Ezra Levant highlights UK police arresting comedian Graham Linehan for old, U.S.-based tweets criticizing trans rights activists, raising concerns over Section 3A of the Public Order Act and broader free speech crackdowns. Meanwhile, Juno News journalist Kian Bexti faces a $50K fine and five years in prison under Canada’s rarely used election law for reporting on an ex-Liberal candidate’s alleged assaults, despite evidence supporting his claims. The episode suggests these cases reflect undemocratic intimidation tactics, with media and legal bodies potentially weaponizing laws to silence dissent, mirroring authoritarian regimes’ playbook. [Automatically generated summary]
We'll talk with Kian Bexti, our Rebel News alumnus, who's being investigated by Canada's elections officers for some story he did that was 100% true, by the way, but the Liberals didn't like it.
So we'll talk to Kian.
And also, I'll give you my thoughts about the arrest of a British comedian for three mean tweets.
I think it's very interesting, and I think things are starting to boil over in the UK.
That's today's show.
But first, let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's the video version of this podcast.
We have some video clips I want to show you today, so it's a lot better to be able to see the story, not just hear it.
And of course, the $8 a month, it supports Rebel News and keeps us strong.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com.
Tonight, UK police arrest a beloved comedian for making mean tweets.
What's going on over there?
It's September 2nd, and this is the Astrid Levant show.
shame on you you censorious bug how do you know if you're living in a police state Most of the time, I think, you don't really know.
It's not like police come up to you all the time and interfere with you all the time.
If you keep your head down, if you mind your own business, if you stay indoors, if you keep your thoughts to yourself, you probably had very little interaction with your rulers in any given police state.
That is, if you chose to strictly govern yourself, the state wouldn't feel the need to govern you directly.
I'm quite sure it was that way in the Soviet Union and even in Nazi Germany if you weren't Jewish.
Just keep your head down.
I know that's the case because I actually know a fair number of Russians who left the Soviet Union during the brief period of what they called détente with the West in the late 1970s.
These were Russians who were allowed to emigrate to the West.
They said they had two ways of talking.
The first, when they were in public or when they didn't know the people who they were with very well.
It was a defensive way of talking, assuming whatever they said would be reported to a secret policeman.
And then there was how they spoke with their absolutely closest and most trustworthy friends and family when they could let their guard down and whisper the truth to each other.
I don't know if you could even do that now, though.
I mean, think of every electronic device that tracks you and listens to you right now.
Imagine trying to go without your phone, which knows your location by GPS.
It knows who you were meeting.
How would you even arrange a meeting without your phone, without email, without texting?
None of that.
It would be very difficult to live that life now.
But the fear of avoiding the attention of the police was a constant.
I had a friend from the Soviet Union named Eugene who came over during detente.
Maybe I told you this story before.
And he went to the University of Calgary when he came over.
And I went to U of C as well for my undergrad.
And at the University of Calgary, in case you don't know it, it has nice big lawns.
And then there's sidewalk paths traversing these lawns.
Here's an actual picture of the U.S., the UFC, one of their lawns.
But you know how it is with public lawns and sidewalks.
Sometimes it's shorter and quicker to walk on the lawn a little bit rather than walk straight and then make a 90-degree turn.
Take a bit of a shortcut.
My point is that Eugene told me that he would be walking at University of Calgary with his friends and they would turn to go a certain way, maybe to class or whatever, and they'd walk a little bit on the lawn to get to the next paved sidewalk, but not Eugene.
Said he would stay on the sidewalk, even though it was sort of ridiculous, like a robot or something walking straight and then making a 90-degree turn rather than just cutting the corner like his friends.
And he told me, his friends said to him, What on earth are you doing?
And he told me he had never really thought about it, but the real answer was back in the Soviet Union, if you walked on the grass at a place like a university, as opposed to staying strictly on the sidewalk, it was an absolute certainty that some policeman would come up to you, perhaps in a uniform, but just as likely some secret policeman, and take your name and write down your details and put it in your file.
That's what he said to me.
And the fear of attracting the attention of the state was so inculcated into him.
It was second nature after, I don't know, he was 20 or 25, that it was, he was programmed, even how he walked.
The story is pitifully sad, but he told me his friends asking him that was sort of a crisis, an epiphany.
And he chose at that moment not to live like that anymore.
And he would walk on the lawn if he had to, if he wanted to.
But what a story about conditioning.
To be a prisoner, even if you're not in prison, to be your own prison guard in your own mind.
That's what he had become after living in the Soviet Union his whole life.
That's what it was like in the 1970s in the USSR.
Glenner's Trial Approach00:17:08
But the thing about 2025 in the United Kingdom is you cannot hide from the secret police.
Being alone, being out at night, being with your secret close friends, none of that actually gives you immunity or insulation from today's version of the KGB.
I put it to you, it's far more pervasive than the police states of the past.
George Orwell, in his book 1984, predicted many things, including a TV set called a telescreen that listened to you.
That was in the book, 1984.
He predicted news speak, truth or lies, freedom is slavery.
But he could not imagine the panopticon of the year 2025.
Panopticon is an interesting word, isn't it?
Sort of, it means to see everything.
That's literally what it means.
That's what Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher, called a circular prison that he designed where prisoners were like in an outer ring and guards were in an inner hub and everyone was under surveillance all the time.
Bentham came up with that idea, I don't know, 250 years ago, and hundreds of prisons are actually set up that way.
But like I said, there's no need for an actual cop to have eyes on you in an actual jail.
Now the machine spies on you, the matrix spies on you.
It's called the algorithm.
It's called machine learning.
That's how it got to know who to target and who not to.
It's not even humans doing the censoring these days.
I don't think in history there has ever been less privacy than there is now.
And good luck living off the grid.
Which brings us to the case of Graham Linehan.
I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce his name, even.
I only just learned about him.
He's the creator of the British Irish comedy called Father Ted.
Now, this morning I watched a whole episode of Father Ted to understand who he was.
And let me just say, God bless the British and the Irish, but holy, do they ever have a different sense of humor over there?
But they say he's a bit like the Seinfeld of the United Kingdom, just sort of the star comedian who created this great sitcom.
That's what they say.
Father Ted was popular for a while, but Graham Linehan, or Glinner, as the Brits call him online, he's gotten a bit political in his old age.
Like J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, he has started to speak out against transgenderism, just like J.K. Rowling.
He tweets about it a lot.
In fact, if you scroll down his Twitter feed, frankly, he's deeply motivated by he thinks about it a lot.
And it looks like he's in some litigation about it too.
His pinned tweet from a few days ago, don't forget next week on Thursday and Friday, 4th and 5th, when I'll be on trial in the UK for crossing a trans activist and his willing goons from the Metropolitan Police do come along to say hello.
Well, little did he know, he was in America coming home for that court battle, that the police would pick him up, five police, and apparently they were armed, which is not normal in the UK.
And they held him and they grilled him for hours, and they charged him with illegal tweeting.
That's a thing, I guess.
Here's a post by Sir Toby Young of the Free Speech Union, who said Glenner was arrested under suspicion of having committed an offense under Section 3A of the Public Order Act.
Section 3A says, quote, a person who distributes or shows or plays a recording of visual images or sounds which are threatening is guilty of an offense if he intends thereby to stir up religious hatred or hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.
Glenner cannot possibly be guilty of this offense since it makes no reference to transgender status.
And all three of the tweets the police questioned him about referred to trans rights activists.
And then he concluded, for that reason, there is zero chance of the Crown Prosecution Service bringing a case against Glenner.
Well, far be it from me to disagree with an expert like Sir Toby, but maybe it's not actually about securing a conviction.
Maybe charging him is about terrorizing people into silence, including him himself, but more about others.
Maybe it's about shaming Glenner, about showing that no matter how powerful or popular are, no one is safe if you transgress transgenderism.
That there's always someone listening to them, that their words are now crimes, and even though real crimes go unpunished in the UK, your thought crimes won't.
Maybe it's not about the law at all.
The whole thing was so stressful, by the way, the doctors had to be called for his incarceration.
They were worried he was going to have a stroke.
That's what that picture is about.
So what were the tweets that he tweeted?
Well, for one thing, thousands of people have since retweeted, reposted those comments, giving them far more viewership than had police not arrested him.
I'll read them.
The first says, if a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent abusive act.
Make a scene, call the police, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.
It's advice for women and girls who discover a man in a women's private place like a bathroom.
There's an obvious joke to be made here.
The police would probably insist that you say, punch her in the balls, her.
But you have to go through that sort of trutherism, don't you?
You have to use their made-up names and say her and say, ma'am.
Here's another tweet that says, a photo you can smell.
I don't know what he's getting at or who he's getting at, but again, it's probably rude, but so what?
This is the UK.
You're allowed to be rude.
And then the last one, he says, I hate them, misogynists and homophobes, F him.
Again, probably rude.
Let's agree it's rude, but so what?
That's a crime.
Five armed police pull you over and grill you.
Now, all three of these posts were from months ago.
And Linnahan just came back from America.
Not sure if he wrote those tweets when he was in America, but he was writing them on an American social media platform, and now he's been arrested in London for writing on an American website, and the police refused to bail him unless he promised to stop posting on Twitter or X as it's now called.
Do they have the power to do that?
Can any pro-transgender cop arrest someone who is rude towards trans people and say, stop tweeting or you'll stay in jail?
Well, of course, and that's why I disagree with my friend Sir Toby, is that it may not be lawful, but it works.
Hey, didn't Donald Trump and JD Vance specifically ask the UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer about all this?
Not about Linnehan's case, obviously, but about censorship in general.
Yeah, look, I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some of our European allies.
But we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British, of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them, but also affect American technology companies and by extension, American citizens.
So that is something that we'll talk about today at lunch.
We've had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time.
Well, no, I mean, certainly we wouldn't want to reach across U.S. citizens, and we don't, and that's absolutely right.
But in relation to free speech in the UK, I'm very proud of our history there.
Yeah, it hasn't stopped, has it?
In fact, I think it's gotten worse.
You know, over the weekend, a British woman was arrested for flying a flag.
Seriously, not a Palestinian flag, a British flag.
They're putting up union flags.
That's the multicolored British flag.
And they're putting up English flags.
And I've seen Scottish flags go up.
It's a sign of national pride in rejecting mass immigration.
30 arrests a day for that sort of thing.
30 arrests for social media posts a day in the UK.
If you told me that Russia or Iran was arresting 30 people a day for wrong think online, I would tell you, I honestly think you're exaggerating, unless perhaps there's a big crackdown going on.
30 a day.
No, that is the average now in the UK.
There's been widespread chatter about this case because Glenner is a TV guy, a comedy guy, a popular guy, not quite Seinfeld, I don't think, but something like that.
And I think a lot of Brits have had it with trans.
Even their own high court ruled there are just two sexes.
But who cares what the courts say?
And who cares that the police exceeded their powers, as Sir Toby Young alleges?
The point is to demoralize, to harass, to show who's boss, to warn, to deter, to deter others.
And if you have to have a few show trials, so be it.
The Brits are getting unhappily good at having those.
But I'm seeing something more and more.
Brits outright asking America for help.
Here, look at this clip from the biggest news network in the UK, GB News.
Watch for a few minutes.
Listen, Elon Musk has just tweeted to say that he believes that we're living in a police state.
The Graham story, obviously, it's a semi-active case now.
We have to be a little careful about what we say about that.
And I'd be interested to hear how the debate goes there on that issue.
But yeah, free speech is massive here.
If you could pick an issue that the American government and the British government are poles apart on, it is that.
We've heard J.D. Bance, the vice president, talking about the fact that he worries for the UK.
And that is an issue that I'm going to be raising every single time I can here at the White House.
I did similar in Scotland.
You might remember when Donald Trump came over.
I talked about free speech with Sir Keir Starmer and Donald Trump.
It's a massive issue here.
And I'm glad we're keeping that conversation alive.
Elon Musk is doing some heavy-duty tweeting about it too.
That makes things go viral.
Hundreds of millions of views.
But Elon Musk is American, so he can love free speech in the First Amendment.
Problem is the UK, isn't it?
And for the Brits themselves, the journalists, the activists, the politicians, for them to say they're leaning on the U.S., they're hoping for help from the U.S., that's actually a pretty extraordinary thing.
In one way, it's quite sad.
It suggests the UK can't fix its own problems.
But in another way, whatever it takes to regain freedom, right?
I mean, that's how I'm starting to feel about Canada.
I don't want foreigners to solve our problems.
But maybe we need a little bit of help.
I mean, the greatest free speech champion for our country is probably not in our country.
I think something's going to break.
I think Trump might start to feel like he's being lied to by Kirstarmer about the UK's dedication of freedom.
And who knows?
If Trump feels lied to, he might just do something like slap a country with a big tariff.
I mean, who knows?
But I do know something.
The UK is waking up and rising up, massive street protests against migrant hotels, massive waves of people, normal people, mums even, protesting against the government, people who have never protested before.
And on September 13th, less than two weeks from now, the largest free speech rally in UK history led by our friend Tommy Robinson.
And can you believe it?
I'll be speaking at it.
That'll be a momentous day and hopefully one that helps set the UK free.
Stay with us for more about freedom of speech here in Canada.
Over the last year, we've seen a massive potential for foreign election interference.
I'm not just talking about the general election.
I'm talking about the all-online leadership selection process for the Liberal Party of Canada.
More votes were discarded.
More votes were rejected by Liberal Party members than were accepted.
And there was never an explanation.
How did a quarter of a million Liberals get disenfranchised?
And how was it that in a statistical impossibility, the winner, Mark Carney, got plus or minus 5%, the identical result in all 338 districts in the country, even winning, implausibly, in the home ridings of his opponents?
Are you telling me that Christy Freeland, after a decade of representing the University District of the University of Toronto, lost by the same proportion as every other district in the country?
It was just implausible.
That whole thing was completely uninteresting to Elections Canada, just as the 11 Chinese agents interfering with the last federal election were completely uninteresting to Elections Canada.
I tell you all this because I think I've discovered where their investigators have been.
They've been investigating citizen journalists, including our friend Kian Bexti, an alumnus of Rebel News who is now with Juno News, who joins us now from Alberta.
Kian, great to see you again.
Why don't you tell our viewers?
I don't think this is going to shock our viewers because our viewers are ready for the worst.
Tell us what elections Canada wrote to you a couple of weeks ago.
What are they threatening you with?
What are they accusing you of?
Yeah, so they're accusing me of violating some arcane law that has not been used against anyone other than me that we can tell, that basically says you're not allowed to lie about a candidate going into public office about them breaking the law in some other capacity, which is not what we did, obviously.
We reported the news during election period that we believed at the time and still do to be 100% accurate.
There's nothing that leads us to believe we were wrong in our coverage about Thomas Keeper, the ex-liberal candidate for Calgary Confederation, who many of your viewers probably know.
He was one of the most infamous candidates that the Liberal Party put forward in the last election.
And shortly after our coverage of him, he was removed from the ballot.
We didn't get an exact reason from the Liberal Party, but our coverage went nationally viral when we exposed some allegations about him made by people very close to him, as close as his family.
So the fact that the government is now investigating me criminally for this coverage, I'm in disbelief.
Yeah, you know what?
I like to think I'm aware of the different ways a journalist can be censored.
I've been hit with a few of those ways myself, including Elections Canada coming after our Lebranos campaign.
That's five years ago now, four years ago.
But I did not know that it was a specific offense to talk about conduct that appears to be criminal by a candidate.
I just didn't know that was on the books.
And I'm just going to read a few words from it.
I'm quoting from the letter that you received from Elections Canada.
So I'm just going to read section 91.1 of the elections law.
No person or entity shall, with the intention of affecting the results of an election, and right there, obviously, your intentions were different.
Your intentions were journalism.
You're not a partisan person.
Make or publish during the election period a false statement that a candidate, a prospective candidate, the leader of a political party or a public figure associated with a political party has committed an offense under an act of parliament or a regulation made under such an act or has been charged with or is under investigation for such an offense.
Now, what you did is you revealed a pattern of conduct that any right-minded person could say, hey, that looks like it does violate the law.
And I know you were very meticulous.
I remember talking to you about this story when you were doing it.
You, if I may, were quite concerned that you were being rigorous enough because you had a real tiger by the tail.
Tell me some of the steps you took to verify the allegations that you ended up publishing.
I remember our conversation.
Tell our viewers.
Yeah, so I mean, this was one of those stories where it cropped up.
And, you know, you got to be really careful when you, whether they're running for public office or not, if they're a person of public interest and the story is a matter of public interest, you have to be extremely careful because you have their reputation in your hands.
And, you know, maybe they did something that the public needs to know about.
Steps To Verify Allegations00:15:50
That's just what journalism is, right?
And you have to make sure that you're as rigorous as possible.
And that's what we did.
We spoke to about a dozen people that knew Thomas Keeper intimately, who had gone on international trips with the guy, who had worked with him in many different capacities.
Some people who he worked for, some family members who were concerned, you know, without getting into too many details about our sources, who we gave anonymity to because we were worried about Thomas Kieper's behavior and whether they would be put in personal risk.
But we did have named sources as well.
And we did our, you know, if we didn't, if we weren't able to name a source, we would have been probably not publishing it because it's tough to just publish this kind of thing with anonymous sources.
But everyone corroborated everything.
And it demonstrated this pattern of behavior that we thought was really important for the voters of Calgary Confederation and Canadians at large to know about one of these candidates who was going to actually become one of Canada's 340-odd board members.
The Liberals won the seat right after he was replaced.
So he would have ostensibly become a member of parliament, which makes it, by definition, a matter of public interest for people to know about him.
Now, just because he was not charged and convicted in a court of law doesn't mean that this can't shouldn't be talked about in a free and democratic society.
The police have a lot of reasons to not necessarily charge someone.
And there might be a lot of reasons why someone may have done something and not being convicted of it.
That doesn't mean that the public is not allowed to know about it.
And that doesn't mean that if someone mentions something that is corroborated and sourced and fact-checked and run by lawyers, and on top of that, we, of course, went to Thomas Keeper to hand him our questions to make sure that he could say, no, that's not true.
And here's why you're going to want to correct the record.
No, he called the police on me and lied to the police and said that I assaulted him, which adds to this pattern of behavior.
I remember that moment because, you know, one of the legal defenses against defamation suits is a concept in law called responsible communication, where if the journalist goes out of their way to reach out to the person they're criticized and put the prickly questions to the person in advance to give them a chance to respond, that really goes a long way to show the court your true motives or to get the truth.
And it's tough if you've been taking pot shots at a guy for a week to actually go up to him and say, here's the questions I want to ask you.
I mean, that's a physically and mentally a difficult thing to do.
You did it in a way I've never seen anyone do before.
You personally hand-delivered the questions.
We've got that on tape.
That was part of your original video.
When I saw this, I sort of chuckled because it takes a bit of chutzpah to do it.
But I also thought to myself, that's smart because you go right to the guy.
You're not sending an email.
You're not leaving a voice message.
You're saying, I'm Kian Bexte.
I'm here doing a story.
I want your side in it.
Let's roll the tape.
I thought this was incredible.
Frankly, I've never seen it before.
Let's take a look.
Mr. Keeper.
Thomas.
Hi, Thomas.
I just have some questions to ask you.
We just have some questions to ask you.
Hi, Mr. Keeper.
Okay, great.
Thank you.
No, no, no.
Carli, come in.
We just have some questions to ask you.
This happens from time to time.
I mean, he ran away from you.
I think he knew the story was coming.
He could have said, here's why.
He could have, I don't know, he could have done a lot of things.
But obviously, your story was persuasive enough that the Liberal Party didn't run him as the candidate after that.
I mean, they seemed to be persuaded that something was deeply wrong.
Do you think Thomas Keeper himself was the guy who called elections Canada?
I mean, I guess that calls for speculation.
It seems very punitive that they're going after you.
You had a successful journalistic story.
The Liberal Party obviously agreed.
This feels like vengeance.
Yeah, so the whole letter is published at defendjuno.com.
And I encourage everyone to go there and read this letter for themselves.
And I'm just reading it here.
What makes me think that it was Keeper is that the elections commissioner says, quote, the allegations have been denied as being false, which, you know, the allegations were against Thomas Keeper.
So the commissioner must have spoken to Keeper before speaking to me, or maybe the Liberal Party denied them as false, and maybe they fired him for a different reason.
I don't know what their reasoning is, but it's all there in the letter and people can draw their own conclusions.
It's worth also noting that we didn't just hand him this letter of questions.
We emailed, we did everything normally as well, right?
We called, emailed, texted him, and his wife as well, everyone that was available that was relevant to the story.
We did the same thing.
And he chose not to.
And also, interestingly, you know, if this was false, you'd think he would sue us for defamation.
Even though we did try to responsibly communicate with him, if it was really that outrageously false that I am now a criminal because of this story, you'd think he would sue in civil court for defamation, but he hasn't sent us so much as a cease and desist letter, let alone a notice of defamation.
So why hasn't he done that?
Well, the answer is because he knows, if assuming it was him that filed this with the election commissioner and not the liberal party itself, he knows that it will cost him nothing to do this and he has no case.
But taxpayers will still foot the bill to prosecute a journalist.
And at the end of the day, that's all you might want.
I want to ask you, because I haven't watched the original story since you aired it.
Can you just tell us what the essence of the accusations were?
Now, don't go any further in your language than you already have gone, but can you just remind me and our viewers, what was it that all his friends and associates had said he did?
And just don't embellish, not that you would, just give me a reminder.
Yeah, I got to be very careful because, like I said, we reviewed, we wanted to be so careful with the story.
We had, it was the most fact-checking and time I have spent on any one story in my entire life.
The story's still up on your website, right?
Yeah, yeah, it is.
I encourage everyone to go there and look at it because they'll be able to read the whole thing.
And Juno News and I still stand behind everything that was in there.
And if we were led to believe, even now at this point, that something was wrong, we would correct it, but nothing is indicated that we need to.
Basically, it was a pattern of abusive behavior ranging of all different kinds of abuse.
And I mean, you can read from the letter that was sent to me by the elections commissioner.
It was specifically, you alleged that he had committed sexual assault and common assault.
Now, I had, I don't even know if that letter is true or accurate based off of what we wrote.
And I actually don't think that it is, but we did publish a bunch of allegations that were corroborated from others, from people very close to him with primary knowledge of his behavior.
Of him, one example was him dragging his wife off of her high heels at an event to leave the event physically.
That just gives you a little bit of flavor.
And it ranges from worse than that to just rude verbal assault against women.
So there's a large variety of what we covered.
And any of that, if it was a conservative, the liberals would be taking out attack ads against the entire party about.
And now they're trying to put a journalist in jail over it.
You know, the liberals very rarely succumb to pressure on these things.
They like to brazen it out.
They're really experts that just don't say anything, never explain, never apologize, just bluff it out.
Trudeau was actually a master at that.
And for them to have removed this guy, they must have known that this was only going to be the beginning of a bunch of problems.
It sounds like they didn't vet him at all.
Well, I really regard this as public interest journalism on your part.
And you've repeated here some of the extraordinary steps you took to check the facts.
And by the way, I think it looks really good on you that you did.
And journalistically, and in terms of the trust of your readers and viewers, the fact that will also, in my view, give you a stronger legal defense is a bonus.
But that act of responsible communication where you reach out to the other side, that's just plain old good journalism anyways.
What is this Thomas Keeper up to now?
Do you know?
He's a real estate agent in Calgary.
I won't comment on what he's doing specifically besides.
No, well, I mean, that's probably the right place, probably the right place for him.
Now, you guys are doing a crowdfund to fight back.
And you told me your lawyer's a good lawyer.
I know him.
He's an expert in this stuff.
What's the best website?
Is that defendjuno.com?
Is it?
100%.
Yeah, that's where the letter's published, and everyone can go there to read the exact wording that the state is using to threaten me with five years in prison and a $50,000 fine.
We just want, you know, we're asking people nothing crazy.
We want them to subscribe and join Juno News.
I want everyone to support all kinds of independent media in this country because the larger we are, the more people we have at our back sharing this news, sharing what's going on and fighting back with the facts.
It makes us stronger.
It makes us more able to replace the stenographers at state-funded organizations.
And maybe they won't be able to take so many stabs at us the larger we get.
So if they go to defendjuno.com, they can read all the news.
They can read the full background on this that our lawyer and hear from our lawyer and hear this, see this document for itself.
We just ask that they subscribe so that they can support us in the fight, the now legal fight and the other journalism that we do.
Yeah.
I'm a subscriber, but I will go and chip in a few bucks for the legal defense as well.
I think this is one of those cases, you probably know the phrase, the Streisand effect.
It comes from when Barbara Streisand had a house in Santa Monica and some guy took a picture of it from the beach and like three people watched the, saw the picture.
But Barbara Streisand tried to get that taken off the internet.
And because of her legal action, hundreds of thousands of people saw the photos that really only a handful of people had seen were it not for her making a fuss.
I think that's what's happening here.
I think they thought you would cower or they thought you would collapse.
I think you, I mean, look, I'm not an expert in this section of the law.
From what you say, this is very rarely used.
I think you're going to win.
And even if you don't win, I don't think the penalty is going to be, God forbid, $50,000.
I think, I mean, you never know.
But I was convicted for doing some Librano stuff and they actually gave me a $3,000 fine.
So I don't think your life's in jeopardy.
I don't think, I think you'll, I think you'll be okay, especially if viewers and readers chip into your defense fund.
What I think will happen is the opposite, that you will bring disrepute upon this section of the law, that you will, that you will show Elections Canada to be partisan nitpickers who work for one party and ignore genuine election crises, like what I was talking about earlier.
And I think it's going to bring a lot more attention to you and Juno News.
So I don't wish a prosecution on any of my friends, but if I know you and Juno News, I think you're going to turn lemons into lemonade on this one.
And I think they're going to come to regret investigating you.
Well, I hope that we can get this law, some attention to this law and how undemocratic it is, because every journalist in the country, not just me, is looking at this investigation against me and the damage that it's causing, you know, not just the cost of this lawyer, which is extensive, obviously.
Tens of thousands of dollars, not the nights of sleep that I'm losing over this, but it's the next election and the next story that one journalist might want to cover.
But then they might think, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, am I going to be at risk of going to jail if I publish this and if I don't have the resources of Juno News or Rebel News.
So hopefully we can draw some attention to this and get this law fixed because it is undemocratic.
It is something you expect to see in North Korea, Iran, Russia, China.
And it doesn't have any, you know, any it doesn't belong in a democratic country, that's for sure.
Well, I'm pleased that the Independent Press Gallery, and by the way, the president of that this year is our own chief reporter, Sheila Gunn Reid.
I'm pleased that the Independent Press Gallery has put out a statement in support of you and Juno News.
Last I checked, now it could have changed in the last half hour, but last I checked the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and Amnesty International and Penn Canada.
Last I checked, all of those five allegedly pro-freedom of speech, pro-journalism groups had not said one word, especially.
Can you imagine a group called Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, CJFE?
Like it's literally their name.
Kian, last word to you.
Why are the so-called watchdogs for press freedom actually lapdogs for the liberal government?
Why?
Well, you know why?
It's because they're there to protect the liberals.
They're there to protect people who take grant money from the government.
And that's their only concern, right?
Even the CBC, who published a story about this law saying that it was going to give a chilling effect to journalists across the country, now that it's happened, where's their story?
Yeah.
Well, no, they were worried that it was going to happen to one of their friends.
Of course, it never would happen to someone like Rachel Gilmore or one of the CBC stenographers.
It's going to happen to one of us.
And it did.
And now that it did, well, they're quietly satisfied.
They're looking at this.
And if you even look on Twitter, I've retweeted a few of these liberals who are saying, Good, I hope Kian sees the inside of a prison cell.
It's time that people like him see some consequences for what they do.
You should take screenshots of that.
That's outrageous.
Oh, it's unbelievable.
And, you know, I woke up knowing we were going to publish this today, and I thought, you know, I actually think that we have such a case here.
This is so outrageous that even liberals are going to say, yeah, this is too much, right?
And I was shocked to see that that's not the case, that partisan liberals are deeply satisfied that this is how the law is being executed in this country.
Well, I'm going to go and chip in at defendjuno.com.
Kian says that's where the letter from the investigator also is.
Kian, good luck to you.
All the best to you guys over at Juno.
You're doing great these days.
And keep in touch.
Thanks.
Will do.
Appreciate it, ever.
Kean Beckstee from Juno News.
Stay with us.
more ahead hey welcome back Your letters to me.
Tommy Robinson Exonerated00:02:24
On Tommy Robinson's charges having been formally dropped.
Pew Pew with Todd says, sue them into oblivion.
We're talking about the case where Tommy Robinson was walking in a train station in London, and some guy saw him and said, I'm going to fight with him and kept threatening Tommy and Tommy and kept retreating until finally the guy was so close at the last possible moment.
Tommy responded and defended himself.
The guy fell down hard and it created a bit of a scene.
But Tommy immediately reported the whole thing to police.
His lawyers contacted police very quickly.
The good news is when police and Tommy and his lawyer finest sat down and watched the surveillance footage, it was so clear Tommy was in the right and the aggressor was in the wrong.
It's just frustrating.
It took a month to have that whole process go through.
And in the media, meantime, the media party made up all sorts of stories about Tommy being the aggressor, running away, etc.
It was typical gross media party stuff.
Mask hysteria says, this may be a reaction to the UK government quietly cracking down on the grooming gangs.
While they're likely to also cover for their own crimes and involvement, it's a de facto admission that Tommy has been correct all along.
You know, Tommy was 10 years ahead of everyone on these rape gangs, these grooming gangs.
And I'm glad that the rest of the public is finally catching up.
But I do not trust the government to look under all the stones because there's a lot of very powerful people who turned a blind eye and frankly people in the establishment, including police.
We know that some police were actually involved in the rape gangs too.
Plumbing Guy for You says, Tommy's the man.
Is he still in danger of being arrested in Canada?
Well, I really enjoyed bringing Tommy to Canada last year, and it was fun to, you know, actually took him up to Banff.
We had one day and we went up there.
It was very cloudy, but it was fun to go.
He, I don't think he's coming back to Canada because he has a passport issue.
But when he was here, he was not charged.
He was arrested, but he was let go.
I mean, we sort of convinced the police, don't get into a Tommy Robinson legal battle.
That might suit the British government, but it's not of interest to the Canadians.
We basically said, Tommy's got a couple of speeches.
Let him give his speeches and he's gone.
And it worked out pretty well in the end.
There was a little bit of drama there to have two police cars arrest the guy in Calgary, but he was sent free.