Trudeau, resigned in 1979.
Then Joe Clark won and was a disaster.
And Pierre Trudeau decided to come back again in 1980.
And he did his worst work in that last bonus term, including the national energy program.
Pierre Polyev's Rise?00:10:48
You don't think that Justin Trudeau knows that history?
Trudeau Jr. isn't necessarily done.
And he might even ask the governor general to end the prorogation and call a snap election.
I don't know.
It could happen.
It's just nuts that we don't have a working government during this crisis.
Here's Trudeau storming out of a liberal caucus meeting earlier today.
Just take a look.
He left after 30 minutes.
It was a six-hour meeting.
Take a look.
Yikes.
You left after half an hour.
He probably spoke for 25 minutes of that.
We know it wasn't pretty.
I'd love to hear what actually went on in there.
But back to the United States.
Look, I love America very much.
I love Italy.
I love the United Kingdom.
I love Israel.
There are other countries that I love.
I love Japan.
But I wouldn't want to move there or live there or be citizens of there.
Canada is my home.
My family's been here since 1903, which is a long time in Canada.
I want to be able to visit the U.S. and enjoy the economic prosperity of being their neighbor.
And I want to be under their security umbrella, don't you?
But I don't feel the need to join their country to do that.
We just need to fix our own country up a bit.
It's amazing to see liberals and the regime media who have disparaged our country for 10 years suddenly find their nationalism again just because Donald Trump has questioned it.
Isn't that something?
I think Pierre Polyev will be the prime minister before the end of the year.
And I think he'll end the circus.
I think he'll be Canadian first, but he won't taunt Trump or take the bait.
I think the two countries will be partners.
By the way, I don't know if you saw the video in a press conference yesterday.
Donald Trump referred to the conservative leader of Canada.
He didn't even know Pierre Polyev's name, and he said Polyev might win or might not win.
That tells me that Polyev and Trump have never spoken.
And the Conservatives of Canada have deliberately stayed away from Donald Trump.
I think because they're afraid of being labeled pro-Trump or MAGA North.
You know, the Liberals tried out that Maple MAGA slur.
It didn't catch on.
I think that Donald Trump simply doesn't know that the cavalry is coming, that Pierre Polyev is coming to liberate us from Justin Trudeau.
He doesn't know that.
I think if he knew Pierre Polyev, I think he would have a different tone, and I think he would work with him.
51st state of the United States.
The leader of the Conservative Party of Canada said, under no circumstances, I'll ever be the 51st state.
Maybe he won't win, but maybe he will.
Listen, I don't care what you're saying, Mr. Rofaz.
You said you were considering military force to acquire Panama and Greenland.
Are you also considering military force to annex and acquire Canada?
No.
Economic force.
Because Canada and the United States, that would really be something.
If I were Greenland, I wouldn't be so sure of an amicable ending.
But really, if you look at Greenland, it's a nearly empty landmass, largely covered in snow, where the U.S. already has a major military presence.
Same with the Panama Canal that Trump is talking about.
America built the Panama Canal, and incredibly, 38,000 Americans died building that.
I couldn't believe that number.
I looked it up.
It's true.
A lot of them died from malaria building it.
I think Donald Trump is going to get the Panama Canal back by any means necessary, including military, by the way.
But obviously, that doesn't apply to Canada, and Trump admitted as much.
Trump is talking tough, and Trudeau literally has no idea what to do with it.
The Canadian who does, the best at least, is not a federal politician, not an ambassador, but the Premier of Alberta.
Let me show you Danielle Smith's entire interview the other day, just masterful.
This room about a week or so ago, but she's just nailing every point.
I want to show you the whole thing.
It was great.
Take a look.
It's wonderful to have you on the program today.
Thank you for being here.
We've seen Canada already shift more officers to patrol the border in preparation for a new administration.
We also know these Canadian ministers are in Florida having conversations.
What do those conversations look like, given what we've seen over the course of the last four years?
Well, I think that they've been very positive.
I know that we had started in our province, and our province borders Montana.
We had started the process realizing that we needed to do more work on the border and addressing the issue of fentanyl.
So we had already started identifying some specialty teams so that they could go to the border, do special commercial vehicle checks, have dogs so that they can sniff out drugs, make sure that we have a band on the border so that if people are coming and going, not an official border crossing, they're probably up to no good and they're going to be stopped.
And we also have a plan to put in some aerial vehicles, whether it's drones or some other kind of aerial surveillance.
And I think you're going to see that that is going to be built out over the rest of the country.
The federal government announced $1.3 billion to be able to do it.
And I think they're going to hammer down some of the details when Dominic LeBlanc and Melanie Jolie visit Mar-a-Lago this week.
Danielle, we know that you know Kevin O'Leary through some business partnerships.
We spoke with him yesterday and he said that half of Canadians actually favored Trump's proposal for Canada to join the U.S.
Well, you know, we've watched the European experiment, which hasn't turned out very well.
In fact, you've actually seen it now begin to bust apart as the UK say that it's not working for them.
So I would say that we have a really solid, strong relationship as two sovereign countries.
We've got this wonderful partnership that we've had since 1993.
There's always going to be trade tensions, but I would say that if we could work on that relationship and also work on some of the border issues, have the Americans know that we really do want to be a partner in addressing not only our cross-border security issues, but also more internationally, the threat of China, the threat of Russia, being able to help our allies.
We think that Canada and Alberta in particular can be a really strong partner in that and as two separate sovereign nations.
I've got to ask you about Wayne Gretzky because President Trump obviously floated his name.
He had a meeting with the great one there.
And he mentioned that Wayne Gretzky should run for prime minister of Canada.
I think it was kind of said in a playful manner, but do you think there'd be any interest there from Canadians and Wayne Gretzky himself?
I can tell you, we call him the great one in Canada for good reason.
And I have always been such an incredible Wayne Gretzky fan from when I was a kid.
But one thing I would say about Gretzky, he always said, don't go where the puck is, go where the puck is going.
And I can tell you in our country, the place the puck is going is conservative leader Pierre Polyev.
He is going to, I think, win the next election.
And I think he's going to be an incredible partner for the U.S. on reducing taxes and trying to get our trade relationship back on track.
So I think it may have been a playful comment, but I think the name people need to start hearing about is Pierre Polyev.
Madam Premier, I just want to circle back to something you said because you're talking about how the United States and Canada can partner and have strength moving forward.
But I'm still wondering where the deficit was over the last four years.
Why did more fentanyl come over the border?
Why did illegals cross the border from the north into this country?
That's something we've talked about with Congresswoman Claudia Tenney in New York specifically about.
I'm just wondering why Canada didn't do its part to just say, you know what, we're going to continue and keep our standards the same, keep the border safe, and not go along with this.
Well, I think you've seen it in the U.S.
I mean, I've been watching all the shows about Purdue Pharma and all of the lawsuits that have been happening.
We have lawsuits in our country as well about what started off as I think the big lie that you could have a safe supply of opioids caused a lot of addiction.
And then when we started trying to cut that off, people turned to street drugs.
And then, of course, with COVID, I think what happened is that that population of organized crime and criminals ended up taking over our large centers.
So when we emerged after COVID, we ended up with a big problem.
So we've all been trying to play catch up after that.
Also, in our country, we used to have pretty strict visa requirements of people coming in to our through the airports.
And some of those visa requirements were relaxed.
And we ended up with way more people coming into the country than we expected.
So we've brought those visa requirements back.
And so I think there's just been a couple of mistakes that have been made, but I think they're all correctable.
And I think there's a will on the part of Canada and the U.S. to work together to make sure we're not causing problems at each other's borders.
Madam Premier, we so appreciate your time today.
We'd love to have you back in the new year.
Thank you.
I thought she did great.
Positive upbeat, pro-Canadian, but respectful of Trump, showing friendship, the exact opposite of Trudeau.
Danielle Smith, frankly, is going to save our relationship with America if anyone does.
So yeah, Rebel News is for an independent Canada.
Now, I love America as much as you do.
We absolutely understand why Trump is furious with our broken border, our lack of a military commitment, our pro-China, pro-Hamas foreign policy, the fact that Trudeau is such a loser generally.
You don't think I get that?
I get that.
But we can fix those things.
A lot of those things get fixed immediately in the next federal election.
We can get back to a time when Canada was America's best friend, but independent.
I've been doing some American interviews.
I say it's like Batman and Robin.
You know, I mean, we're our own person.
We can be the junior partner, but we're our own person.
That's the way to be.
By the way, if you want to turn an American off of this dream of a Knicks in Canada, in about 30 seconds, just remind them that there are 9 million Canadians in Quebec who expect bilingualism in French.
And then follow up with, you know, you'll have another California on your hands when it comes to the Electoral College.
I mean, Canada will likely vote Democrat.
I don't know for sure.
I mean, Alberta, Saskatchewan might vote Republican, but I mean, what's Doug Ford other than a left-wing Democrat?
I think if you remind people in America, you're going to have this electoral block in the presidential vote.
I think it cools them off pretty quickly of annexing Canada.
Look, I love America, but I love Canada more.
It's hard to love Canada right now because it's so broken and we are literally being invaded by Trudeau's migrants.
But I haven't given up on it just yet, and I don't think you should either.
Stay with us for more.
Ancestral Shadows00:10:20
up next an interview i recently did with mark milkey excited about our next guest He really is a Renaissance man.
He's a scholar.
He's a builder, a founder of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.
And of course, at heart, he's an ideas man.
He is a writer, and he's got a new book.
It's called The Victim Cult: How the Grievance Culture is Wrecking Civilization.
What a pleasure to be joined now by our friend Mark Milke, who joins us from Calgary.
Mark, great to see you again, and congratulations on the new book.
Ezra, thanks for having me.
And, you know, I'm happy to have this new book out.
So it's great to be interviewed on it.
You know, it is so easy emotionally to give up and say, I'm a victim.
I am not the captain of my own ship.
Bad things that happen to me, it's someone else who did this to me.
Therefore, I don't have to take responsibility for it.
I can mope, and there's sort of a misery loves company thing.
There is some satisfaction in moping and blaming others.
But that's not the right way to be for people.
It's not the right way to be for entire nations.
Is it?
Tell me more about your thesis behind the victim cult.
Sure.
Well, the reason I wrote this book, and it took a very long time to write, about seven years in total, is because I've done a lot of work on indigenous issues over the years.
And there are some tremendous examples of Indigenous leaders who say, look, obviously some harm and some discrimination was rife in Canadian history.
But the person who wrote the foreword to the victim cult, Alice Ross, former First Nations elected chief in British Columbia on the coast of British Columbia with a high slum nation, set the tone for the book in that you can't allow the past to trap you as a person or as a group of people in the past because that's no way to create a better future without being flipping about it, right?
And Alice is not, and I'm not in the book.
The danger is, is when people concentrate on the past and the victimization, sometimes it's imagined and sometimes it's real.
And we shouldn't deny the latter.
When you concentrate on the past to a great degree and blame everything in the present on the past, you really go in circles.
And you see flourishing cultures around the world in history, which is part of what this book did, that even when they were heavily discriminated against, as Indigenous Canadians were in the past, as Asian Canadians were between 1850 and 1950, literally in law and in policy, and Jewish people, as you all know, Ezra, also discriminated against in institutional ways before the 1950s, 1960s reforms.
Nonetheless, they were able to progress and push back.
And so part of the message of the victim cult is without denying the wrongs of the past, you better look at what leads to successful outcomes for peoples and entire groups today.
Otherwise, you end up not making any progress.
And Palestinians, by the way, vis-a-vis Israel, are a great example of this.
And I profile them in an entire chapter in the victim cult.
Yeah, I think it was Henry Kissinger who said the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
And it's almost as if they had, at least their leadership, chose not to have a happy ending to their story because they loved the process of grievance more than they loved the outcome.
You know, I saw a tweet from Elon Musk the other day when he was talking about racism and slavery.
And he said, I'm paraphrasing, he said, everyone in the world is descended from a slave.
And I think he's probably right.
And I think he had another line about, and many of us are descended from slave owners.
And he wasn't talking about in the last generation or even the five generations.
I think he's talking about maybe over the course of thousands of years, because it's true that even in the medieval feudal systems, there were indentured servants and people tied to the land as peasants.
And if all you do is try and relitigate the past and either blame someone whose great, grandfather was a slaveholder or seek victim status because your great, great, great, great grandfather was a slave, you're never going to break free from that oppressor-oppressed dichotomy.
You're never, it's like an endless feud with the past, isn't it?
Well, it is.
And there are a number of things when you think about slavery and the arguments these days about restitution or compensation.
There are a number of things to point out.
Number one, look, I'm in favor of compensation and restitution where wrong has been done in recent history.
So, for example, if you're sitting in 1950 and you're looking at Japanese Americans or Japanese Canadians, it was absolutely the right thing to do to provide restitution for the property they stole and for the time they spent in internment camps.
That makes sense.
It was a theft of property, a theft of years of their life.
Likewise, in the late 1700s, Quakers actually compensated their slaves that they freed because they realized a great wrong they've been done.
But that's a pretty short cause and effect timeline.
If people now want to go back 200 years and say, you should compensate me because my family was enslaved, that really kind of stretches, I think, the timeline for, you know, and basically who's to blame.
So the closer you are to an event, sure, there's some argument, and I point that out in the book for compensation in the short term.
If I step on your foot, Ezra, and I break it, maybe I owe you a medical bill or whatever.
But the further you go back on slavery, what's really fascinating, when I researched the victim cult, one of the chapters in there is all about slavery.
And people forget this.
It was such a worldwide phenomenon and, you know, regrettably taken for granted that people were naturally unequal and some should be slaves.
But even white Europeans and white Brits were slaves.
A lot of the Moorish and Muslim ships from the Mediterranean went all the way even to like southern England and captured slaves off the coast of England for centuries between the late 1500s, all the way up to the 1700s.
This was a problem.
Moorish ships that came and enslaved Europeans to the degree of a million people.
Now, a million people is not as great as the Arab-African slave trade or the Atlantic slave trade between the Americans, the Americas, and Africa.
Nonetheless, people forget that even Arabs and others were enslaving Europeans.
And in fact, the term slavery, even that's where Slav comes from, initially slaves in Europe.
So unfortunately, it was a tragic worldwide phenomenon, which the British and imperial power, the colonialists that everyone likes to beat up on today, who were the ones that really ended slavery in human history.
And there was a reason for that.
And so why I wrote the victim cult, one of the reasons is to say, it doesn't do much good to say your ancestors beat up on my ancestors.
It goes around, you know, and everybody's ancestors beat up on everybody else's ancestors to put not too fine a point on it, if you go back far enough in human history.
So again, the question people have to ask themselves is, again, beyond tight cause and effect links that are provable and recent, what kind of a country do you want going forward?
And it's not a good idea to have one based on historic grievances.
I mean, that's why so many of our ancestors left Europe.
We retire to the fighting.
You know, I just can't help but mention you talked about slave trades of people we don't think of when we think of slaves.
And I visited Ireland a few times in the last year, and I discovered that an entire town called Baltimore, the entire town, was raided by slaves.
And one or two, I think, had their freedom.
They were ransomed.
The rest were taken to a slave market in North Africa.
An entire town, I guess it was more like a village.
Well, this is one of the reasons why the Americans in the late 1700s began to set up a navy because they couldn't protect their commercial shipping.
This literally was why the Americans set up a Navy.
People forget that their ships were being picked off in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean.
I think the idea of the victim cult is so appealing because it's so easy.
You don't have to work hard.
You don't have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
You don't have to force your mind to be productive and positive to get over a grievance.
Everyone in the world has a grievance.
Every single person in the world has a grievance.
And it's hard to overcome that.
But if someone says, you don't have to overcome that, you are the oppressed person.
You didn't do this to yourself.
And by the way, I can get you some goodies.
Like, I think of what our schools teach.
Everything, you know, cultural Marxism, which includes critical race theory, I would say that critical gender theory and transgender theory.
It's all, there's a group of terrible people who we can judge stereotypically, call them all bad.
And you're one of the all good people.
I mean, that's, you can see that narrative in the pro-Hamas protests.
They're saying any resistance to Jews or Israel is justifiable.
So they're justifying even horrific terrorism, and they're justifying their own hatred towards Jews who have nothing to do with a particular political quarrel.
I just, I think it's so deeply rooted in all our institutions of learning.
If you ask me, the number one thing being taught in universities in 2025, it's not math or science or history.
It's cultural Marxism.
It's think of yourself as either a victim or an oppressor.
That's what land acknowledgements are at the beginning of any meeting.
That's just saying we're oppressors and sorry for existing.
They're not actually serious about giving back the land yet.
I don't know.
I just, I think this is a much bigger problem than, you know, yeah, it shot through our culture.
Look, in the victim cult, I write about, I'm not sure there's both sides in this or that the left-right spectrum makes any sense anymore.
It's been messed up for years then.
But, you know, when Donald Trump claims to be a victim of election fraud in 2020, and he knows better, and he knows he's not.
And some of your listeners are going to disagree, I know, but I don't care because he wasn't a victim of election fraud.
So I pick on both sides of this, but you're right.
The cultural Marxists who see everything through the lens of victimhood are perhaps part of the bigger problem here.
I mean, they've set the stage for this nonsense.
Also, it's a faulty view of the economy.
Cultural Marxists and Victimhood00:04:18
If you go back and think, look, your ancestors, beat up my ancestors, or vice versa, and that somehow there was just this pot of money that someone stole centuries ago, it kind of overlooks the growth of the capitalist economy in much of the world over the last two or three centuries, which had nothing to do with plundering other people's cultures.
It came from creating something new as an entrepreneur, for example.
So there's been a great development in the world economy.
And you can't blame much of what the inequality you see today or the remaining poverty, which hasn't been wiped out by markets for various reasons, due to some event that happened 200 to 300 years ago.
Usually has to do with more banal things today, like regulation that prevent people from moving forward or inflation or that sort of thing, which creates inequalities.
So part of the problem of thinking like a permanent victim is, let's go back to the Palestinian issue.
It prevents you from progressing.
If you look at other Arab nations, Qatar, if you look at Hong Kong before the Chinese regime took it back and made a mess of it in the last 10 years, you will see that cultures can progress with the rule of law, property rights, a free economy.
And that's what makes people progress.
It doesn't help to focus on the past at infinitum.
And the Palestinians have made the mistake.
They could have been Singapore by now.
They could have been Hong Kong if, you know, since the early 1970s onward, after the Israelis held the West Bank in Gaza, they produced leaders that said, look, we're going to work within the system for now and prove that we're not out to kill everybody on the other side of this border.
But they've had bad leaders time and again, including Yasser Arafat.
One of the examples I give in the victim cult as a comparison to Yasser Arafat is Jerry Adams and Marty McGinnis, Martin McGinnis, Sinn Féin and provisional IRA leaders, respectively.
They did a deal with the British and got to the Good Friday Accords in 1998.
And it's not because they weren't terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists in both cases.
It's because they wanted to get to a peace treaty more than they wanted dead Brits.
And they eventually came to that conclusion.
And they would crack down on their own side in those negotiations, including one author I quote, you know, basically says they probably fed information to the British to try and crack down some of the more even more radical sales than the ones they are involved with when they wanted a peace treaty.
The Palestinian leadership has not done this.
And the Palestinians, unfortunately, are a great example of they've suffered from poor leadership that has wanted dead people on the other side of the border rather than more than they wanted a peace treaty in all these decades.
Whereas Israel has proved in its deals with Egypt, Jordan, and the Abraham Accords more recently, they will do peace treaties if they can find a partner on the other side.
But a lot of Palestinians, I regret to say, are so enmeshed in the victim narrative, they can't get beyond it.
You know, let me close with one more thing about Marxism, because Marxism in its original form was about the working class and the means of production.
It was about prosperity.
It was about who gets the stuff.
And you can imagine when people were so poor in general and the Industrial Revolution was fairly new, there was spectacular wealth amidst great poverty, and that was on people's minds.
These days, we're so wealthy and so luxury, we have to invent new luxury grievances about gender or race and these fine degrees of things to complain about because, you know, the working class in 2025 would be astonishingly rich 100 years ago.
And a fun way to look at that is things like that movie by Matt Walsh, What is a Woman?
He goes to very poor third world countries and asks them, what is a woman?
And they laugh and they answer clearly because they're so worried with basic level prosperity questions, they haven't had enough idle time to worry about cultural Marxism.
What is a woman?
And I think that in a way, the victim cult is a proof that we have so much free time and so much luxury and so much excess wealth and so few real problems that Karl Marx himself would have identified as real problems.
So now we've had to apply that oppressed oppressor narrative to the rest of the world just to keep ourselves wrapped up.
I think it's actually quite sad.
Anti-Merit, Anti-Individual Cult00:02:40
Folks, we've been talking to Mark Milke.
He's the boss of the Aristotle Foundation.
His new book is called The Victim Cult.
You can get it at amazon.ca.
Last word to you.
Mark, tell us what the Aristotle Foundation has coming up in 2025.
Well, lots of stuff on anti-merit, anti-individual, illiberal DEI policy, right?
This notion that everything is due to racism.
It's not.
So we've got more work on that coming up.
We've got a book on John Diefenbaker coming out in a couple of months by author Bob Haminden, looking at the freedom fighter.
And that's the subtitle of the book.
So look for that.
It's not available yet.
The Victor Cult is available now, about a book on John Diefenbaker will be coming out in several months from the Arizala Foundation, along with some work in anti-Semitism and radicalism within Canada.
Sounds great.
There he is.
Mark Milke.
Stay with us.
moorhead hey welcome back Your letters to me.
Rebecca Baer says, I don't care.
I'm not returning to Facebook.
Hey, fair enough.
It's tough to overcome a decade worth of antipathy towards Mark Zuckerberg.
I think Alan Buccari was right yesterday when he said to me that Zuckerberg is just being pragmatic.
He's going which way the wind blows.
And if that blows him back to freedom, that's a good thing.
You know, I don't know if we have to forgive, we shouldn't forget, but I'm happy that freedom is on the march.
And the most important thing I took away from the Zuckerberg video is that he implied that Facebook intends to be free around the world too, and he's going to rely on the U.S. State Department to help him overcome local governments around the world that are censors.
That gave me some hope.
Bruce Acheson says, this is a start, but the war isn't over.
We must fight lies and bullying wherever it happens.
Leftist bullies have been pushing people around for far too long.
Like in Revenge of the Nerds, people will come to our side when we speak the truth.
Leftist jocks will find themselves to be a small minority of losers if we keep on fighting their tyranny.
Well, there have been some forces for freedom in social media.
Rumble, which is the YouTube competitor, has always been great.
Telegram has resisted censorship too.
But Facebook is the biggest of them all.
And YouTube, Google, actually, in some ways, that's even bigger.
So those are the ones that really count.
That's why I'm so glad Facebook has come over.
So far, Google and YouTube are atrocious.
Google And YouTube Criticized00:00:27
YouTube demonetized us over the course of time.
I think YouTube has knocked, like if we would have stayed on YouTube monetized, over the course of our life as a company, we would have had $10 million worth of ad revenues based on our traffic that we could have hired more staff, opened up more offices, done more good work.