Ezra Levant examines Trump’s new executive order denying visas to foreigners who desecrate the U.S. flag under specific conditions, framing it as a symbolic stand against disrespect rather than free speech suppression. He contrasts this with perceived leniency toward Palestinian activists blocking Ottawa’s Gay Pride Parade—no arrests despite clear rule violations—and cites cases like banned pastor Chris Foyt and relocated Christian events, questioning police neutrality. Meanwhile, Mark Carney’s exclusion from a U.S.-European summit (while Canada spent $20B in Afghanistan) hints at strained relations, possibly over Gaza or trade, leaving Levant puzzled by Trump’s move and the broader erosion of trust in institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
Donald Trump has a new executive order banning desecration of the American flag, but it only applies in certain limited circumstances, including to foreigners in America, which I think is the whole point.
I will take you through that executive order.
Very interesting stuff.
And then an interview with Chris Dacey on the clashing rallies in the streets of Ottawa, the Gay Pride Rally and the Palestinian Rally.
Which one do you think won?
That's ahead.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month.
I want to show you what happened on the streets of Ottawa.
And for that, you need to see the video.
So please sign up at RebelNewsPlus.com.
Tonight, what flag do you wave?
What flag would you never wave?
What flag would you burn?
Are you even allowed to burn it?
It's August 25th, and this is the Ashley Vance Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
You know, Donald Trump is still issuing executive orders at a furious pace.
I started putting together this monologue in the early afternoon, and he had already signed four executive orders just today.
And he was also meeting with the new president of South Korea.
Flags of Controversy00:15:43
I mean, he's doing a lot of important things.
It's not surprising to me that Mark Carney in Canada are lower on his list.
He's so busy, he's doing, and he's doing it all at once.
I don't think I've mentioned the fact that he has used his federal powers to take over policing in Washington, D.C., to supplement them with the National Guard and actually stop the crime in that city.
I don't mean to understate things, but it didn't even look that hard for him to do.
It's just that no one had actually tried it in 50 years.
Look, D.C. is a miracle what's happened.
I mean, they can come up with fake numbers like the mayor's doing.
Oh, no, it was going down for 20 years.
You didn't live here.
You know, have you been mugged?
Okay.
D.C. was a hellho, and now it's safe.
And in fact, I put out this morning, I said, I hate to say this because it doesn't sound very good, but there have been no murders in D.C. in the last week.
That's the first time in anybody's memory that you haven't had a murder in a week.
And I think the mayor has to get on the ball because we have a situation.
She's a nice woman, but I'll tell you what, she's got to get on the ball.
We have, I don't want to see phony numbers.
D.C. hit an all-time high last year of absolute total crime, and it continued pretty bad.
And then we put some strength into it, got the numbers down a little bit, but we brought in the D.C. National Guard, and we coupled them with the police, and it has been amazing.
Yeah, I think we're at 10 days now with no murder in a row, violent crime way down, people walking on the streets again, people going out for dinner in restaurants again.
You can't say that for everywhere in Toronto, by the way.
Just look at these two tweets from just 15 minutes separated.
Couple of stabbings in two different neighborhoods.
I wonder if Donald Trump could come rescue us too.
I understand he's going to do this in Chicago next, in all of these cities.
It's not that the local criminals outgun the police.
They obviously don't.
It's that the police and more frequently prosecutors and judges simply choose not to fight crime.
They don't arrest certain offenses.
They don't impose bail.
They don't impose strong sentences.
They let crime become normalized.
If that happens for years and even decades, it can feel hopeless.
And that's just the state of things, the way things always are.
Trump has proved in Washington that really all you have to do is decide you don't want to live that way.
In 10 days, he's revolutionized the city.
It's great for Americans in those big cities.
The one side effect I don't like, but it's a small price to pay to make America safe again, is that all of these Democrat mayors and Democrat governors are having their crime problems fixed by a Republican president.
And so life is going to improve in those blue states.
And people will perhaps ascribe their improved life to the Democrats they voted into office for mayor or governor, as opposed to the guy who's fixing the problem, Donald Trump.
There's a U.S. liberal named Ezra Klein, not to be confused with Ezra Levant.
Klein points out that all of the places run by Democrats are awful places to live when measured by crime, drug use, homeless encampments, taxes, et cetera.
And that at the end of the day, that's a reason people don't want to vote Democrat because they see what life is like.
I mean, you can have all the campaign slogans and ads you like, but really, would you rather live in a city run by Republicans or Democrats?
Where do you think crime is going to be better?
Where do you think taxes are going to be better?
San Francisco and LA and Portland have lovely bones, those cities.
They're beautiful in nature.
New York is still an amazing city, too, but everything is so much worse than it could be or should be because of their politics.
I mean, Detroit was once one of the leading cities in America.
Only politics undone it.
Donald Trump, paradoxically, is going to fix that for Democrat politicians, even though they'll likely make a fuss about it.
He's actually fixing their problems.
Anyway, forgive me for that very long detour.
I just really want to talk with you today about flags.
But I couldn't help mention that Trump was tackling big city crime, even though he's president.
In some ways, this will likely make more of a difference to more people than most of what goes on in politics.
I don't care what you think of Trump personally.
He's going to go down in history as one of the greats.
But back to the flag executive order, which was one of the four that Trump announced today.
It criminalizes the burning and, well, really, the desecration of American flags in certain circumstances, which surprised me, because Trump is a free speech enthusiast and banning the desecration of flags is a kind of expression.
Sorry, the desecration of flags is a kind of expression in many cases.
But let me read it to you because it's actually the headline goes a lot further than the substance, but it's quite clever.
I'm not going to read the whole thing.
You can find it pretty quickly on the White House website.
Our great American flag is the most sacred and cherished symbol of the United States of America and of American freedom, identity, and strength.
Over nearly two and a half centuries, many thousands of American patriots have fought, bled, and died to keep the stars and stripes waving proudly.
And he goes on at some length about how important and beautiful the flag is, and it's very poetic.
But then he remembers: well, this is one of the things that makes America so great is freedom.
So he says, notwithstanding the Supreme Court's rulings on First Amendment protections, the court has never held that American flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to fighting words is constitutionally protective.
Very interesting.
So the U.S. Supreme Court has gone very far in protecting the desecration of flags when it's to send a message.
But Trump here is saying, well, what if it is to spark violence, which is a very narrow exception to free speech, isn't it?
It's going to have very limited application.
Let me continue reading.
The Attorney General shall prioritize the enforcement to the fullest extent possible of our nation's criminal and civil laws against acts of American flag desecration that violate applicable content-neutral laws while causing harm unrelated to expression consistent with the First Amendment.
This may include, but is not limited to, violent crimes, hate crimes, illegal discrimination against American citizens, or other violations of American civil rights, and crimes against property and the peace, as well as conspiracies and attempts to violate and aiding and abetting laws to violate others to violate such laws.
So it really is focused on where the flag, it's not the content of the flag and the desecration of the flag that's the point, but it's other things like discrimination and violence.
So it's exceedingly narrow the application here, because otherwise this would be struck down by the Supreme Court by both Democrat and Republican judges.
I'm not going to read it.
It's a very lengthy and very interesting executive order.
They hand off some of the prosecutions to local authorities.
They say that the feds, the Department of Justice, may have some test cases to, quote, clarify the scope of the First Amendment exceptions in this area.
So basically, the first chunk of this executive order is saying we love the flag, we super love it, we love it more than anyone else.
We're going to ban desecrating the flags where it's constitutionally permissible, which is probably going to be, and this would be so rare, I think, where desecrating the flag was done in concert with a violent act or with discrimination against Americans.
I don't know if that would even happen once a year in the United States.
I don't know.
I don't follow flag burnings.
But really, this executive order, the first chunk of it, admits the First Amendment protects any substantive content, any expressive content.
But look at this.
Look at this part.
This next part is what this executive order is really about, in my opinion.
Let me quote it verbatim.
Oh boy, this is good.
The Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting within their respective authorities, shall deny, prohibit, terminate, or revoke visas, residence permits, naturalization proceedings,
and other immigration benefits, or seek removal from the United States pursuant to federal law whenever there has been an appropriate determination that foreign nationals have engaged in American flag desecration activity under circumstances that permit the exercise of such remedies pursuant to federal law.
This is not about Americans having their free speech stripped from them.
Really, this executive order repeats the First Amendment's protection several times.
This is about foreigners burning the U.S. flag.
This is about sending them home.
And really, who could disagree with that?
The left?
Really?
The left are the people who prosecute you if you scuff your feet on a pride-colored rainbow flag sidewalk, if you don't bow down to the trans flag.
You're prosecuted for that all over America.
I guess we're in the flag wars now.
You know, one of the most incredible deployments of a flag was not the American flag, but a Mexican flag.
When Donald Trump announced he was going to go ahead with the mass deportation of illegals, there were actual street riots in Los Angeles, and the flag of choice by these people in America was not the American flag, but Mexican flags at anti-deportation riots, which sort of proves the point.
You're flying a Mexican flag in America because you don't want to go home to Mexico, but your flag of choice is a Mexican flag.
Now, Soros activists quickly saw how that was backfiring in terms of PR, and they tried to get anti-ICE, that's the immigration police, anti-IS protesters to wave U.S. flags to sort of make Americans think that they love America.
It didn't really work.
You cannot get a leftist who hates America to fly an American flag, even as a psyop.
Now, I see flags all the time in Canada, and also when I travel to the UK and to Ireland, Canadian flags are flown, but by whom?
By citizens, by conservatives, by Christians, by freedom fighters, by the truckers.
In fact, the flag was sort of adopted by the truckers.
I had never seen so many flags and so much anthem singing in my life as when I visited the trucker convoy in Ottawa.
But I also see a lot of protests without Canadian flags.
I see pro-Hamas protests every week in my neighborhood, and they're only carrying Palestinian flags, Hamas flags, Taliban flags.
Sometimes they have trans flags flown by anarchists and by thugs.
I've really never seen them fly the Canadian flag.
A couple years ago, I went to Oxford University just to tour the place, and I only saw a single UK flag-that's the Union Jack or the Union flag, only one on the whole university.
But every other building did have a flag, but it was either the older pride flag, the rainbow flag, or the new trans flag.
I must have seen a dozen of those on campus.
I felt like I was in a parallel universe.
In Ireland, I'm often with the nationalists who only fly the tricolor-those that's the three-colored Irish flag.
And it's sort of glorious to see a thousand of them.
There are always counter-protesters, they have very few, if any, the tricolor, but they have lots of Palestinian flags, trans flags, and government labor union flags.
It is so telling.
I love the flag wars because you really sum up what you stand for in your flag.
In the UK, the flag called the Union flag, or sometimes the Union Jack, if you look at it carefully, I don't, I mean, I'm sure Brits know this off by heart, but Canadians might not know.
It's actually flags put on top of each other.
There's the English cross of St. George, there's the Scottish flag, and you know, there's the four constituent countries of the UK: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
You can fly your country's flag, the Welsh flag, for example, or you can fly the Union flag, which was also the flag of the empire.
But people would often get in trouble for flying not only their national flag, especially the English flag, which is the red cross on the white background, that's the cross of St. George.
You would get in trouble for flying an English flag.
It would be called racist.
I visited a man in the city of Sunderland in the UK who said police came around and told him to take down the Union flag, the Union Jack, the British flag.
It was considered hostile by foreigners.
People objected.
Police would enforce taking down the British flag.
But something amazing is going on right now.
The flag is becoming a rallying point in the UK by British people who are against mass illegal immigration.
And all across the UK, sometimes as many as 20 different protests in a day outside these hotels that have been set aside for foreign migrant men, men, women, and children are protesting.
And what is their symbol?
The British flag, the English flag or the Union flag.
And it's incredible.
And something amazing has happened.
They're being set up all across the country.
People are in the dead of night taking up their ladders, climbing up lampposts and affixing flags, either the union flag, the union jack, or the English flag.
And I've seen a Scottish flag also all over the place.
And you know those roundabouts, sort of a circular intersection?
They're painting the center circle of that in the English colors of a red cross on a white background.
I don't know if you remember a few months ago, I showed you this phenomenon in the UK called Blade Runners, where people would very quickly go down and use a steel-cutting saw to knock down spy cameras that were enforcing those 15-minute cities.
Those people called themselves blade runners, and they would run out with a saw and in often less than 30 seconds, they would knock down these CCTV systems, sometimes for the 10th time in the same location.
It's the same spirit of sort of sneaking around in the dark, but instead of cutting down these spy cameras, they're putting up British and English flags, and it's breaking out everywhere, and it's sort of amazing.
And the thing is, some city councils run by leftist, UK-hating politicians are vowing to take down the British and English flags.
But these are the folks who have abided or in some cases even put up Palestinian flags in the UK.
Cracker Barrel Controversy00:02:16
I think these are very interesting days.
And I love watching these flag vigilantes in the UK.
You know, we believe in symbols.
They sum up who we are.
I don't know if you've followed, there's a U.S. chain called Cracker Barrel.
We don't have it in Canada, unfortunately.
It's sort of southern-style home country cooking, comfort food, and it's sort of an old-fashioned vibe, fireplaces, sort of almost a garage sale kind of junk store at the front.
It's a very fun, very friendly.
Well, they hired a new DEI CEO, and her first move was to absolutely denude the Cracker Barrel logo, to take out the picture of the old white guy sitting near a barrel.
It's called Cracker Barrel.
And yet they took out the guy, the Cracker and the Barrel.
I'm kidding, that's not what the word cracker meant.
To purge any whiteness or southernness.
And the customer base of Cracker Barrel has revolted.
Cracker Barrel has lost 15% of its stock market value just from changing their logo to de racinate it, to take away its cultural history.
Now, I was actually, I actually had some Cracker Barrel a couple weeks ago when I visited the States for a day.
It's still delicious food.
So I think the company's going to survive just because the food's so good.
But I tell you, these companies that try and destroy their meaning, like Bud Light or Jaguarm, it's not because people really care about Jaguars or Bud Lights.
It's because those companies have tried to embody values that we have as people.
And then when those companies decide they hate those values, isn't that another way of saying they hate the people?
If you liked Bud Light and suddenly you're under attack and you're not good enough for the brand, if you like Cracker Barrel, but suddenly Cracker Barrel doesn't like you, doesn't want you, wants you written on the picture, it's sort of humiliating.
You say, well, if they hate me, why should I give them any of my money?
It's very interesting.
These are not pocketbook issues.
They're identity issues.
Of course, people care about pocketbook issues.
Of course, taxes weigh heavily on us and we want to be able to afford things, afford housing and groceries.
Pride Parade Blockade00:15:16
But who we are counts too.
And I think the government, especially here in Canada, has forgotten that.
That's why people love football, both U.S. style football and in the U.K. they call soccer football, because sometimes that's the only way for old stock Americans, Canadians, Brits to fly their flag.
It's why both British and U.S. football have been targeted with political correctness, along with our Canadian hockey, don't you think?
You know, these symbols matter.
These symbols matter because it's about who we are and who we think we are and what we think is important.
But actually, people take them at face value.
I don't know what you think about these land-back acknowledgements that so many institutions have.
Before giving a speech, they say we are on the territory of this Indian band or that Indian band.
Does that have meaning?
Of course it does.
Symbols have meanings, words have meanings, flags have meanings.
And if you doubt me, look at the recent BC court ruling giving the land back.
My point is, you can only fly a flag for so long that's not your flag, that you don't believe in, before people say, well, no, you've been saluting that false flag for long enough.
That actually is you.
What I'm so excited about in both the United States and the UK are from Donald Trump down to the ordinary Brit, they're reclaiming their flags and their meanings, and with it, their history and their culture.
Stay with us for more.
Right in front of the Prime Minister's office.
Do we have a rogue group here?
Prime Minister's office here to the right.
I recognize this guy.
This is leading the Pride Parade.
Prime Minister's office in the background.
Wow.
I don't know if it was clear to you, but let me clarify what you were seeing there is the Gay Pride Parade in Ottawa, which is as sacred to that city's politics as, I don't know, I suppose the Santa Claus parade in New York City or Columbus Day.
But there is a more powerful force than the LGBTQ2SL Plus lobby these days, and it's the Palestinian lobby.
What you saw there was the blockading and the cancellation of the Pride Parade by the Palestinian activists.
The man who shot that footage and who was there to witness it all is our guest today.
His name is Chris Dacey.
He is a citizen journalist in the true sense of the word and a member of the Independent Press Gallery.
Chris, great to see you.
Thanks for taking some time to tell us what happened yesterday.
Yeah, good to see you again.
And thanks for having me on.
So we didn't see the whole thing.
I didn't want to play your whole clip, but I really recommend people follow you on Twitter.
Tell me what happened because listen, gay pride parades are sometimes noisy and there's lots of whistles and maybe it's a kind of controlled chaos.
But what we saw there was the beginning of a blockade.
Is that correct?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So this was Capital Pride, and it's an event that's done every year.
It draws thousands.
I've seen numbers up to 10,000 people.
And they had a parade route scheduled this year that was going from Ottawa City Hall up Elgin Street and then down Wellington in front of the prime minister's office past Parliament Hill before it headed down Bank Street into the gay village.
And just as this parade was march was getting onto Wellington Street, basically directly in front of the house or in front of the PMO, there was a golf cart, surprisingly enough.
There was a Grand Marshal, then a Palestinian golf cart that was, I guess, an approved contingent of this thing.
But it was very quickly joined by a mass of other Palestinians that came up from the back, and they basically ground the thing to a halt there.
They made it as far as the House of Commons, where they shut it all down.
And an hour or two later, the whole thing was canceled.
So did anyone try to keep the parade moving?
Did police move the blockade?
Or did any parade organizers even try to clear the blockade?
And we'll play some background footage while we're talking here to show.
I mean, we showed the energy there as the Palestinian side was sort of mustering, but I want to show that it actually blocked it.
Did anyone try and clear it so the march could continue?
As far as forcing it to clear, I don't believe so.
There was ongoing negotiations is what the statements have been put out.
So there's kind of a few conflicting statements, depending on which party you ask.
But as far as Ottawa police being involved, there was, when I was down at the blockade in front of the House of Commons, there was maybe a handful of officers that I could see in my total line of view.
I didn't see any public order units anywhere.
I didn't see any officers mustering like they would even try to do anything.
So once this thing stopped, there's some reports that they were going to allow them to stop it for 20 minutes, which seems like a crazy idea to invite these people in then and tell them you're going to allow them to stop your parade.
So that may or may not be true, but there are reports of that going around.
But I mean, once they got to the House of Commons, they had control of the front of it.
They had hundreds of people, and there wasn't really a lot that could be done, but I don't think anyone tried to do anything.
Now, what did the mayor have to say?
Because the mayor attended the rally.
I'm sure he wanted it to be a success.
Did you see the mayor?
I think the mayor downplayed what happened.
I don't think he used the word blockade, did he?
Yeah, so the mayor did put out a statement.
He was involved, and I believe he was involved at the start of the parade.
There's been issues, I guess, with the mayor.
Last year, there was an issue, and I think he boycotted it.
Basically, the Palestinian contingent or the Transfer Palestine contingent has a list of demands that they're making of people.
You have to agree with them all, or they'll do this sort of thing and shut you down.
And I think that there was some demands that they were making that some people involved with Pride, Ottawa and the mayor, and some of the groups were not willing to make, particularly Jewish groups involved, I would like to say as well.
So the mayor did start the parade, as far as I know, but he didn't go through.
He didn't finish it.
He certainly wasn't there when this happened, which was very early on in the parade.
And as far as statements, I think his statement that he's given is quite lacking so far.
Right now that I remember it, I think he didn't attend because they had some views that I think the mayor considered to be anti-Semitic or something.
I don't want to misstate what the mayor said, but it was he who chose to boycott the parade last time.
Now, there was a tweet this morning from the Globe and Mail, and I just want to read it to you because I tell you, this choice of language is quite something.
Here it is.
It's from the Globe and Mail.
It says, Ottawa Pride parade canceled after coinciding with pro-Palestine rally.
That makes it sound like, oh, wouldn't you know it?
We've got two rallies.
And without explaining anything, the Pride parade was canceled.
So it was such a coincidence.
They kept coinciding.
I don't know.
I mean, that's a very creative tweet.
I think it hides the truth of what happened.
They didn't coincide.
It was a blockade.
It was a deliberate, targeted blockade.
They hijacked the Pride Parade to get all its buzz and attention and blocked it.
I don't know why the Globe would use such an opposite word.
I mean, why don't they want the world to know what happened?
Well, they're lying by omission.
And it's so, so obvious.
I mean, you can't completely hide these things to coincide.
We know that's not what happened.
And thank goodness for community notes, where, you know, I'm a citizen journalist and I was able to put out what really happened.
And some of that coverage is hitting millions of views at this point.
It's gone absolutely viral.
And then the people online saw it.
You know, they know what happened.
They were able to add the community note.
So right there under the globe, you get the community note now saying what really happened.
So it's a good thing we have that mechanism at least to correct the misinformation from the state-funded media.
Yeah, I love community notes.
I mean, in the past, you could only just shake your fist at these big regime media, but now ordinary people can talk back.
And whoever the community note is under can't get rid of it.
Like, you can't just delete it.
It's there.
I suppose you could delete your first tweet.
What's so interesting to me, and Chris, I bump into you from time to time outside the Ottawa courthouse because I've been there maybe 10 times to cover the Tamara Leach hearings, because that's obviously where all the trucker trials are taking place.
And the story of the trucker convoy is police clearing blockades on Wellington, which is the street right outside Parliament.
And I don't know, there's so many cases of protests in Toronto and Ottawa and other cities that don't have permits, clearly block roads.
Montreal's crazy these days.
And I keep thinking that if they weren't wearing kefias and flying Palestine flags, if they were wearing trucker hats and saying honk honk, like that's really the only, I can't think of any reason why the truckers were arrested and called illegal and called an insurrection.
But Palestinians flying foreign flags and sometimes saying things that are quite violent in the language.
Like it's such a double standard to me.
It's like every police force in the country has been told, check the politics of who's protesting before deciding how to respond.
Yeah, this is very much the case.
And, you know, I've been trying to highlight the kind of two-tier standard I keep approaching it as.
But now, this weekend is really showed that it's more than two-tier.
It's multi-tier.
So the top tier, I guess, is Palestinian or Islamists.
Then you have the LGBTQ crowd.
They're normally allowed to go out and do whatever they want as well.
But in this case, you saw where it slots in.
And then you can start inserting different special interest groups there.
And then, you know, you get into white people meeting at the bottom, basically.
But you're a Christian male or a Jewish person.
You can put in all these different groups, right?
And they all seem to slot in.
It's really interesting to watch the approach and to see it unfold in real time where you can clearly see that this group has been given ultimate leeway to do whatever they want.
I was actually down by the PMO earlier today and filming a little video and I was just thinking to myself about Tamara and Chris.
You know, Tamara's been convicted of, I believe it's one count of mischief.
And in this blockade yesterday, or yesterday, there was at least three different people who identified themselves as leaders.
There was the Asian gentleman we saw on the on the megaphone, the video you played.
You might recognize him.
He was involved in the flotillas for Gaza with Reda Thuttenberg.
So he kind of reached internet fame a little bit that way.
There was also a person speaking directly in front of the House of Commons, putting themselves out as a leader when it was shut down completely, who it turns out is a member of the public service and works for Library and Archives Kenya.
And then there was another woman who came out and was negotiating this blockade on behalf of them.
So, I mean, there's three identifiable people who shut down the streets, who caused a giant blockade that stopped a permitted march with thousands of people.
I think that would be impeding their ability to enjoy the public.
I mean, you're a lawyer, I think, not me, but it seems to me that many of these things would qualify as mischief.
We don't see the same approach.
We don't see arrests.
We don't see anyone calling for arrests.
So, I mean, the multi-tiered, multi-tiered approach is just completely in your face here.
Yeah.
You know, in just the last couple of weeks, there's an American pastor who's sort of very charismatic and sings and has outdoor prayer meetings.
And it's very American, the style, like the confident, charismatic Christianity.
It's very popular, and he's completely harmless.
His name is Chris Foyt, if I'm saying his last name right.
And he has been banned from city after city, from public parks, not even public streets, like literally a booking in a park.
He follows the rules, fills out the forms, and he's been driven out of the public square and fined.
In fact, we're crowdfunding his legal defense in Montreal.
He was in a church.
The church was fined 2,500 bucks just for letting him play there.
And I just, my worry here, Chris, is that this erodes trust in police.
I grew up looking up to police, thinking, hey, they're the good guys.
If I'm in trouble, they can help.
They're sort of above the fray.
But I have to say, these days, when I look at police, half the time I wonder, well, are they on some political mission or not?
And I really think it brings the administration of justice into disrepute.
I don't know.
I mean, like you say, it's like they check, it's like a paint swatch.
They check your race, check your religion before they apply the law.
And I don't know if policing can survive that.
Policing needs the consent of the people.
And I mean, just like in the past, I suppose visual minorities didn't trust the police.
Now, I think conservatives and maybe Christians, they have cause to doubt if the police are going to be fair.
I know that's a terrible thing to say, but what else can you say when you witness the same thing 100 times over?
And I can't really blame the people that think like that.
I did go see Sean Poit when he came to Ottawa.
They call him a threat to public safety.
Christian worshipers are a threat to public safety.
I had to travel 40 minutes out of town into a farmer's field to go to go worship and watch worship.
And he's certainly not a threat to public safety.
But this is just the way things are.
I'm similar to yourself, where I grew up with a healthy respect for law enforcement.
I have friends in law enforcement, military.
I still do know people in law enforcement.
And after the convoy, it really shattered that, seeing that.
And my experience since has really shattered that.
And I really try hard to repersonalize and rehumanize different police.
I've worked really hard and I think it's a good faith to get to know some of these people and figure out how to work with them.
But it's really disheartening to me to see what goes on here.
And it's different with different officers, but I can see officers that it looks like their hands are tied and it looks like they're really uncomfortable with what's going on.
You can almost see people incurring like moral injuries, for lack of a better term.
They're just, they're not doing well.
Shattered Trust00:04:31
Yeah.
You know, I mean, obviously the police would have the power to sort things out there in a heartbeat if they wanted to.
And I'm not talking about Billy Club swinging.
I mean, everyone there was a pretty soft touch, I think, but there was just zero political will to do so.
It's very incredible.
But listen, I'm really glad you're there on the street.
And I saw, I think you indicated in an ex-post this morning that you had over a million views on your vids and your tweets.
And I think that's what's going to save the day in the end.
We don't all have to read the Globe and Mail story about the coinciding protests.
As long as there's citizen journalists with a cell phone camera, we'll always be able to get to the truth if those citizen journalists are allowed to operate.
And so there is a, I suppose, silver lining here in that we're replacing the traditional sources of info with disaggregated independence.
And that's, I think, where the trust in media will be rebuilt.
So thanks to you for being out there on those mean streets of Ottawa.
Thanks, Ezra.
There he is, Chris Dacey.
You can follow him on Dacey Media, and his ex-account is simply Chris Dacey, D-A-C-E-Y.
Stay with us.
more ahead hey welcome back Your letters to me.
The first one by Natasha Janser is, I can't listen to Mark Carney anymore, except he is announcing his resignation.
Yeah, he really has an irritating tone, and he says so little.
He always says, let me be clear.
And then he's not clear.
And like, have you ever, other than his phrase, elbows up, which was clearly misleading, is there any speech he's given that you remember?
Any meaning he's imparted that has stayed with you?
I mean, I don't think he's an empty suit like Trudeau was.
Trudeau was an actor.
He would say whatever lines were put in front of him.
I don't think Mark Carney is that way.
I don't think he is someone else's vehicle.
I just don't know what it is he stands for.
I have no idea.
And I'm not sure if half his own caucus do either.
Next letter from William McDowell says, Ezra, please don't show that elbow chicken dance again.
It's embarrassing for Canadians.
Oh my God.
You know what?
I think it was embarrassing.
I think it was embarrassing what happened.
I think it's even more embarrassing now.
But there are people who still, you know, there was some brewery that had elbows up beer.
I see some elbows up merch here and there when I travel around the country, in Ontario mainly.
There are people who think he's doing great and would say he's doing great no matter what he did, simply not to have Pierre Polyov as prime minister.
And frankly, anyone who says bad things about Donald Trump, right there, you're going to have 30% of the Canadian vote locked up just by badmouthing Trump.
I think that's how he won.
Last letter from Bernie Moore, who says, not that there is any sanity in Europe, but to ignore Carney shows how low he is and Ford have lowered Canada.
Yeah, I mean, I was honestly surprised when Mark Carney was not allowed or was not invited to go to that, I was calling it Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
He had Donald Trump and Zelensky and then seven little European politicians, Macron and Starmer and Murs from Germany and Maloney from Italy and then the Finnish guy.
I mean, if you're having a guy from Finland, population 5 million, and you're not inviting the Canadian guy, population 42 million, that's given $20 billion to Afghanistan.
I was honestly shocked that Canada was not there.
And I don't know if it's Zelensky who said no, the Europeans, or if Trump said no, I'm not giving that guy any of my time.
He's interfering with me on Gaza.
He's interfering with me on trade.
Why would I give him the honor of being there in the White House?
I don't know.
But that, to me, was more revealing than anything about Canada-U.S. relations.
I don't know what's going on with their behind-the-scenes negotiation.
How would I know?
But the fact that Trump or whoever it was blocked Carney from being at that meeting tells me a lot about those two men's relationships.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until next time tomorrow, on behalf of all of us at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.