Joel Pollak examines how Donald Trump’s "America First" stance reshaped Canada-U.S. relations, with Mark Carney’s Liberal victory framed as a response to Trudeau’s perceived anti-Americanism—including mocking remarks and unchecked immigration policies like Gaza migrants. Pollak warns Canada’s multiculturalism risks societal balkanization, contrasting it with U.S. assimilation, while proposing ideological vetting for immigrants, like excluding those opposing Israel’s existence. Housing costs and cultural tensions, especially in Quebec, further highlight potential instability, though Pollak dismisses fears of Canada becoming a "serious threat" post-Trudeau, underscoring Trump’s broader strategy of pressuring allies for favorable trade terms. [Automatically generated summary]
Today we talked to my old buddy, the senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com, Joel Pollack is his name, for his take on the meeting between Mark Carney and Donald Trump.
It's a little bit different than my own, and I hate to say it, but I think where we disagree, Joel is probably right.
And you know, I think it's a really interesting talk, and I hope you enjoy it.
Let me invite you to get a subscription to what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com and click subscribe.
I'm still thinking about my chat with Joel, and he has some very striking things to say.
I think you'll like today's show.
Hey, by the way, one more thing.
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Mark Carney's Focus on Security00:04:03
Tonight, we get an American view on Mark Carney's visit to the White House.
It's May 7th, and this is the Ezra Levance Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, Canada-US relations are normally so boring that they never come up.
I mean, sure, Canada has never lifted its share of the load in terms of NATO and military, but that wasn't a top 10 issue for any U.S. president.
Well, Donald Trump has made tariffs and economic repatriation part of his mandate.
And of course, Mark Carney, the new Prime Minister of Canada, made hating Trump a core part of his mandate.
Well, the two men finally met today in the Oval Office.
Here's a clip of how that went.
It's a great honor to have Prime Minister Mark Carney with us.
As you know, just a few days ago, he won a very big election in Canada.
And I think I was probably the greatest thing that happened to him, but I can't take a vote for it.
His party was losing by a lot, and he ended up winning.
So I really want to congratulate him.
It was probably one of the greatest comebacks in the history of politics, maybe even greater than mine.
But I want to just congratulate you.
That was a great election, actually.
We were watching it with interest.
And I think Canada Joe's a very talented person, a very good person, because we spoke before the election quite a few times.
And it's an honor to have you at the White House and the Oval Office.
You see the new and improved Oval Office as it becomes more and more beautiful with love.
We handle it with great love.
And 24-karat gold.
That always helps too.
But it's been a lot of fun going over some of the beautiful pictures that were stored in the vaults that were for many, many years, in some cases over 100 years.
It was Jordan Valls of the great presidents who are almost great presidents, all having a reason for being up, every one of them.
So it's very interesting.
But I just want to congratulate you.
And we had a really great race.
I watched the debate.
I thought you were excellent.
And I think we have a lot of things in common.
We have some tough points to go over, and that'll be fine.
We're going to also be discussing Ukraine-Russia, the war, because Mark wants it ended as quickly as I do.
I think it has to end.
Mark, would you like to say a few words?
Thank you, Mr. President.
I'm on the edge of my seat, actually.
But thank you for your hospitality, and above all, for your leadership.
You're a transformational president, focus on the economy with a relentless focus on the American worker, securing your borders, providing ending the scourge of fentanyl and other opioids, and securing the world.
And I've been elected with my colleagues here, with the help of my colleagues here.
I'm going to spread the credit to transform Canada with a similar focus on the economy, securing our borders, again on fentanyl, much greater focus on defense and security, securing the Arctic and developing the Arctic.
And the history of Canada and the U.S. is we're stronger when we work together, and there's many opportunities to work together.
And I look forward to addressing some of those issues that we have, but also finding those areas of mutual cooperation so we can go forward.
That's great.
Very nice.
Thank you very much.
It's a very nice statement.
Well, the animosity is gone.
And Trump, I don't know if he's serious or not, is implying that he supported Carney.
Carney was his choice.
And that his tweets helped throw the election to Carney, which is something I can't really dispute.
Joining us now to talk about this is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Joel, great to see you again.
Trump's Impact on Canadian Politics00:14:05
A few months ago, it was unthinkable that the Liberals could win again.
The Conservative Party had a 20-point lead, and that's in a multi-party system.
The Conservatives had been leading for two full years.
The only question was how big a majority would it be?
Trump started talking about a 51st state and annexing Canada, and it spooked a million boomers and seniors into voting liberals, letting them edge out the Conservatives in the vote.
What do you make of all that?
Well, I don't think that Trump is to blame for this.
I think you can make that argument, but I think there are several factors that went into this.
First of all, Justin Trudeau left the scene.
He was clearly very unpopular.
And the Canadian public appears to have decided that the Liberal Party was just fine without his leadership.
So, again, you're the better judge of that than I am.
But I would guess that just looking historically at the fact that there really only has been one Conservative prime minister in the modern era, that there's kind of almost a default preference in Canada for the Liberal Party.
So, if it comes up with a different leader, you know, we have this problem in the United States as well.
If you ask most voters, until recently, really, until the last couple of years, where Republicans have outperformed Democrats on what we call the generic ballot, generally there are more Democrats than Republicans in the United States.
No party has a majority, and there's a huge block of independents.
But typically, your average American voter is more likely to say that they are Democrats.
That's changed in the last year because Democrats have become so unpopular, mostly because of their woke policies.
Wokeness has become unpopular, and Trump has become very popular among those who like seeing something done about wokeness.
So that's changed.
Generally, there is a kind of cultural preference, at least when talking to pollsters, for the center-left, even though in terms of our politics, generally, our policies are center-right.
So, it's a curious balance.
And I think Canada likes to be liberal or thought of as liberal.
And so when you have Trudeau removed from the scene, then maybe there's a reversion to that.
There are a couple other factors as well.
One is that I think Canada likes to be different from the United States.
It's part of the Canadian identity, just from my experience with friends and family and so forth in Canada.
So I think that the fact that Trump came out of the gate so hard, not just against Canada, but on every front, meant that Canadians understood they had to be the opposite of whatever that was.
And it's noteworthy, I think, that the last conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, was prime minister during the height of the Obama era.
There were a few years where he overlapped with George W. Bush, but basically Harper was around during Obama.
And I think that Obama was a radically left president.
And in the same way, I think there's almost an instinct to be different from the United States.
I also think that the campaign that the Conservatives ran in Canada has to be faulted for some of the things they didn't discuss.
And never mind Trump for a moment, but the issue of immigration was there, but perhaps not as strong as it ought to have been.
And I have to say that just following a little bit of the aftermath of the election, the idea that the party leader would shove out a duly elected member of parliament to take up a seat again, it smacks of bad form, and it actually makes it look like he deserved to lose, at least from this distance.
So I think you have to look at the campaign the Conservatives ran.
I also think that Trump could have played a role.
So let's get to Trump.
And the theory that we have at Breitbart News is that Trump prefers a weaker Canadian leader to one who's stronger and able to push back.
So I think Trump preferred a liberal leader, frankly, than one who is conservative and might have the ability to make a stronger case for the national interest because he could point to some ideological similarities with Trump and say, we're not opposing your ideas.
We're just standing up for Canada.
It's easier to oppose someone who not only is from a different country and advocating for that country's interest, but who also has bad policies in a number of areas.
Carney has come out of the gate, for example, talking about climate and so forth.
I mean, it's so easily mockable that I think it helps Trump make his case for the United States in the trade dispute with Canada.
So that's how I would look at that.
You said a few things about the conservatives, which I disagree with, but I don't want to spend time on those.
I don't think they're that important.
But let me just talk about the 51st state thing for a minute.
I think you may know that it came about, and Trump referred to it again today, when Trudeau came down to Mar-a-Lago to try and head off the tariffs.
And Trump said, if we had even trade, that is, we no longer had a huge trade surplus with Canada, which is almost all from oil and gas, by the way, automobiles and oil and gas.
That's what the trade surplus is, but it's mainly oil and gas.
Trump said, what would happen if we had an even trade balance with you?
And Trudeau, who isn't that policy-oriented and didn't have a good answer, he sort of panicked and said, well, then Canada would cease to exist.
He said something almost exactly to that effect.
Here's Secretary Rubio, who was there.
Take a look at this.
President Trump has talked about expanding the U.S. footprint.
In a hot mic moment, Canada's prime minister said that absorbing Canada is a real thing.
Is it a real thing?
You know how that came about?
President's meeting with Trudeau and Trudeau says, Well, if you impose, if you even out our trade relationship, then we will cease to exist as a country.
At which point the president responded very logically, and that is, well, if you can't exist without cheating and trade, then you should become a state.
That was his observation.
That's how it started.
It is how it started.
And I think he's told the story publicly.
And that's how all this began.
And so Trudeau panicked and said that would mark the end of Canada.
That's such an astonishing thing.
It's false, by the way.
But it shows such weakness that Trump immediately grabbed it and jabbed at it, saying 51st state, 51st state.
And I think Trump, I've watched enough of his speeches, he gets an applause line or a joke that works, and he just uses it all the time.
It's his go-to line.
So he loved saying 51st state.
It did irritate Trudeau.
But the trouble is it felt like an indecent proposal to Canadians who were happy enough with their own country.
Like proposing marriage to someone who was already married.
It wasn't just not on, it was taken as an affront.
And that's a luxurious reason to cast a ballot.
I don't like how Trump makes me feel.
But I think for a million sensitive Canadians, his repetition, and he repeated it again today, which I don't even know why he's doing it.
Maybe to show America, I think of America as a great growing power, you know, manifest destiny.
I get it, but I like the banter, but a lot of Canadians, it really turned on a lot of anti-Americanism.
I just don't see how having an anti-American population in Canada helps with America First.
I don't know how it helps get a stronger military.
I don't know how it helps get our trade barriers down.
I don't get it.
And I am probably the Trumpiest person in Canada.
We've endorsed him in all three elections.
We've taken a lot of punishment for being pro-Trump.
And I honestly just don't get it.
How is this America First?
Well, I don't think you would have had that comment had Trump's policy not been America first, because Trump doesn't see his job as electing conservatives in other countries.
He really doesn't.
I think he refers sometimes to the rise of populist and nationalist movements in other countries, but that's not really where his heart is.
His heart is the American interest.
And it's left to commentators, mostly on the right, sometimes on the left, to talk about whether the Trump phenomenon is being mirrored in other countries and so forth.
But he doesn't feel any sense of obligation.
And in fact, some of his best relationships have been with foreign leaders on the left.
That doesn't mean he always prefers foreign leaders on the left, but he has had productive relationships with people with whom there's something to exchange or to trade, rather than people with whom there's already a lot of commonality.
You'll notice there's a bit of a frosty relationship at the moment between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, for example.
That has to do with some disputes over the 2020 election.
But it also has to do with the fact that being close to Netanyahu allows Netanyahu to have a little bit of leverage over Trump that Trump doesn't want him to have.
And Trump has pushed him away a little bit in a number of ways.
First of all, Netanyahu came a few weeks ago to try to get Trump to sign on to a deal to attack Iran's nuclear sites.
And Trump then announced, without really warning Netanyahu, that he was launching talks with Iran.
Then just this week, both the U.S. and Israel attacked the Houthi rebels in Yemen and quite forcefully so after the Houthi attacks on the U.S. Navy and on an Israeli airport.
And right after Israel bombed and destroyed the main airport in Yemen, Trump came out and said, We're not bombing the Houthis anymore because they've agreed not to attack our ships.
And that boxed Israel in to some extent.
Now, Israel had already done, I think, the most significant damage.
And you don't want a situation where you create a state that collapses completely, which then requires you to participate somewhat in a humanitarian or rebuilding effort.
But it was a way of boxing Israel in and saying, okay, I'm not going to be pushed any further into this conflict.
So I think, just to round out the thought, when it looked like Netanyahu might lose during the first Trump term, Netanyahu had to go through several elections, but there was one, the first one where it looked like he might lose.
Trump came out and said, our relationship is with the people of Israel and not with any particular government.
And so I think that Trump doesn't see himself as a kind of global leader of conservatism or populism or nationalism.
He cares about those principles, but he ultimately just cares about America first.
And so if he believes it's in America's interest to have a liberal Canadian leader, he doesn't mind helping the liberal leader.
And he doesn't mind if he riles up the Canadian electorate to put one into power.
Now, we might, again, think that it's unfortunate.
And I happen to like the conservative leaders' policies in a number of ways, many ways.
And many conservatives in the United States were quietly rooting for the Conservative Party.
At the same time, I do think that Trump believes that he can get a better deal from Canada in terms of trade if he applies this kind of pressure.
Do I like it in every case?
I don't.
But that's, I think, what his America first policy is about.
He just doesn't feel an obligation to the Conservative Party in Canada, and he wants to get the United States to a better place.
And look, just one more example.
When AMLO came to power, the previous president of Mexico, many people thought, oh, that's the end of Trump's effort to get Mexico to do anything about the border because this guy is basically a socialist and Trump is a capitalist, billionaire, nationalist.
Trump did very well with AMLO.
It was AMLO who sent 15,000 troops to the southern Mexican border to stop the caravans of migrants from coming up to the United States.
And that's because Trump threatened tariffs on Mexico.
And after that, the two of them got along very well.
So I think that it is possible that Trump believes that dealing with a weak liberal leader, and I do think Carney is going to be a weak leader, I think his policies are terrible.
And I think the public will sour on them very quickly in Canada.
I think Trump would prefer to have an unpopular and weak Canadian leader than to have somebody who is strong and able to articulate the Canadian national interest.
So I hear the pain in your voice.
It must be very hard.
And I hear the same from friends in Israel who love Trump and everything he's done for Israel.
And now they're getting very worried about what kind of deal Trump might do in Iran that ties Israel's hands.
And so there's a lot of frustration.
But I think the lesson for Israel is also the lesson for Canada, which is that you just have to be strong independently of whoever's in the White House.
And one final thought on this.
The 51st state thing.
Look, it is insulting, and I understand that it's insulting.
Americans also find it somewhat amusing, and it becomes a laugh line and an applause line.
You know, it's like Michael Moore portraying Canada in, I forget which film it was.
I think it was Roger and me or one of the subsequent films.
And he mentions Canada and then he cuts immediately to a shot of penguins on the ice.
Obviously, penguins don't live in Canada, but there's a certain amount of teasing that goes on.
And, you know, the South Park films and all of that.
I mean, a lot of it happens the opposite way as well, I know, from my Canadian relatives.
But I think that the wounds that Trudeau caused among Trump and his supporters for the way that he treated Trump, those left a very bad memory.
And you mentioned he came to Mar-a-Lago.
During Trump's first term, there was a meeting of some international leaders somewhere, maybe it was the G7, I don't know, where Trudeau was hanging out with Boris Johnson and some other people, all very clearly enjoying a laugh at Trump's expense.
And their comments, I think, were caught on a hot mic and everything.
And I just think Trump never forgot that.
Trump's Eternal Grudge00:03:11
Right.
And I think that there was no way Justin Trudeau was ever going to be able to deal with Donald Trump.
So if anything, I think that fueled the kind of rancor that Trump used against Canada.
And, you know, I think he was very polite to Carney.
And I watched the press conference.
I thought that he was trying to put the relationship on solid footing.
And I thought Carney actually did very well.
He said, Canada's not for sale.
And Trump said, okay, well, you know, you can see he's arguing for his interest, and I'm arguing for mine.
And we love Canada.
And we're going to get, he said that many times.
We love Canada.
We love Canadians and so forth.
But we're going to have a tough fight here over this.
So look, that's where I'll leave that point.
You may disagree with some of what I've said, but I think that's why he did it, because he really thinks he's doing the best for America, for the United States, I mean, by saying that.
Yeah, and Canadians should never say a word if an American throws a jab at us.
I mean, our CBC state broadcaster had a whole series called Talking to Americans, where our so-called government comedian would go to the United States and ask fake questions and give fake answers just to demonstrate how dopey Americans were.
Like this was our state broadcaster.
Like half of the Canadian identity.
Trudeau himself said this.
He was asked, what does it mean to be Canadian?
And his answer was, not American.
Canadians are incredibly proud of being Canadian.
One of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, well, we're not American.
Like there's a sullen, smug, superior anti-Americanism in Canada.
And the one time an American chirps at us, you know, we go into apoplexy, it's a bit much.
You're right.
I mean, I thank God that Donald Trump is too busy with Ukraine and Russia and Iran and China and Mexico to follow what, frankly, most Canadian leaders say about him.
I'm lucky that we're not on his top 10 of issues.
So you're right.
It's just, I feel a sense of loss because we were so close to extirpating the liberals from this country.
And here's what I'm really worried about.
And I think America should worry about it too.
Mark Carney is a friend of Xi Jinping.
When he was the chair of Brookfield Asset Management, basically a slightly smaller BlackRock, he was deep with China.
He has various pro-CCP candidates who were elected in parliament.
I'm worried about the Five Eyes Intelligence Group that I'm worried that Canada's, frankly, being compromised.
I think Canada should sell our oil to America.
Mark Carney isn't that fussed about it.
I'm worried that China's sniffing around our resources.
There's just things that hurt me as a Canadian, but I think I bet America would care about this if they knew about it.
So I don't know.
We'll see where things go.
But Carney certainly was a different man in the meeting in the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, his anti-Americanism was off the charts.
Political Motives and Failures00:13:22
His anti-Trumpism.
Even after he won, he was saying things like, our relationship with America is forever changed.
Well, in the Oval Office meeting, he was like a little puppy on Trump's lap.
You know, I respect your leadership, Mr. President.
Anyways, you're right, I'm a little sagile.
For two years, and the mass immigration is another thing.
I mean, we are bringing in thousands of people from Gaza.
You can't vet someone from Gaza.
What do you check against?
The police records kept by Hamas?
How do you vet Gaza migrants?
And they're coming into Canada.
We have a fairly porous border with America.
How does that suit Trump to have those guys re-elected?
That's what's on my mind.
Well, let me perhaps refer to a couple of things.
First of all, Stephen Harper, when he lost, said a line that I've never forgotten and I've often repeated, which is that the people are always right.
And I thought it was magnanimous of him in defeat to say that.
And I've often thought about that line when I've disagreed with the outcome of an election.
And I wanted John McCain to defeat Barack Obama so badly in 2008 that I made life decisions based on that election, really, that are still, you know, having an effect on my life today, a positive effect.
And I still think Obama was terrible.
But John McCain betrayed the Republican Party and Donald Trump in a really nasty way.
And I say this with great respect for his heroism and his five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison and all of that, which, you know, looking back at the arc of his life, he had a remarkable life.
He was a hero.
But he did break his promise to his own voters, first of all, on border security, and secondly, to Trump on repealing and replacing Obamacare, which was Obama's attempt at a national health service.
And when I saw McCain do that, I thought, okay, he deserved to lose.
That's the kind of person, that's the kind of character he would have been as president.
That's what people who were critical of McCain saw.
It doesn't mean they were right about everything about him, and sometimes they said things that were grossly inaccurate and unfair.
But in that moment, I thought, okay, we dodged a bullet in a way.
Not that Obama was good.
I still think McCain would have been better than Obama.
But in a sense, in that sense, the people were right.
The people saw something in McCain's leadership that they did not want.
And I'll add the second thought, which is what happened when Biden won the election.
And I do think Biden won the 2020 election based on the rules that Democrats put into place.
So they made previously fraudulent voting legal.
So I don't think there was ballot stuffing and mailbox tricks and all sorts of things like that.
I think they made vote by mail universal and immediate and automatic in many places where it wouldn't have been before and where doing that kind of thing would have been fraudulent.
And they did a lot of things that were bad.
In that election, I've written a book about it.
But I could not discount the possibility or I could not eliminate the possibility that Biden won fair and square.
And I do think that the American people had tired, in a sense, of the drama around the Trump presidency, not all of which was caused by Trump, maybe not even most of it.
I mean, most of it was the result of the media and Democrats deciding to make the country ungovernable with the riots and so forth of 2020, the ridiculous pandemic shutdowns, which I think were very much because Democrats wanted to shut down the economy to hurt Trump.
I do think there was a strong political motive.
But as I watched Biden taking the oath of office, I also had a sense of confidence.
And I said, none of this will work.
None of this will work.
It's not going to work.
Everything you do will fail.
Not that I want it to fail, but it is going to fail.
And I just wrote a book about Trump's first 100 days in office, and it's called Trump 2.0, The Most Dramatic First 100 Days in Presidential History.
I also released an e-book about Joe Biden's first 100 days.
And the title of that book was, We Told You So.
Told you so, because everything he was doing was already failing.
And it wasn't just a partisan perspective.
I mean, nothing he did worked.
Nothing.
Zero.
And the country understands that now.
It's not just Republicans who say that, conservatives who say that.
The country understands that Joe Biden was a failure.
And he was a failure because he didn't even do the things that his own voters wanted.
And left-wing ideas fail in governance.
You know, George Orwell used to say that the strongest opponent of any left-wing government is its previous propaganda.
And that's because they promise everything and then they can achieve nothing because you cannot govern as what the Cubans would call a revolutionary party.
It doesn't work.
And so I would offer the consolation, you know, this consolation to conservative voters in Canada.
You're going to watch Mark Carney fail.
He's going to fail hard, just judging on his policies already.
This alliance with China is going to fail.
The climate stuff is going to fail.
I'm sorry for the cost you have to endure in the meantime.
I'm sorry for the negative results, I think, that are going to come from the trade agreement that eventually results from dealing with Trump.
I think Trump now has the upper hand.
So again, you never want to wish those negative interim costs on anybody.
I mean, I think the damage Biden did to the country in four years was terrible.
Millions of illegal migrants.
How are we going to get rid of them?
You have, you know, bad immigration.
Canada's immigration policy used to be exemplary.
Now it's a cautionary tale.
But, you know, so it's going to cause a lot of problems.
I do think Canada will find a way out because that's what democracies do.
The people eventually find a way to reinvent themselves in political form.
And so I would say with Stephen Harper, as painful as it is, people are always right.
And I think you have to look for new conservative leadership and bolder conservative leadership that may be willing to challenge some of the sacred cows of Canadian politics.
And I think you'll find it.
I think you'll find it and you'll find it in your audience because the people who watch rebel news understand what's necessary.
And I think that's what drew you to Trump.
You're not a follower of political personalities.
You're a discerning and incredible thinker who I followed long before I knew you personally.
And I think you were drawn to Trump because of Trump's policies.
And there are things about Trump I would dislike if I weren't American.
But there are many things I like about him because I'm American, because I'm a citizen of the United States, and because they're working.
And these are things that I thought no politician would ever do before.
I mean, you know, so every day there's something he does something new that I wish someone would have done.
And he does it.
So, you know, sometimes you take the bad with the good, but overall, I think he's been very effective.
And even when he is gone from the political scene, his supporters will be able to say to Democrats, what he wanted to do worked.
I don't know if the tariffs will work.
I do believe eventually we'll get to a better place than we are now in terms of our trade.
I think the situation is improving.
But I think ultimately the test is whether these ideas work.
And I do think they work in the United States, whatever you think of Trump.
So maybe if you have a Canadian leader who really picks up the gauntlet and goes at some of these things very hard, I think you can win.
Yeah.
Well, let me close with this, Joel, because you've made me feel better by what you've just said there.
I was in the United Kingdom on Thursday when two remarkable things happened.
There were hundreds of local council elections, which followed the federal party, say, the national parties.
And Nigel Farage's reform UK absolutely cleaned up.
Like huge, huge successes.
And immediately they've announced things like only the British or English flags can be flown, no other flags, no DEI court.
Like they're immediately started with full-throated stuff.
And I was in, so they had these local elections that were just huge wins, massive.
And then I was in this one neighborhood named Runcorn in Hellsby.
What a great British name.
And the Labor Party had won it with 53% last time.
And remember, they have the multi-party system there, so that's a huge win.
Reform one.
And it was such a bellwether, not the old conservatives, but reform.
And you know what?
Their main message, their number one message, it's very short, so I memorized it.
It's freeze immigration and stop the boats.
Freeze immigration.
I don't even know if Trump uses that word.
So they were unafraid.
They were all the way over and they didn't even care about who called them names.
Freeze immigration and stop the boats.
And that one in Rencorn.
Right.
Look, I think Canada has a massive problem with immigration from the Muslim world.
And it's got a problem with housing costs, which are driven partly by immigration as well.
But Canada has a massive problem with immigration from the Muslim world.
And I feel that the multicultural nature of Canadian society, which is multicultural by design, you have Quebec, you have a bilingual society.
It's part of who you are as Canadians.
And it's a wonderful part of who you are as Canadians.
But it does make Canada more vulnerable to a kind of balkanization culturally.
And that's a challenge very few countries in the world have dealt with successfully.
The United States has dealt with it more successfully because we don't have a multicultural idea fundamentally.
We have an idea of assimilation at the core of our identity.
The national motto is I plurbus unum, from many one.
But we don't have the same identity that the French do, which is a kind of enforced secularism.
Headscarves have never been banned in this country.
Muslims have headscarves.
In fact, Americans, as anti-Islamic as they might be, would think it was weird to ban headscarves.
They might agree with banning veils in identity photographs, but they wouldn't ban headscarves.
So there are different ways to try to deal with this while also remembering that there are many Muslims who come to our country and your country who want to be part of the United States and Canada, want to fully immerse and be Americans and Canadians and devote themselves to the country.
There are many good people.
But there has to be a way of making sure that people who are going to cause problems are not being brought in.
And what Trump is doing is exactly what I said he should do in an essay I wrote about how Trump can fight anti-Semitism.
I wrote this right after the election.
And one of the things I said was, and I wrote this in my book, The Agenda as well, something similar, but you basically need to exclude any migrant from the rest of the world to the United States who believes Israel shouldn't exist.
We already exclude terrorists, we exclude communists, we exclude Nazis, okay, on the basis of their beliefs.
You couldn't do that to Americans.
American citizens have the right to freedom of association.
They can become Nazis if they want.
But we don't want more Nazis in the country.
So Nazis are not allowed to immigrate.
And if you lie about having been a Nazi, then we can convict you of a crime and kick you out.
Same thing with communists, former terrorists, radical Islamic terrorists, and so forth.
We should exclude people who believe Israel doesn't have a right to exist because, frankly, that's just not a debate we're going to have.
And we don't want to add to the sheer numbers on the anti-Israel side of the debate because the Jewish community can never compete with the size of the Muslim world.
A billion Muslims versus a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction.
Now, you have the Christian evangelicals who are a larger portion of American society who support Israel.
But if this is a numbers game, Israel will lose every time.
If it's a question of principles and strength and quality, Israel wins every time.
And I think Canada needs to say, what kind of Canada do we want?
And are the people coming here prepared to be part of that Canada?
We can have multiculturalism within certain boundaries, but it cannot be a free-for-all where the multicultural nature of our society is simply determined by who manages to cross the border.
It cannot be that way.
So I think that's a question that the conservatives in Canada are going to have to grapple with.
And it's not just about Israel.
I mean, I believe that Israel can generally take care of itself.
What appalls me about the mass immigration to Canada is its hatred, not for a foreign country, but for hundreds of thousands or millions of Canadians.
Like, I'm afraid in Canada, for Canada, being a Canadian Jew, is what scares me.
I'm actually not worried about Israel.
I think they'll be fine.
So I hear what you're saying.
I'm just speaking about, you know.
I think Israel will be fine.
But I think having a strong belief that it's anti-Israel is a problem.
It's a proxy for being anti-American, anti-Western, anti-separation of mosque and state.
Absolutely.
Anti-Israel Beliefs Problematic00:01:35
I hear what you're saying.
It's not just an external abstract thing like, what do you think about Israel?
It's like every week in Toronto, we see hate marches that if they were against black people, if they were the Klan marches, they would be arrested in a second in Canada.
Anyway, we're getting a little bit off course, but I hear what you're saying.
If Americans truly studied Canada's immigration, I think they would reclassify Canada as a serious threat.
And I had hoped that that would end with Pierre Polyev's election, but alas, it won't.
Joel, it's great to catch up with you, and you're very generous with your time.
Tell me again the name of your new book, Trump 2.0.
Tell me what it's called.
It's called Trump 2.0, The Most Dramatic First 100 Days in Presidential History.
And is it out now or is it coming out soon?
It's out now.
It's on Amazon.
It's there.
Trump 2.0, it's a short book about the first 100 days.
I have another book coming out in the fall, which I know you'll like, Ezra, and it's called The Zionist Conspiracy and How to Join It.
Wow.
And that's coming out in print.
So that's great.
Well, you know what?
I met an actual Nazi in Ireland for the first time in my life, and I was shocked by it.
And I'll have to get him a copy of the book.
His name is Justin Barrett.
It was quite an experience.
Joel, great to catch up with you.
Thanks for your thoughts about so many things.
And I look forward to reading both books.
All right.
Take care, Ezra.
All right.
There he is.
Joel Pollock Sr., editor-at-large of rankbar.com and the author of the new book, Trump 2.0.