Ezra Levant accuses Mark Carney of abandoning Canada’s trade sovereignty by scrapping tariffs on U.S. goods post-CUSMA, despite his "Elbows Up" threats during negotiations—like a 25% tariff on American products while exempting Canadian exports. Carney’s alleged Hamas ties and diplomatic sidelining (e.g., exclusion from Ukraine talks) further fuel Levant’s criticism of his leadership, marked by rising immigration, crime, and taxes under just 22 days in Parliament. Meanwhile, Levant dissects the right’s puzzling embrace of anti-Zionism, citing figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, questioning foreign influence (Qatar, Russia) and whether populist conservatives are prioritizing fringe narratives over Trump’s pro-Israel policies and domestic wins. The shift risks alienating allies and undermining nationalist principles, leaving Levant baffled by the right’s apparent retreat from substance. [Automatically generated summary]
Elbows down, Mark Carney has decided to surrender to Donald Trump after all.
Abject, total surrender, abolishing all tariffs on America, and in fact, accepting new tariffs from America on Canada.
I've never seen anything more pitiful.
But his backers will still love him.
All they care about is stopping the Conservative Party of Canada.
They don't actually care about any substance.
I'll prove it to you today.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
I want to show you some clips.
I got a bunch of clips today.
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Tonight, elbows down.
A total surrender from Mark Carney to Donald Trump.
It's August 22nd, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious boobug.
Mark Carney, the Irish-British banker, sold himself to Canadians as the Trump whisperer, the kind of guy who is sophisticated and worldly and operates at the highest levels.
The kind of guy who knows how the world actually works and the only guy tough enough to handle Trump.
He said that.
You were at the helm of a company that quite clearly registered much of its business in Bermuda to avoid paying taxes, including, as CTV News reported, registered to an address of a bike shop in Bermuda.
You have said that this is the way the world works, and that in the case of pension funds, that leaves more money for pensioners.
But in this case, it looks like just plain tax avoidance.
This may be a legal practice, and as you say, as the world works, but is it ethical, Mr. Carney?
First off, I'm no longer at Brookfield.
Secondly, this follows their arrangements, follow the rules, including the tax rules of this country, other countries.
And thirdly, as you mentioned in your question, that the structure is organized so that Canadian pension funds can get the most benefit for those pensioners, which are teachers, retired first responders, and public servants.
Thank you.
I did not really respond to the question as to your opinion as to where if it was ethical, but let me follow up on that.
You wrote a book, Values.
The thesis of that book was that capitalism or markets left to their own devices don't help humanity.
For years, your party, the Liberal Party, has promised to stop the practice of tax avoidance that Brookfield and other companies have engaged in.
Do you have the tools to do that?
You said so.
When are you going to release and tell Canadians what those tools are and when will you implement them?
In terms of having a fair tax system in Canada, including for corporate taxation, it's absolutely a priority of my government.
If we are re-elected, it'd be a priority of our government to ensure that our companies are paying their fair share of taxes.
Well, unlike Pierre Polyev, he said, he would be tough with Trump.
Elbows up, he said.
And you know, he meant it because he kind of did a chicken dance with his lovely bride elbows up dance.
Part of that elbows up approach was to disparage Trump, to threaten Trump, to talk tough about Trump, to make little sneak attacks on Trump.
I mean, in the middle of trade negotiations after the election, Carney jacked up an internet tax on U.S. high-tech companies right in the middle of trade negotiations.
Total ambush.
Carney thought part of being tough was putting tariffs on U.S. goods, and that could make sense.
That is how a trade war works, I guess.
Except he did so on goods that were specifically exempted by the U.S.-Canada trade deal, the USMCA.
Here's some astonishing news about that.
I would maybe add: we've been nicer to Canada at this point than Canada has been to the U.S. Would you say from what you're seeing, what you're hearing, is there any areas in Canada that have made the current negotiation approach harder to reach a mutually beneficial agreement?
Oh, yeah, I think some of the retaliatory tariffs to the U.S. are a huge irritant.
We have protected the integrity of CUSMA.
Okay, our negotiators have said we are not going to implement tariffs on any products that are covered under CUSMA.
Canadians have said, well, those guardrails are off.
I think since April, they have been tariffing U.S. products that are part of the CUSMA agreement.
The products that are covered under CUSMA are going into the U.S. tariff-free, and the ones going north are covered or now have this, I think, 25% tariff on them.
Okay.
And so what it means is I know from American companies, they're saying, hey, we're basically going into Canada and we can't sell because we've got a 25% tariff while our Canadian competitors are coming into the U.S. with no tariffs at all.
You put that together with the actions of your provinces where they're saying, in certain cases, they're saying, all right, we're going to first buy product from our province.
If the product from our province is not available, we are going to buy Canadian.
If there's not a Canadian product available, we're going to buy international.
And if there's not an international product available, then we may finally consider buying American or maybe not buying at all.
Okay.
I think, you know, that they've gone, the Canadians have gone on those issues, they've gone significantly further than where the U.S. has gone.
Canada is calling into question the future of CUSMA.
It's not the United States of America.
It's Canada.
I had to learn that from a citizen journalist because the CBC would never say anything contrary to Mark Carney's narrative.
And Carney and his Brain Trust, whoever they are, thought it was a good idea during these same negotiations to endorse Hamas and Palestine, right when Trump was at the same time trying to negotiate an end to that war.
So, I mean, normally no one cares what Canada thinks about a foreign matter around the world, except for it gave encouragement to Hamas that I think scuppered Trump's deal.
And just tweaking Trump, just insulting him, just shamelessly saying that Trump wanted to destroy Canada.
I don't think Trump does.
President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us.
That will never.
That will never ever happen.
But we.
But we also must recognize the reality that our world has fundamentally changed.
Carney also said he was going to get closer to other countries that are rivals of America instead and reorient our country to China, obviously, and to Europe.
He weirdly said that Canada was a natural fit for the European Union.
I want to ensure that France and the whole of Europe works enthusiastically with Canada, the most European of non-European countries, determined like you to maintain the most positive possible relations with the United States.
Canada is a reliable, trustworthy, and strong partner of France, which shares our values and lives them through action during this age of economic and geopolitical crises.
Yeah, no, what a laugh.
By the way, his European buddies didn't even invite him to the White House last week to talk peace about Ukraine.
Tiny little Finland was there, but not Canada.
I don't know who blackballed Mark Carney.
Maybe it was Zelensky, but probably not because Canada is such a big donor.
Was it the Europeans?
Or maybe it was Trump himself?
I don't know.
All I know was that no one invited Canada and frankly, no one seemed to miss Canada's presence.
But boy is Carney bad at all of this, isn't he?
And Carney's closest ally, the conservative in name only, Doug Ford, the alleged conservative Premier of Ontario, he has no role in foreign affairs.
He's never missed an opportunity to just be rude and stupid towards Trump.
What's the general impression of Trump in Canada?
He's probably the most disliked politician in the world in Canada because he's attacked his closest family member and that's the way we look upon it.
And when I talk to the governors and senators and Congress people, even Republicans totally disagree, but they're too scared to come out and say anything because the president will go after them outside of a few senators.
And I want to thank them for coming out and standing with not just American people, but their closest friends and allies, which is Canada.
And again, we love the Americans.
It's unfortunate President Trump decided to go down this road.
You know, if that kind of thing would actually work, I'd get it.
But have you ever heard of Trump responding positively to someone insulting him?
I mean, have you ever?
And just this week, Doug Ford said he's not going to stop with his insults.
I'll never stop, you know, poking Donald Trump, but we're going to focus on what we can do.
So that no matter who the next president is or whatever the next crisis, we're able to protect our workers, the services the public relies on, and our communities.
Not just from President Trump, but from anything that comes our way for decades to come.
Yeah, well, I guess we saw the fruits of this strategy.
Here's Mark Carney a few hours ago in that plauding, monotonous, bureaucratic tone of voice, completely surrendering to Trump, just abjectly, just removing all the tariffs he had placed on America and just accepting whatever Trump wants to do, he's fine with.
So let's be absolutely clear.
Canada currently has the best trade deal with the United States.
And while it's different from what we had before, it is still better than that of any other country.
So as we work to address outstanding trade issues with the United States, it's important, it's vital.
We do everything we can to preserve this unique advantage for Canadian workers, Canadian businesses.
And doing so will require both building on a soon-to-be revised CUSMA, our free trade agreement with the U.S. and Mexico, as well as developing a new form of trade and security partnership with the United States.
In this context, and consistent with Canada's commitment to CUSMA, I'm announcing today that the Canadian government will now match, we will now match the United States by removing all of Canada's tariffs on U.S. goods specifically covered under CUSMA.
For decades, as a result of a series of trade agreements, starting with the Free Trade Agreement of the 1980s, the Canadian and the U.S. economies have become steadily more integrated, continually more deeply connected.
As I've emphasized in recent months, that steady process of integration is now over.
And as a result, some of our historic strengths have become vulnerabilities.
We can and must adapt to this new reality.
That means concentrating on trade, investment, and security partnerships that preserve our sovereignty.
And it means striking new trade deals that are robust to different economic circumstances, different governments, because of the mutual benefits to both countries.
In all these ways, Canada will move from reliance to resilience, building our strength at home, developing new markets abroad, creating new opportunities for Canadian workers and businesses as we build the strongest economy in the G7.
Pretty much every stop during the election, you referenced Elbows Up and saying that was going to be the strategy you take with the Americans.
You also consistently said that Donald Trump was trying to break us so he could own us.
Your new argument today is that Canadians should accept basically the best of a bad deal.
What's been the change in?
Wait, I reject the premise of that question or your characterization of what I'm saying.
Why The Deal Isn't So Great00:05:14
We have the best deal with the United States right now.
We have the best deal.
Look at the numbers.
Our tariff is 5.5%.
We have 85% of our goods are free trade.
It's not what we used to have.
Nobody has a deal with the United States that they used to have.
Nobody does.
They have fundamentally changed.
It's their right.
We respect it.
They have fundamentally changed their trade policy.
They have new objectives.
And they haven't just talked about those objectives.
They put in place tariffs and they have signed a series of trade deals, including with the European Union, including with others, that have put those into effect.
So we're in a position where we have held out, not signed a deal that we don't agree with or that we don't think is in the best interests of Canadians, And focused on, and we will remain focused on those strategic sectors to the best interests of Canada first.
Of course, America will focus on the best interests of the U.S.
But we do so from a position where we're respecting with this decision, we're respecting our agreement with the United States, and we are matching what they have done.
That puts us in a good position for these phase of it was sort of pitiful, it was sort of sad.
He just sort of gave everything away, and then he said, Hey, guys, it's okay because we still have the best deal in the world, and I did a really good job, and I'm a really good boy.
You know, I don't think I've ever seen a worse negotiator in my entire life.
So much weirdness.
I mean, I don't get it.
Just yesterday, Anita Anand, Carney's pro-Hamash foreign minister, managed to get a very brief meeting with Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State.
And this is after the U.S. really wouldn't meet with Canadians.
But reportedly, Anand cut the meeting short and came home early for other matters.
What?
What is more important?
I don't know, another memo about Palestine or something.
It's so weird, so weak, so unprofessional.
And mainly, what a total failure of his campaign promises.
What's supposed to happen now?
But what's so interesting to me is how the Liberal Party and their media allies were totally in support of this disastrous strategy of trying to out-bully Trump, out-insult Trump.
They screamed at Danielle Smith, the Premier of Alberta, who actually went down to Washington, D.C. to make the case for Alberta in good faith, one person at a time.
She didn't use insults or threats.
The entire media party called her a traitor.
They used those words.
Here's that crackpot at the CBC in the Global Mail, the once sane Andrew Coyne, responding to someone calling Danielle Smith a traitor.
When Washington talks to the British, it's leadership.
When Benedict Arnold talks to them, it's treason.
Maybe it matters what you say to them.
He's saying that by trying to negotiate with Trump, Danielle Smith was a traitorous, a traitor like Benedict Arnold.
Yeah, it's tough to take the media party seriously anymore, though.
They'll immediately rebrand Carney's abject surrender as brave leadership.
No more talk about treason for dealing with Trump.
Just like they immediately accepted Mark Carney setting the carbon tax to zero.
Just immediately, 20 years of banging the drum for climate change was ended because their hero, Mark Carney, was against the carbon tax for now.
They really never believed in it all along.
It was just a game, a trick to trip up the conservatives.
And that's just not useful now.
So they've all stopped caring.
But Mark Carney didn't just surrender back to zero with Trump.
Today, Trump unveiled new tariffs on Canada, and Carney's fine with that.
Tariffs include steel and aluminum.
I mean, remember, Carney famously said, who needs steel anyways?
Well, a lot of people do.
Here's Saskatchewan's Premier Scott Moe.
He said, the U.S. has expanded its steel and aluminum tariffs to manufactured products that include Canadian steel and aluminum.
This is a major blow to Saskatchewan ag equipment makers who employ thousands of people in our province.
Our Minister of Trade, Warren Ketting, has written to the federal government to ask what they are doing to have these tariffs removed and what they're doing to support these businesses and workers while the tariffs are in place.
Yeah, the thing is, though, Saskatchewan, it has just one single liberal MP.
They don't care about Saskatchewan and Ottawa.
I mean, my proof to you is they haven't lifted a finger.
They haven't even verbally said anything about China's 100% tariffs on Saskatchewan canola crops.
Hey, real question.
Can you name a single thing that Mark Carney has achieved as prime minister?
He's been prime minister for 161 days today.
That's almost half a year.
What has he done?
Parliament has sat for a grand total of just 22 days during that time.
Mark Carney would do disastrously in question period.
So I say again, what has he done?
He hasn't even brought in a budget so much for this smart banker.
Sharia Concerns Skyrocketing00:07:15
He has no deal with the U.S. Immigration is skyrocketing.
Crime is skyrocketing.
Taxes are skyrocketing.
Oh, they did get another thank you letter from Hamas.
So that's what he's achieved.
Total failure.
I thought this guy was supposed to be an improvement over Justin Trudeau.
stay with us for more.
You know, I've been working on a monologue and I don't know how quite to do it because something has changed.
I'm 53 years old, and for my entire life, the right, the North American right, the Anglospheric right, has been phylo-Semitic, the opposite of anti-Semitic.
I grew up in rural Alberta.
I went to a country school.
My sister and I were the only Jews in a school of 400.
You would think, oh, that's stereotypical racist country.
The opposite.
People, if anything, were super friendly and curious.
My entire life, I felt comfortable in conservative parties knowing that anti-Semitism was a leftist mind virus.
It was based on, you know, jealousy or blaming others, not taking responsibility.
There were so many things about anti-Semitism that made it the perfect ideology of the left, not the least of which was the Soviet Union weaponizing it against Israel in part of the proxy war between the USSR and America.
But in the last year, I have seen people I've looked up to on the North American right become bitterly anti-Israel and in some cases, even anti-Semitic.
And I find it very discombobulating because this is not the conservative movement I've seen and known.
And I have to say with some sorrow that even some of my personal heroes have been washed over by this.
And I'm thinking in particular of Tucker Carlson.
I'm not going to pretend we were close, but he had me on his show on Fox News a few times.
I really looked up to him as an independent journalist, and he was very kind to us at Rebel News.
I don't know what's happened, but here's one mashup of how Tucker has completely changed his mind on some of these core issues.
Take a look at one of them, Sharia law.
This I saw on the internet just the other day.
Take a peek.
So a lot of Americans are concerned about Sharia law.
Sure.
And they're concerned about polls that show a strikingly large number of Muslims would like to see it supplant civil law in the countries in which they live.
Sharia law is bad, Seth.
I don't know if you've heard that.
It's bad.
It's worse than what's happening in New York and Detroit.
It's just bad.
I don't know of a single Gulf country where it's illegal to proselytize on behalf of another religion.
I think that in every Muslim-majority country in the world, non-Muslims are treated, have fewer rights.
And you can tell when you go to a place like Abu Dhabi or Riyadh, like, oh man, I hope we don't ever wind up with a society like this with a rape rate of zero where you leave your keys in your Lamborghini and don't ever worry about it being stolen.
So you often hear people say, well, Sharia is intolerant.
Women are treated badly.
Gays are treated badly.
Women have, in the Quran, fewer rights than men do.
I'm not Muslim.
I'm not for Sharia law.
On the other hand, compared to what?
Compared to Baltimore?
In England, it's four out of 10 British Muslims.
France, 29% of French Muslims would like to see it replace French law.
You know, if people want to get wasted, they do it at home.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I hope we don't wind up with that.
But I've seen a bunch of polls like this that show that the attitudes of faithful Muslims are not Western at all and that they include a tolerance of violence you don't find among say Presbyterians or Jews.
You know, shut up.
Sharia law.
Meanwhile, a California Imam is apologizing after he referred to Jews as filth.
Oh Allah, liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews.
Oh Allah, count them one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one.
Do not spare any of them.
Sorry, Sharia law.
I don't understand it.
I don't understand why Tucker has suddenly gone anti-Western.
He's been platforming extreme alternative historians who say that Churchill was actually the enemy in World War II.
And Hitler, well, perhaps we should have been on his side.
I don't get it.
There's Tucker.
There's, I mean, Candace Owens goes even further in an interview with my friend Steve Edgington that she later demanded be taken down.
She said that America should not have even joined the Second World War, even though Steve Edgington pointed out Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
Here's that clip that Candace Owens demanded be taken down.
I managed to save a copy.
Take a look.
Do you think that America shouldn't have gone into that Second World War?
Yeah, and that is a radical statement.
People don't know how to deal with that because we've all been so brainwashed by the school system to believe that, oh, look how great things are.
Let me ask you about your question.
Do you think that your country has become greater since?
Has our country become greater since?
Absolutely not.
You know, this whole idea of international liberalism.
Now it's not just about your problems.
It's about solving the world's problems.
Let's make sure that in Pakistan there's a trans flag waving.
No, I actually, if Pakistan does not want to wave a trans flag, I don't even want to wave a trans flag, but why is this my business?
And they're constantly trying to pollute you to make you think that it is your business.
No, I actually am comfortable if that's going to be the newest smear that I have to wear that we're isolationists.
Good.
Good.
I want to be concerned with just America's problems.
As soon as those get resolved, I'm happy to pick up our head and say, oh, well, you know what?
There are friends over there in the UK.
Let's see how they're doing if we can help them.
But America first.
But Japan did attack Paul Harbor.
So presumably you would have reacted to that.
Yeah, I mean, yes.
Look, I think, of course, if you're ever talking about a threat in terms of your nation being attacked, you should always have an equal response.
But at the moment, we're not just.
But, well, a response was just, right?
Does the response necessarily dictate a world war?
These are questions that should be relegated, I think, to an academic discussion.
These would be interesting academic discussions.
I'd love to get a bunch of people and to play out those scenarios.
What if we had just responded to Japan and dealt with the threat?
You know, I haven't had the time to stand out and think about it, and I definitely don't want to do that on the fly and get that wrong.
But it would be a very interesting discussion to think about other options in terms of responding to things.
You know, the war was essentially over.
Japan was already negotiating their surrender.
They had been literally on the defense for two years.
There was no reason that we needed to drop that bomb on a Catholic church, no less, in Abasaki, in order to end the war.
That's garbage that you're being taught in your school system.
Well, what's going on?
Part of it, I think, is, I don't know, the pendulum swinging back and people liking to transgress a taboo.
And you can attack Israel or the Jews in that particular instance, and you're not going to be, I don't know, car bomb as compared to if you, say, criticize Muhammad and draw a cartoon of him.
You could get slaughtered like in Paris, France, about a decade ago.
Woke Dissonance and Bot Farm Influence00:11:33
I think some of it is money.
Qatar has pumped billions of dollars into influence industries in the United States.
I was shocked when I saw that Qatar paid $200,000 to get their political leader on Tucker Carlson's show.
That really seems like a tit for tat.
But I've seen some other theories, and one of them that I saw online the other day was very persuasive to me.
It was by Will Chamberlain, who said maybe this whole growth in these strange and alternative viewpoints and Candace Owens going, spending hours and hours talking about the sexual details of the First Lady of France.
Maybe it's because things are going too well in America and people are tired of winning and there's not enough to talk about since Trump is taking care of it.
I thought it was a great thesis and I'm delighted to say that Will Chamberlain has come on the show to talk more about it, to help explain this phenomenon on the online right.
Will joins us now from Washington where he is with the Article 3 project, which helps vet judges and the Edmund Burke Foundation, a conservative organization.
Will, great to see you.
I don't want to blur things.
Like, you know, going after obscure alternative histories isn't necessarily anti-Semitic.
And I'm not calling everybody anti-Semitic, but there is some of that.
But there's certainly something going on on the right where it feels radical, it feels stupid, and it feels unconservative.
What on earth is going on?
So I think there's a few dynamics at play.
The first is things are really, as I said, things are going very well for the Trump administration right now.
It's extremely effective.
They managed to reduce border crossings to zero.
ICE has 20 times the funding now that it had under the Biden administration.
We federalized the District of Columbia and are shutting down what used to be one of the most crime-infested cities in the country and making it safe again.
I mean, and that's just one of many options.
There's been peace agreements all over the world.
A peace agreement, if you're at all familiar with the history of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the fact that we have negotiated a peace deal there is one of the premier diplomatic accomplishments of the entire century.
And that's something, you know, that's one of six peace deals Trump has negotiated in the first seven months of being president.
So things are going really well.
They're going really well for the hard American right, the American right that wants to see immigration restricted dramatically, the border secured, the populist right.
And as a result, I think many of our normal voters are kind of going about their day-to-day just focusing on their lives because they don't have to worry about politics in the same way they did under Biden.
And as a result, if you're a content creator in the space, getting views is hard.
It's hard because our people are focused on other things.
I think that's really part of it.
I'm here in Canada, as you know, Will, and we've got an awful lot of problems up here.
Things are getting worse all the time.
I just saw that refugee claims in the first half of 2025 were larger than in all of 2024.
So things are getting worse faster.
In the United Kingdom, the migrant crisis is spilling into the streets.
There is so much to talk about.
Everyone can see the problem.
But you're so right.
I see today that Donald Trump is now making a list of all 55 million visa holders, and he's checking if there's any of those he can kick out.
1.5 million already deported.
Transgender extremism on the back foot, like it's win after win.
And maybe it is tough to find something to talk about.
I mean, I have no idea if Emmanuel Macron's wife is a he or a she.
And maybe that is the scoop of the century, as Candace Owens says.
But maybe that's what you talk about when all the Make America Great Agreement promises are actually getting done.
Trump maybe did too much in his first hundred days.
Yeah, so, you know, and it's something I can think about, like maybe you have closer experience with Canadian commentators, but I follow a few and I follow a number of British commentators and they're very focused on the problems of their country, right?
British commentators are very focused on the refugee crisis, violence from asylum seekers, the social media censorship that's going on in their country, a lot of cases.
Canada has, as you say, a lot of problems.
I'm sure Canadian commentators are focused on how terrible their administration is.
And yet here, I just see kind of its weirdness.
And there's other dynamics too, which is, you know, I think there's a cognitive dissonance that results when you make predictions.
You know, a lot of these commentators decided to make their big stand against Trump and the administration on the Iran strikes and made a whole slew of predictions about the Iran strikes leading to World War III being a terrible mistake, et cetera.
Because it was, and it was the one case where Trump seemingly went against the broader philosophy of America first and non-intervention.
But I think he picked his spot very well.
And it's kind of obvious because that war ended in 48 hours and was brought to a close probably much faster than it would have been absent American intervention.
And so it's hard to kind of do a Maya culpa, be like, well, I guess I was wrong.
Maybe Trump knew more than I did on this specific question.
And so you get things channeling off into different ways and people getting angrier about things that are not relevant to the average American's daily life.
Yeah, I mean, it was almost like commentators on, I'm not going to use the word the alt-right because I don't think that's really what they are, but there's something cooking on the right.
You know, James Lindsay calls it the woke right.
I'm not sure if that's what it is.
But boy, it was almost like they were lusting for things to go wrong in Iran.
I don't even know if I would say America went to war.
I mean, I think it was half a dozen planes, dropped a dozen specialty bombs, and that was sort of it.
It was over as soon as it began.
I don't even think that classifies as a war.
The whole thing was a war with Israel.
I really felt like there was parts of the online right who wanted Trump to fail to sort of show him.
That's what happens when you go to war against Iran, which we have decided we like now because it's a counterweight to Israel.
I mean, I thought Tucker's interview with Vladimir Putin was useful, even if it wasn't that elucidating.
But I think since then, he's really gone on a crazy bender of talking to wackos and extremists, which I think could be great TV, but he doesn't press them.
I think you could have the Hede Qatar or a Palestinian nun on your show and ask great questions and get a lot of clicks.
What surprises me is that Tucker turns into a gentle lamb when he's talking to America's enemies, but he goes ferocious against someone like Ted Cruz.
So I mixed a whole bunch of issues there, but I find it confusing and I'm really trying to find my way through it.
Yeah, I mean, first, I'll talk about James Lindsay first.
So James Lindsay is woke right.
Nomenclature, I think, is totally useless.
He characterized me as woke right.
He characterized my organization as woke right.
It's an umbrella term that he's using as a classical liberal to essentially indict anybody to the right of him.
It's really obnoxious and not enlightening in any way.
Like if I'm woke right and Tucker Carlson is woke right, then what even is the term describing?
So I think that a good way to, it's sort of classified as like the anti-Zionist, right?
I think that's actually a useful way to understand what's going on.
And part of the, again, it's a cognitive dissonance issue.
There's this long-running thesis on the sort of anti-Zionist fringe right that, you know, is really hostile to Israel, that Israel is subverting American policy in its own interests, and therefore that many of the harms that are going on domestically in the United States are sort of a function of the bad behavior of Jews or Israel.
That's like the overarching thesis.
The problem is the Trump administration is aggressively disproving that because while it is simultaneously a very pro-Zionist administration, it is also very aggressively solving the problems that have been plaguing the country for a long time and that the hard populist right has identified for quite some time.
So it's showing that there's no real connection there and that the underlying thesis of the anti-Zionist right has been wrong, that has been basically disproven.
And it's the same problem with the Iran strikes.
What happens when you have a thesis you've believed in a long time that is disproven by events?
You can either sort of embrace it and just shift mentally, or you can kind of go into cognitive dissonance and start kind of going off in wild directions.
Yeah.
And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't like the accusations you're in the pocket of a foreign power.
But I remember when tenant media, T-E-N-E-T, was discovered to have taken millions of dollars from a Russian front.
And it rang true to me because I sort of know the people who were involved with it, one degree of separation or whatever.
And I remember Lauren Chen, who's actually a Canadian.
She was sort of the boss of this operation.
And I always respected her.
I thought she was a very thoughtful, interesting conservative.
She's part Asian or something.
So it gave her a different perspective.
And I remember she started tweeting anti-Trump stuff, sort of from the right.
I hate Trump.
He's not good enough on abortion.
I hate Trump.
He's not.
Her tweets are still up.
You can find them.
And I thought, that's weird.
That doesn't seem authentic.
I know Lauren well enough to, where did that come from?
And I see that same attack Trump from the right, cause dissonance, try and fracture the MAGA base.
And I see it from people who wouldn't have said that, hadn't said it before.
And then when it came out that she was taking big money from Russia, I thought that is the only way this makes sense for Lauren Chen to have said those things because I know she didn't actually believe them.
And I think we have to be grown up and realize that Qatar and others, they are getting seriously into the influencer business.
That's not even a theory.
I mean, a lot of what they do, they register and disclose.
A lot of what they do is not really disclose a bull.
They pump more money into American universities than any other country.
I think some of what we're seeing out there is agitprop.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think, you know, you have the occasional Lauren Chen who was just directly and knowingly taking Russian money, according to the allegations from, you know, the indictments against her.
But then I think there's another dynamic too, which is I think there's a lot of foreign bot farms that are not intentionally being used by the influencers themselves, but are used to encourage influencers to adopt narratives that are favorable to those running the bot farms.
I think that's a long-running dynamic because, you know, again, the problem of any content creator is you want to create content that gets engagement, that gets liked, that gets spread, goes viral.
If you hire a bot farm, if you're an outsider and you hire a bot farm and you have them like all the content that a content creator makes that is more aligned with their worldview, you can sort of subtly shift how they feel and shift what they're more likely to be interested in because they believe that it's their audience that's interested in it and that they're getting authentic.
And so I think to me, that's the most obvious explanation for what's happened with Candace Owens.
I mean, I think she's a victim of audience capture by, you know, essentially either bot farms or just very highly motivated groups that have tried to drag her further and further into the swamp of absurdity.
I mean, I think her case is particularly sad.
Arguments Against Zionism Scrutiny00:09:13
I don't know if you saw the series of tweets published by her father-in-law, who was actually the vice chair of a Jewish Christian, you know, allies group in the UK.
He's Gentile himself.
He was so heartbroken, he took to Twitter saying, I don't share my daughter-in-law's views.
I can't imagine a more painful letter to write.
It made me sad.
But here's another thing: like, there's a lot of comedians who are getting on this.
And conservative comedians, I think there's a renaissance in conservative comedians.
And I think there's a couple of things at foot.
First of all, there was censorship.
And unfortunately, some of the faces of censorship on social media were Jewish.
I think of the so-called anti-defamation league that was run by an Obama staffer.
And he was so partisan and so punitive.
And his job description was, I'm going to censor things I don't like on the internet.
And he was so clearly Jewy that I think that him sort of doing it in the name of Jews created more anti-Semitism than anything else.
And there are certain people online who are so officially Jewish.
I think of Rabbi Shmuly, who has such bad judgment sometimes.
I think the head of the ADL, Jonathan Rosenblatt, I think is his name, and Rabbi Shmuly and a few online officials, self-appointed spokesmen for the Jews.
I think if you're an online right-wing comedian who feels free to speak now because Elon Musk has freed the social media and Trump has freed the social media, you think, well, I'm going to say exactly what the ADL says I can't.
I'm going to prove that I can transgress what was once a taboo and try and stop me.
I don't know.
I think part of it is a backlash to the Jewish face of censorship over the last decade.
Maybe I'm too self-conscious, but I hate it when I see someone in a censorship position who's Jewish.
I wish they were anything else.
Yeah, I think you've identified a big issue, which is, I mean, first off, the ADL has been a really obnoxious organization in terms of the way it's been handling the right.
It's purported, held itself out there as a Jewish organization, and it's really just a progressive, hard, progressive left-wing organization.
And as a result, and it's just, I mean, it's been useless.
I think the guy who runs that organization should resign and really all the donors should stop donating to it.
Whatever its original purpose was, it's not serving it now.
And certainly, I think, I mean, Rabbi Shmuley and people, you know, of his ilk are not certainly not helping the cause of Jewish people around the world.
They're certainly not helping their image.
And you sort of have a, you know, it's, there's an adverse selection problem.
It's like the people most likely to seek the limelight on behalf of the entire Jewish people in this respect are usually the least suited to it.
I remember growing up, sometimes my grandmother would say, if there was a terrible crime committed, there was sort of a reflex, I hope he's not Jewish.
As in, you know, I hope this terrible public disgrace that we're about to learn the identity of, I hope it's not someone from the Jewish community because it'll redound to all of our discredit.
And I think that's what's happened.
And I'm not going to talk about Vladimir Zelensky, but having a Jewish guy who looks sort of Jewish, and we heard so much about how he's Jewish, be the face for, hey, America, give me $100 billion worth of foreign aid.
I think that sort of blended with Israel's $3 billion a year of aid.
I just think that all these things, it was a perfect storm and it was weaponized by domestic and foreign enemies of Israel.
And I don't know.
I just feel there hasn't been this much anti-Semitism in the world since 1945.
And I'm worried that it's seeping into mainstream conservative politics, especially amongst young people.
I don't know.
What are your thoughts on that?
It's a huge subject.
I wonder if you've done some thinking about it.
It's worrying, but I think I guess I'm more optimistic about this.
I think, I mean, the cause of Israel to me strikes me as fundamentally a right-wing cause and one that is very much aligned with the interests of the American right.
Because Israel is a country that's simply saying, we're a polity.
We're going to say who's going to be an Israeli and who's not.
And we're not going to commit national suicide because the global left finds our arrangements unfair or wrong.
We don't care.
And that's exactly what we're trying to do here on the American right.
Like, we're saying we have the right to determine who's in our countries and who's not, that the people who come to our country are going to be loyal to us and not try and undermine our polity.
That's the entire point of our immigration policy.
And I think, you know, and what I'd say to any sort of young right-wing person is that if you go after Israel on the grounds that everybody's trying to go after it with these frivolous claims of genocide or these arguments, that how dare they try and make sure that they don't let themselves be destroyed demographically, then you're undermining your own case in the West, too.
Like you're undermining the case to restrict immigration in the first instance in the West.
And I think we all need to, you know, take a step back and realize that the ultimate goal here is to preserve civilization against barbarism and Israel's on the side of civilization.
You know, some people say they're against Zionism.
To me, Zionism is basically ethnic nationalism for Jews in the Holy Land where they were indigenous.
Maybe you could tweak the wording there a little bit, but it's basically Jewish nationalism in a geography that is linked to the people historically.
I mean, tweak those words.
But if you're against that, but you support other nationalisms, that's a contradiction that I think is tough to reconcile.
There's probably about 50 countries in the world whose constitutions have embedded within it a race or a religion.
I mean, about two dozen Muslim countries, Islam is right there in their constitution.
Even the British Constitution, the king is the head of the Church of England.
There are many countries where Christianity is hardwired in the Constitution.
So I think, and there's even a fringe movement in Christianity to say being Zionist is anti-Christian and un-Christian, which seems to me to forget the whole purpose of the Crusades, which was to take back the Holy Land from Islamic interlopers.
I don't know.
I just feel like a lot of the arguments against Zionism and against Israel, they feel like there's this prefab bundle of talking points out there that doesn't pass scrutiny.
I don't know.
I suppose I'm letting it all out here, Will.
I'm complaining to you, because I myself regard myself as a nationalist Canadian who supports national identities from Ireland to Greece to wherever.
And frankly, if I look at the American administration, probably the second most important person in restoring the American nation other than Trump himself is a Jew named Stephen Miller, who I think has been essential to retaking America for Americans.
I don't know.
It just sort of breaks my heart because I loved the America and the Canada of the last 50 years, which eschewed anti-Semitism as a socially unacceptable bigotry.
And I feel like it's sort of coming back in.
Last word to you.
Will, I think I've been thinking out loud here, you know, trying to figure out my ideas.
It hasn't so much been an interview as a therapy session for me.
But why don't you wrap up with some thoughtful thoughts?
Yeah, I find anti-Zionism kind of bizarre, as though it's like acceptable.
What other countries do you think should not exist or should have radical governmental and demographic changes in order to completely take away their character?
Especially Irish anti-Zionists.
I'm like, fine, maybe I'm for a one-state solution in the British Isles.
You guys can lose your sovereignty of the United Kingdom again.
Wait, is that offensive to you?
No kidding.
What?
Maybe I'm anti-Pakistani.
I think the creation of the Pakistani state was a huge geopolitical mistake and the Indians should, there should be Hindu superiority, Hindu from the Indian Ocean to the Hindu Kush Mountains or something like that.
I mean, we can come up with any number of examples that would be obviously offensive to existing sovereign states and their peoples.
And yet, there's exactly one that it's acceptable to say, oh, well, they're behaving badly, therefore, their entire state is illegitimate.
I'm sorry, what?
Like, you know, Germany still exists.
Do you think Germany should cease to exist because of World War II?
Yeah, I find it tough.
These are tough times.
I mean, to me, it would be like someone saying, I really like Italians.
I just don't think Italy is right.
I love the French people.
No problem with French people.
It's just France I hate.
I just don't think those things make sense.
Listen, it's great to catch up with you.
Thank you for letting me use you as a bit of a sounding board.
I find it frustrating when some of my heroes, and I really looked up to Tucker for so many years.
Maybe I was just a fanboy in Canada who thought, wow, that guy's in the big leagues.
But I think he really was a champion of conservative ideas.
And now I don't even know who I'm looking at.
And I hope one day I understand it, but for now, I don't.
But you've helped clarify a few things, Will.
And it's great to see you.
Great to be with you.
There he is.
Will Chamberlain.
He is online, which is where I follow him most of the time.
He's also with the Article III Project and the Edmund Burke Foundation.
Stay with us.
Bacon and British Arrests00:03:12
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
These are on the report from InfoWars that the United States is considering sanctions against British bureaucrats for censorship.
Jerwyn Tiberius says should impose massive 100% tariffs for their misalignment with U.S. constitutional rights.
Any ally should also be aligned with U.S. policy and ideology.
You know, we don't want America to rule the world as an empire.
But if U.S. companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, et cetera, are being threatened by the Brits, then it's not meddling in British affairs.
It's stopping the Brits from meddling in American affairs.
And that's the thing.
I do not want decisions about my freedom to be made in Washington, D.C.
But if U.S. platforms that I use every day are censored in Canada, then I'll take the U.S. help.
I really do.
Pitsky says, issue a travel warning to the U.K. as well.
Hey, that's a good point.
I mean, Canada issues these stupid warnings.
Whenever there's something in the U.S. about pro-life or anti-trans, the Canadian government issues some sort of warning: we're not going to Colorado anymore, or we're not going to Florida anymore.
It's just so political.
But it is a real threat that if you go to the United Kingdom and tweet something the government doesn't like, you could actually be arrested.
It really is a problem.
I like the idea of a travel warning.
Home Strait says, someone was arrested for saying, I like bacon in front of a mosque.
No BS.
You're right.
Here's the video of that.
Okay, we want bacon!
Why?
Because I like bacon.
I say he likes bacon.
I'll be interested in saying he likes bacon.
Oh!
I'm kidding.
It's so nuts.
These police are so hypersensitive.
I like bacon is never a crime.
It might be slightly rude if you're at a Muslim event, like at a Muslim dinner or something, and you say, I like bacon.
But even then, it's not particularly rude.
It's not aggressive.
It's not hateful.
You're just saying you like bacon.
It might be sort of dumb or awkward to say, but it's never a crime, let alone outside giving a talk.
Just craziness.
That's the two-tier policing that Brits have come to experience.
But there is a kind of uprising, and Brits are raising the flag, not just the British Union flag, but the English flag, the cross of St. George.
And I'll have more to talk about on that subject next week.